[colug-432] Photo digitization recommendations?

[Jim Wildman]

I was waiting for others...  DigiKam was recently reviewed positively on LWN.  I'm intrigued by the idea of an external db, which would
give device portability.

On Thu, 12 Jan 2017, Peter Kukla wrote:

> Hi COLUGers,
> 
> I have hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of photographs that I'd like to scan.  My goal is to digitize the whole batch and distribute them to the
> family members of those in the pictures.
> 
> I have a Linux-based household, so the hardware & software would need to be Linux-friendly.  Hence my bugging you guys.
> 
> The project will require a fast scanner, given the number of photos in question.  Waiting 2-3 minutes for each scan to complete is fine if I
> only have a few pages to scan, but not for a large project like this.
> 
> Once scanned, I'll need to catalog the photos, describing who is depicted in each one.  In the interest of ensuring that the metadata is
> associated with the photos, one thought is to embed the metadata via IPTC tags, although I haven't explored that option very deeply yet.
> 
> However, the photos being scanned also are mostly of people I don't know (many pictures are from the wife's side of the family) and the family
> members who would know are widely dispersed, geographically.  It would be nice to have some sort of web-based, open source solution where I
> could load the images into a database of some sort and allow users to tag the pictures with details that I may not know ("Hey...that's Uncle
> Gump at our 1973 Grand Penguin Ball!")
> 
> Anyone ever done anything along these lines?
> 
> I'm looking for recommendations & advice for:
> 
>     * Good, reliable, and fast flat-bed scanners that are Linux-friendly
>     * Preferred image formats (the IPTC aspect may reduce the number of options?)
>     * A web-based digital archive system that supports user feedback and possibly downloading of the original images
>     * Any pitfalls I may encounter that I haven't yet thought about
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> 
> Peter Kukla
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wildman, CISSP, RHCE       jim at rossberry.com http://www.rossberry.net
"Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best
state, is a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."
Thomas Paine