I found an old post from 2008, but I assume software has improved since then.
I have a large plastic bin of old family photographs in my garage. They aren’t organized in any way. Some are pretty fragile. I would like to scan these photos before they deteriorate further. I have a newish printer/flatbed scanner. It’s an HP Officejet Pro 8028. I have no desire to send these to someone and have them scan them for me. I’m retired and have plenty of time to waste doing this project.
I want to put 3 or 4 photos on the scanner simultaneously and then split them into separate jpeg or tiff files I can categorize. I found a few software packages that should do that, but none are compatible with my printer/scanner. I run Windows 10 and would prefer something free if it exists or something not too expensive. Any suggestions?
Spend the time and effort and scan individual images. The time you think you will save by scanning several images at once is lost because of the time you will require separating each of them into several individual images.
You want to scan each image at optimum color and contract. Scanning multiple images may me your scanner will attempt to optimize all of them at once, possibly ruining an effort for later work to optimize each one.
Seems like there should be some free photo tools in Windows 10 that you could use. I did this awhile back with some CD covers. I had ripped the CDs but Windows Media Player couldn’t find the album art for them. I scanned two at a time then used Windows Photo Viewer (I think?) to split them out.
Scanspeeder is what I am using for a similar project. The software recognizes individual pictures and separates them for you. You have the option to manually override it if necessary. I have an almost-new HP scanner and it recognized it immediately after installation.
I’ve done color and I’ve done B&W, and it works fine for both, although I’ve not tried both in the same pass.
Obviously I’m not nearly as particular as @Duckster; scanning multiple photos and creating multiple files from 4 or 5 photos is working just fine for me.
Best 30 bucks I’ve spent in a while.
I believe you can download it for a limited test run.
It is possible to load pre-scanned images, so you could scan them first
then run autosplitter and import the scanned files.
(You’ll need to register to remove the watermark)
You may want to double-check that… it doesn’t look like any of these apps support (or not) specific scanners. They all look like TWAIN / WIA scanner apps, meaning that they support the standard, and if you’ve got TWAIN drivers for your scanner, you’re good. And if your scanner’s under about 15 years old, you can pretty much assume the drivers are TWAIN compliant.
You might need to update your drivers to the latest ones- go look at the HP website for those.
You said that scanspeeder wouldn’t recognize your scanner. Assumedly, then, you downloaded this app to test? How about the other app that was mentioned, autosplitter? Have you downloaded this one for a test run?
Your scanner, the HP 8028, is relatively new. I find it hard to believe that neither of these apps can find your scanner.
It also looks like Autosplitter will split already cropped images, so if nothing else you could scan them all using whatever scan utility your scanner came with, and then use Autosplitter to break up those scanned files further into individual snapshots. It’s a bit more work, but still less than cropping by hand.