I’m pretty satisfied with the HP DeskJet and OfficeJet series. My main beef with them is that when it loses the network connection for some reason, there’s no way to restore it short of rebooting my router.
If I may piggyback on this thread. . .
I’m about to embark on the massive task of digitizing my family’s photos (many thousands of photos), Does anyone have any recommendations of software to organize this collection. I’d like to be able to add multiple tags and descriptions to each photo and have those be searchable.
I assume this project will take up an enormous amount of resources, would it be best to have a dedicated computer, or would removable storage devices (thumb drives) be adequate?
thanks,
mc
Adobe’s Lightroom is the gold standard for organizing and editing photos. It costs $9.99/mo because life isn’t fair. Darktable is a free alternative that would suit you fine. But, whatever you do, upload everything to Google Photos when you’re done. Storage is unlimited for photos up to 16 megapixels and Google will automatically sort photos by the people (and pets) in them. It’s also dead simple to share photos and videos from it.
As for resources… Assuming you’re scanning 4x6 inch photos at 600 dpi, you’re looking at 24 megabytes per uncompressed digital photo in the TIF(F) format, or 24 gigabytes per 1000 digital photos. That’s not a lot of space, but I don’t know what you’re working with. In any case, external hard drives are not too expensive: ~$60 for 2000 gigabytes / 2 terabytes.
We’ve had threads in which people described their experience doing something like this themselves. Basically, scanning that many photos is really tedious and gets old very fast. You may want to consider sending out the photos/negatives/slides to a service bureau rather than doing it yourself.
And if you’re going to go to that much trouble (either scanning yourself or sending them out), I think you want to store the files in multiple places. So not just one removable storage device or one computer, but copied several places.
Replying to the piggyback, I just use Windows folders and self-documenting file names like 20090503 Yosemite Park Valley Floor Charles Jane Me.jpg
For storage, I have a net-based backup service (Backblaze) and also two stand-alone USB 2Tb Hard Disks. Department of Redundancy Department. It’s only the only way to go.