Spent the day scanning old photo negatives today, and generally sorting through all our photos and getting them organised.
Our photo collection so far consists of 16151 photos (yes, that’s over sixteen thousand !) starting from 1985. That’s unique photos too – no duplicates counted there … if you count duplicates (multiple scans at different resolutions or multiple edited copies etc), then there’s actually over 18,000 files. At least that’s what I’ve scanned so far – there are more yet to be scanned, so this number will grow.
All of the more recent photos in our collection are digital only, and the rate of photo taking increased significantly once we went digital as film/processing cost was no longer an issue. It might be interesting to graph average number of photos taken per month over that period to show just how much our photo taking has increased.
With so many photos, disk space is of course an issue, with the photo collection now taking up 115GB of drive space. I have an external network drive using a Thecus N2100 with two 500GB hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration (mirrored disks), so if one disk fails, the other will still have a copy of the data. I also have an offsite backup (not completely up to date) stored at Leanne’s sisters house.
I also managed to scan some really old photos that were not in 35mm format – they are actually square shaped. The Nikon Coolscan scanner spat them out and didn’t want to scan, and the image is too large for the Epson 3200 flat bed scanner negative strip holder – so I rigged up the medium format transparency adaptor to hold the negatives while I scanned them on the flat bed. Seemed to do the job okay – the quality of the photos wasn’t great to start with, so it wasn’t worth getting too fussy about the results.
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