Need some advice...photography

I am an amateur photographer, just a hobby. But, I've done a fair amount of travelling. I spent several years working over in Asia, and I took about 2,000 rolls of film. Some of the shots are great pictures, and some suck.

Back in about '00 I had a film scanner from Canon, it scanned 35mm negatives. Trouble was it took about 5 minutes to scan a single strip of about (5) negatives, and that was at a medium resolution. It was still good, so I set out to scan all the negatives, and it was a bunch. However, then Micro-SHAFT forced upgrades on my OS, and my negative scanner was no longer supported.

In any case, a full resolution 35mm negative is about 19mb of data.

I've since upgraded to a digital SLR camera. With mass storage I capture both RAW and JPEG (large) for every shot. But, I still don't have all the original negatives from the film cameras scanned in, or anywhere even close.

I'm not a big picture framing guy, and maybe I should be, but my house would be covered with pictures (not something I want). I do, however, want to keep the good shots.

I was reading some of the scanner specs out there now, and many of them are anywhere from 1-3 minutes per negative for full resolution. I have 120,000 pictures (+/-). Even with multi-TB drives, this would take weeks, if not months, to scan, and then I'd have to pick out all the crap and delete it.

There's got to be a better way to do this!

Anyone know how?

Just an honest question.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

I have 120,000 pictures (+/-).

Take them to a commercial digitizing company. Seriously that many pictures you either need professional equipment, to pay people with special equipment or spend months. There's not many ways around that.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Great question!

a reply to: dug88
I agree he does.

Im having a very similar issue.

Not the camera but the content on the card. I have thousands of photos. My problem is i want to use the card as original and save it. Then I'll get a new card, i need the originals.

Work out which ones you actually want to keep and scan just them.

Use a projector to view the negatives.

A lot less effort.

P

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk
I don't handle negatives much these days, but when I did I kept them in sheets of 8x10 *8.5x11?) binder holders . If you can arrange an option like that with them then you can scan a sheet at a time and pick out the individual shots worth spending the time on to make archival scans at highest quality.

Keep the scanned contact sheets with the negatives for easier browsing through the images.

I still shoot a lot of film, and I scan all the negatives. Each negative takes about 6-7 minutes because I want a really good resolution - I sell my work all over, even been featured in the Washington Post. I prefer to do the scanning myself. Yes, it's very time consuming, but I don't have to worry about sending off my negatives for somebody else to scan and getting them lost in transit. You can't replace them, no matter how much you insure them for. To me, that's the most important thing to keep in mind. I use an Epson Perfection V500 and have been satisfied with it for a decade. Even bought a new spare one for when it stops working.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Have you ever double exposed them to get a punchier picture,better colors and better lines??
The colors are vivid and look pretty cool.

I should note. Every time I try to upload on my laptop, it crashes the computer... that's where it really becomes a problem.

High resolution.

4 hours high definition video of aviation.

Everytime I plug that card in, CRASH!


Edit: Wish Eriktheawful was still here to steer me in the right way.

a reply to: IagainstEye

I have them all in film strip holder sheets, stored in full sized, 8-1/2" x 11" three ring binder notebooks. It's like (3) shelves worth, side by side. And, that's only about half of them! The rest are stored in the original developing packages. Haven't even gotten to archiving those yet. I never had prints made because it was too expensive, and I didn't trust the print making.

I have boxes and boxes of pictures from years earlier too, all the negatives, some with prints. Even with prints, you still have to sort through the negatives to find which print matches which negative. It's a slow process.

In an ideal world, what I'd like to be able to do is scan all strips of negatives, give me a thumbnail for each in like a proof sheet, and then cull the pictures I don't want and keep the ones I do.

I never thought all this would be so difficult when I was shooting the pictures, but now I don't want to throw all that history away.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Was looking into this a few months ago.

I've not done a whole lot of research into the company, but they also make a unit that transfers film-movies (8mm & Super-8). Below is for the 20mp negative scanner

Here it is on amazon;
"Wolverine Titan 8-in-1 20MP High Resolution Film to Digital Converter with 4.3" Screen and HDMI Output, Worldwide Voltage 110V/240V AC Adapter & 32GB SD Card (Bundle)"

Again.. I can not confirm or deny that this unit is any good... but it popped into my head after reading your query.

Cheers and good luck.

***ETA***

My situation is that I have tons of research video's I've shot in Hi-B video that are starting to decay and I need to transfer them before they disappear.