[Leica] Re: Advice needed

[lrzeitlin at optonline.net (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

On Feb 19, 2009, at 6:07 PM, Clive wrote:

> Wow - I started on my collection of negatives several years ago - and
> made almost no progress. Your time of 6 minutes per scan seems close
> to mine - but it took you 250 8 hour days to scan 20,000 images! I
> have a hard time scanning for an hour at a time - my ADD kicks in
> really quickly :-(


Thanks to everyone who offered advice and sympathy on my film  
collection digitizing effort. I probably will continue to store the  
images in iPhoto because I'm too lazy to learn a new program. But I  
will divide the large accumulated file into at least 10 iPhoto  
libraries. Probably divided by years. It did take a about a year of  
stolen moments to digitize the images and I'm not done yet.  
Fortunately I didn't have to sit in front of the computer the entire  
time. I could load up to ten negatives in the film carrier, start the  
scanner, and come back in an hour. Now that naked hard drive prices  
have dropped to less than $30 per 100 GB, that will certainly be the  
cheapest way to store the backup file. Several years ago I bought a  
Newer Technologies cable to salvage data from a defunct LaCie hard  
drive. You simply plug the cable into an uncased ATA drive and  
connect it to a USB 2.0 computer port. It works beautifully and would  
be just the thing for using hard drives for backups.

But I wish I had started digitizing files years ago when decent  
scanners became affordable. That would have turned a mountain into a  
series of small hills.

Larry Z