One Huge Preservation Project Done

Saturday I scanned the last forty or so of my father's collection of slides. The last slide to be scanned was this photo of my great Aunt Anna Elizabeth Peterson who was one of the Annas for whom I am named. She was the wife of my paternal grandmother's brother, Axel Heinrich Valdemar Anderson, and is pictured here enjoying coffee and cake at a party for my grandmother's 75th birthday in October of 1980.

All told, I scanned 1,872 slides from Christmastime 1949 in Chicago to the summer of 1991 at the end of the Marion-Bermuda Cruising Yacht Race.

As I emptied each carousel of these slides I kept them in the closet in our spare bedroom so that I could offer them all together on Freecycle when I finished.

They were all claimed by one person within two hours of my post and will be picked up this afternoon. Now all of these slides, minus two carousels worth that I gave to my step-brother, have been placed in closed binders and sit safely on a shelf in that same closet in our spare room.

Next project - rescuing photos from the acid sandwiches of magnetic photo albums. Stay tuned!

The Elusive Organizing Ideal

My head is still spinning from the season finale of The Blacklist, so I hope I can write a lucid post!

I've realized as I've thought about this post throughout the day that it is going to be at least as much about theory as it will about my actual organizational conventions. Sounds exciting, doesn't it?

When I started scanning these slides of Dad's with the old scanner a few years ago I hadn't had any exposure to the many organizational techniques and ideas of my fellow GeneaBloggers and other genealogists. I just filed them on my computer in a way that made sense to me at the time, which was by carousel (that's the slide holder that fits into the projector and, in my case, has capacity for 140 slides). Although I have modified my file naming somewhat, I am still doing it this way and it turns out that this is something of an archival method of organization because I am organizing them the way that I got them. This, according to this post by Sue Adams, which I found referenced in this post by Tony Proctor, is an archival arrangement; grouping records according to their creator and in the same order as their creator. Of course, real archival organizing is much more complicated, but at least Tony Proctor's post, and the others he refers to within, gave me some assurance that this was a valid way to organize my images.

My Epson Perfection V370 gives me the following screen when I'm ready to scan:

At the purple arrow I'm telling the program where to save the image files and at the green arrow I am giving all of these files the same prefix, in this case "Car1." which will then be followed by the number of the slide's order in the carousel. This file name doesn't tell me anything about the image itself, only which carousel it came from and which slide number it was in the carousel. Metadata will tell the rest of the story.

This is what that looks like on my Mac. Tags go in the box on top at the red arrow, if there were people in this slide (Pennie was my dad's Collie, not a person) I would have used additional tags like their Dollarhide number and last name. The file name is filled in automatically at the blue arrow and I use the comments box to add my name and copyright as well as details about the photo. All of this information is searchable.

Organization is one of those things that is very personal and what makes sense to me may not make sense to you and vice-versa. That is why there is no one way to do this, there is no ideal way except for each of us.

I will probably continue to use this method with at least some of my other image files. The posts I referred to above are full of good ideas and things to consider but I do also want to keep things relatively intuitive and simple. I hope this system will stand the test of time, but as they say, only time will tell.

More about Scanning

I don't remember how I found Miriam Robbins' blog and the ScanFest she used to host every month, but I still follow her guidelines for scanning whether I am digitizing photos, slides or negatives. You can find them all here.

I wear cotton gloves whenever I am handling slides, negatives or photos. I bought them at an archival supply but I don't remember which one. I only scan on a flatbed, never with a scanner that has a feeder and I place my originals on the glass as carefully as possible, never sliding them around. I make two scans of each image, each in a different file format and I'm going to share my thought process about this with you to hopefully help you decide what process would work best for you.

In the various genealogy groups that I belong to on Facebook, I have seen some debate between TIFF and JPEG files and which is the best way to save digital scans. JPEG files are compressed each time you edit the file, so some digital information is lost each time. Some say this is no big deal and point to the larger file size of the TIFF file as a serious drawback, but I would rather do everything I can to ensure that my images will survive as far into the future as possible with as little data loss as possible. That being said, if I want to share my images, TIFF files can be a problem with some programs, such as Blogger, and are usually too large to email. TIFF files can always be converted to JPEGs when needed; Photoshop and Photoshop Elements can do it, the photo editor on my Mac can do it and I understand that there are free websites and software available online that can do it. I prefer just to scan my images twice from the get-go and have them available in both formats when I need them or want to share them.

When I scan my images the first time, I use:

• the automatic color restoration
• the dust removal tool
• sharpen the image
• save it as a JPEG at 300 dpi

I then scan a second time:

• without color restoration
• without image sharpening
• but still with the dust removal
• I save that image as a TIFF file at 600 dpi

I save the JPEG at fewer dots-per-inch and with the color correction because that file is meant to be useful. I save the TIFF at a higher dots-per-inch with no color correction because that file is meant to be archival.  I realize that scanning the archival copy with dust removal is modifying the image from its original form (which is why I don't color restore the TIFF file) but dust removal using photo editing software is a long, tedious and imperfect process while letting the scanner do it is just one click and works very well.

So this is what it looks like on-screen.

First I have to tell the scanner what kind of original I am scanning (red arrow) and then I can get a preview (blue arrow).

 Then I'll see the images and I can start making adjustments. First I correct orientation (red), then choose an output size which is generally 4 x 6 for slides (green) and resolution (blue) , then sharpen (purple), color restore (pink) and remove the dust (yellow). Psst, when using the dust removal tool on your scanner, you won't see dust disappear in the preview scan. The tool works with the light somehow so that can't be previewed. Just because you can't see it here doesn't mean it isn't working!

Once I have done that, I choose Scan, which will bring me to this screen where I will choose the folder to which the scans will be saved (purple), the prefix for the file names (green), and the file type (pink). I'll share a bit about my file naming and organization in a post on Friday.

So, once I have done all this and scanned the images twice as I outlined earlier, I get output like so:

This is an auto color-restored image in .jpg format at 300 dpi with auto sharpening and dust removal. Although I'm usually very happy with the colors in the auto color-restored images, these slides that had a pink cast to them at the beginning, didn't turn out as well. For my purposes, I'll probably leave them as they are, but if I really wanted to play with the colors, I could still do that with photo editing software.

So, I have a Treasure Chest Thursday post ready to go for tomorrow, and I will wrap up this little scanning series on Friday with a post about my file organization and naming.

This Weekend I Scanned Some Slides

This weekend I spent some time catching up with my slide scanning project. These slides were my dad's and were given to me with a slide scanner six years ago at Christmas by my step-mother. I am very grateful to her for that but I do have to say that the slide scanner she gave me then was not the best. Also, I bought a Mac about a year later, having only managed to scan one carousel out of eighteen, and the scanner was not Mac compatible. Finally, I bought an Epson V370 scanner for myself at the beginning of 2015 and I have been scanning the slides ever since, with varying degrees of success.

Scanned with the old scanner.

I have hopefully now worked out all the kinks and now have a system that works for me for scanning and storing these wonderful slides so I thought I would share my process here. I hope that someone else reading this post can avoid some of the mistakes I have made and I am always open to suggestions for improving my process as well.

Dad's slides came to me in the carousels that I believe he put them in some time in the 70s or 80s. When I scanned that first carousel with the old scanner, I just put the slides right back into the carousel without any knowledge or thought of proper archival storage. Even when I did look for other storage methods, I have to admit that I was primarily motivated by a desire to save space.

I was already familiar with terms like "acid-free", "lignin-free" and "archival" from my paper-crafting days, but now I had to learn how those terms applied to my slides, photos and other heirlooms. In a perfect world I would be transferring my slides to archival quality boxes for storage after scanning, but they are expensive and not in my budget. Instead, at least for now, I am using these PVC-free slide pocket pages and these acid-free closed binders.

Next I had to decide what to do about labeling the slides themselves after scanning. I bought acid-free labels and archival pens and was going to put the labels on the outside of each pocket, but I was concerned about what might happen if the slide were out of the pocket page, how would someone be sure that a slide were going back in the correct pocket, if the slide itself weren't marked in some way? I would never write on the back of a photo, but I decided that as long as I'm using acid-free labels and archival pens that I would label the slides themselves.

The first carousel are actually in plastic frames, probably developed and made by my father himself. I don't know what kind of damage those might be doing to the slides inside, but since the cardboard Kodak frames probably aren't archival either from that long ago, I'm not going to worry about it for now. There just isn't any budge to have them re-framed by a professional, if that is even possible.

Slide labeling and storage in progress.

So, this is my storage process. It may not be for everyone, and even I don't feel it is ideal, but until I have the budget for boxes, this is what I've been doing.

I do recommend, especially if you have a large number of slides to digitize, that you decide on your method and purchase your materials before you begin scanning. That way your slides can go right from the scanner into your chosen receptacle right from the start. I certainly wish that I had done that.

In my next post, I'll share my process for scanning and saving the digital images.

Scanning Dad's Slides - Dust Removal

I believe that I have now scanned all of Dad's slides at least once.  You would think that would mean I was done, right? Unfortunately, when my Epson scanner (which I love, by the way) arrived without a manual and I was unable to find one online, I just dove right in without enough experimentation, which is my way. As a result, I will be rescanning most of those slides this year.

One of the things that I really should have learned about right away was the dust removal tool. Slides that are anywhere from thirty to sixty-seven years old have collected a lot of really fine dust and the fifteen carousels sitting in my dad's basement for who knows how long were no exception.

When you scan anything in my Epson v370, you start with a preview scan. This lets you size your image and you can see there in the preview what your scan will look like if you color correct and sharpen your image. So when I checked off that box for the dust removal tool, I expected that I would see the dust disappear in the preview. When I didn't see that change, I made the mistake of assuming that the tool didn't work. Actually, the issue was that I didn't understand how the tool works.

When the tool "failed" I attempted to remove the dust from the slides before scanning with a dusting tool that came with my first slide scanner. Unfortunately, since my slides are all in frames, all this did was move the dust around. As my frustration grew and I finally did more Google searches to see what other people might be doing, I learned that dust removal tools work by the way they shine the light through the dust. That explained why I wasn't seeing the results in the preview. When I FINALLY did an actual scan with the dust removal tool on, I was amazed at the results. Almost no dust remained on the final image!

So, lesson learned. BEFORE you invest hours and hours doing anything, make sure that you are happy with the process and results.

At least I can say with this last carousel, that I have finally settled on a process for my scanning, labeling, storing and backing-up that will remain in place as I rescan all those other slides.