Not Floundering Quite as Much in my Sea of Photographs Now

I had many great responses to my story Floundering in a Sea of Photographs where I asked for ideas on how to organize and preserve (pass on) of my family photos.

After reading the ideas, I was struck by how many different avenues of organizing/storing/preserving there are. Geniaus suggested I get a feeder for my scanner to save time and I started thinking about that.

A few years back i bought a super-duper business scanner. It has so many buttons and gadgets I hardly know what it does! So I started wondering if it might do some magical things that I never checked out - and if it had a document feeder!

After digging out the manual and starting to read, I got pretty excited because I found that those nifty buttons on the front actually DO something - and something pretty cool. One of them is a button to scan photos. You place your photos on the bed (mine is extra large so I can get 6 photos on at once) and hit the button. Bingo! Up pops a window where you can choose your settings (you only have to do this the first time then save it as your default). Then you hit SCAN. I choose to scan at 300 dpi and save as .tif

All the pictures scanned on their own, meaning I didn't have to move the outside borders, fiddle with settings, or hit accept. They just scanned, and quickly! Then up came another window asking if I wanted to scan more. I replaced the first photos with another batch and hit YES.

Zip. Scanning done. I only did a little test run but I scanned 8 photos in 3 minutes. To me that's magic and I can live with that!

I had rather quickly gone through my boxes of photos (well one box) and pulled out Hallowe'en pictures of my sons and I. That is what I quickly scanned. Then I imported those 8 pictures into Picasa and created a collage, just so I could show readers here what I ended up with.

I'm happy with the results and now feel motivated to sort my photos as suggested, then start scanning in groups. Events, dates, special trips, years, etc. I'll then print off pages (not collages) for each of my children. I've got a really nice laser colour printer that does a super job, and a speedy one at that.

So thank you everyone for your words of encouragement and your ideas!