CSA Online 2. The best photo scanner A flatbed scanner, the type that uses a glass platten like a photocopier, is the least expensive option. Epson’s Perfection V600 (~$250) is a good example and includes a negative/slide/film carriage. Scanning photos one at a time in this way will get tedious, but avoids document feeder scanners as they could well damage irreplaceable originals. If you’ve got a huge stack of photos to get through and can justify the expense, Epson’s FastFoto FF-680W ($699) is an exception to this “no document feeder” rule, as it’s engineered specifically for this purpose. Place a stack of photos, hit a button and the whole high-resolution scanning process happens automatically. Images are output as JPEG or TIF. The former is a “lossy” format that compresses image information and is not recommended. The latter is lossless and, with storage as inexpensive as it is today, perfect for photo archiving. The FastFoto software which comes with the FF-680W is great for both editing and organizing images. This eliminates the need to purchase or subscribe to other image-editing software for all but the most “prosumer” users. 3. A place to store your photos online There’s no one answer to where best to store photos online. Google Photos is a front-runner because it lets you store unlimited photos at “high quality.” You’re also afforded a generous amount of free storage for uncompressed photos. If you exceed the storage quota for uncompressed photos, the cost for more storage seems to vary, but isn’t expensive; I pay about $3/mo. for up to one terabyte across all Google services. Apple iCloud is an obvious choice for Apple devotees. You’ll run through the 5GB of storage at the free level pretty quickly. 10X the storage, 50GB, is US$12 per year and goes up from there. Not bad. If you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber ($80/year) you already have an unlimited high-resolution photo storage option for you and up to five family members. 4. A place to store your photos offline Don’t trust your photos only to on-device storage such as your tablet’s flash storage or your laptop’s hard drive. If the device is lost, stolen or broken, you’re out of luck. Saving your photos for safekeeping offline is a pretty simple matter; all you really need is an external hard drive… or two, if you want a redundancy. Depending on how bulletproof you need your photographic defences to be, you can keep one or more hard drives or high-capacity USB keys full of photos in a drawer, a lock box or a safety deposit box. One last thing… Have fun with it. Sorting through old photos can be tedious. It’s also a fun trip down memory lane, so enjoy it. This topic was inspired in part by my Mum, who is going through boxes and albums of old photos in this process right now. She’s also aCSANews reader and is guaranteed to read all the way to the end, even when I’m way over my word count. Hi, Mum! Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Slim Portable Epson FastFoto FF-680W CSANews | SPRING 2020 | 47
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzMzNzMx