Working on Batch 1

I'm starting with Group 1, Batch 1. Group 1 is a set of 19 3.5-inch square prints from around 1971. I'm not sure if I'll use the same settings for everything, but this group I scanned at 600 dpi using 24-bit color. The master images are stored with no cleanup or color correction.

In order to create some lower-resolution images for web use, I then imported them into iPhoto and created a gallery using a few of iPhoto's enhancements (straightening, cropping, color enhancement). This does not change the original files.

I'm quickly realizing that the photos as they arrived are even more jumbled up than I thought. I don't want to try scanning slides yet, so those will leave batch 1. The school portraits exist in dozens of duplicates so I shouldn't scan those now either. And as I peer through the other boxes I'm finding a lot of photos that belong in these groups -- many of them are part of the same set of prints, for example, the Kodak instant photos.

I had originally planned to just scan everything sequentially, to sequentially numbered files, mostly ignoring any kind of grouping of the originals. But that leads to very inefficient scanning, since I can't tile the prints nicely on the scanner if they are all different shapes and sizes. It also does nothing to relieve the original organization problem. As I got into this I quickly realized that I want the original prints to be much more organized when I'm done, if only to group them up for putting them into archival boxes to send to relatives.

This means I can't really call a group complete until I've gone through every print and grouped them as best I can. If I scan as I go, rather than scanning after they are all sorted, this means that I'll be constantly adding images to groups and the file numbers will have not relationship to the groups any more. Which means it then becomes quite a chore to match up the originals to file numbers, especially since I don't want to actually write the file numbers on the originals.

Madness awaits!