Mastodawn

The Picard Maneuver Mar 7

Prepared for this day

This was my mother when she passed. She left me so many many boxes of cables and equipment. Sooooooooo many power supplies.

After a 2 ton truck worth of gear later I realised that I couldn’t do the same to my son. It would be criminal to leave him my garage worth of gear on top of his grandma’s.

I’m proud to say I’m down to two boxes (20 litre containers) worth of active day to day stuff (jugs cables, hdmi, usb, gpus and about 80TB of storage, probably more) .

And 1/3 of a garage filled with tapes and digital tapes (one day I’ll go through them. Ideally upload them to YouTube so people can see her work (she worked in film and television)

I recently digitized my family’s (and extended family) VHS and new to me 5.5 VHS camcorder tapes. Now I have my grandfather’s cassette tape collection of accordion recordings. Have yet to fiddle with losslessly digitizing those but I’m sure I’ll figure out out. My mom also has my other grandfather’s Super 8 camcorder she claims has their wedding video on it. Need to eventually get my hands on that and figure that out as well.

Scanning pictures however is the worst. You can use a 3rd party, but many of them dispose of your physicals after the fact and don’t guarantee the scans came through without error.

ArcaneSlime Mar 8

Tapes are easy, get a cassette player of any kind with a headphone jack, jack that into your PC’s 3.5mm hole, and use Tenacity (audacity bad now, tenacity good fork) to record side A and B into two tracks which you can later split up into individual songs if need be. The Super 8 camcorder however idk, that sounds more difficult than audio tapes lol!

But scanning photos? Just get a Brother laser printer/scanner combo and scan them hoes yourself!

In related news does anyone know of a good photo printer? I have to go the other way and make my digitals into physicals! I could go to a pharmacy still I think but it’d be cool if I could do it myself.

Postmortal_Pop Mar 8

I’m currently looking for a good laser printer myself, if I get my hands on one I’ll pass the deets to you.

ArcaneSlime Mar 8

Brother laser printers are the move for sure, but as for photo printers I’m at a loss.

Hell, Brother probably makes one now that I think about it, hmm…

I have an HP multi function that can print on multiple types of paper, including cardstock, photo and glossy magazine. I’ve made reprinted NES instruction booklets on it even. I know everyone says “HP Bad”, but they are all making the toner move. I accidentally updated my dad’s Epson and it started complaining about his black ink cartridge. Lesson learned, just don’t update firmware on ANY brand and block their update servers at your router if possible.

ArcaneSlime Mar 9

Oh for sure lol, never update it, I usually don’t give printers access to the network anyway, I’ll just use a cable! I’ll check out that HP, thanks!

What are you doing, step printer? That’s not where cartridge go!

Thanks! I do have several cassette players, including the one my grandmother recently used to listen to these same tapes. I assumed the process is similar to what you laid out but have yet to get my system set up for said conversion.

And for the photos, I’m already planning that too. I have a stand alone scanner but know it’s a very tedious process from past personal scanning projects, and I have a tote full of I scanned photos. Maybe I’ll task my oldest with it later this year I’m her “down time” lol.

JackbyDev Mar 8

If you get anything digitized, sanity check the results, my mother in law got some done that were really weird, like some other family’s stuff and then it just cut out or something. I don’t think they put any effort into making sure it was correct. Especially if it’s somewhere disposing of the originals.

If I digitize anything, I only trust myself with that. I’m too OCD to trust a third party!

limelight79 Mar 8

Some years back I embarked on a project to scan my parents pictures. I think there were over 4,000 until I was done. I don’t remember the ratio, but there were some negatives and some prints. Oh and trying to unduplicate (this picture is a print of this negative) was a bear, because the prints and pictures had sometimes gotten separated.

I set up the scanner in the living room and worked on it while we were watching TV. It took months, but I did it.

Then I did my in-laws’ pictures, who didn’t have nearly as many, fortunately. And they were better organized to start, so that felt like a walk in the park by comparison.

I noticed my parents took a ton of pictures of my older brothers, but very few of me… But there were a ton of pictures of the bridge construction next to their house… Hmmm!

To be fair, with two daughters that are 1.5 years apart, we also have many more of our older daughter. We had more time to take pictures between naps and active time and less attention split once our second was born. Do I have remorse of having less pictures of our youngest? Of course, but it really was a challenge to get as many pictures with a 2 year old running around a baby that can’t even crawl yet!

My brother in Christ, please tell me what hardware you used and method. I have around 20K print photos that need digitizing and short of paying out of the wazoo for a professional service to do it, I’m at a total loss

limelight79 Mar 9

I have an Epson scanner, though I’d have to check the exact model. The one I have has the light so I can scan negatives or prints, but if you’re only doing prints you wouldn’t need that feature.

I used Vuescan to do it. Paid software, but none of the open source options were as smooth for high volume scanning (this was some years ago, so that might have changed). Vuescan did a pretty good job of adjusting colors and all automatically after the scan. It was worth the money for the time savings alone.

Basically just sit there, load the print, hit scan, wait, remove the print, repeat. You’ll learn the sound of the scanner when it’s returning to the top of the glass, at which point the print is safe to remove even if the software is still processing. That saves a little time.

It’s tedious, no question. Scanning negatives is better because you can get up to six in one shot. Get a second negative holder and you can have one scanning while you’re setting up the other one. It took me months and months.

Also consider culling the pictures you scan. Did I need to scan all of those rolls of the bridge construction? Nah.

Holy shit. You crazy motherfucker. You actually put the photos on the frame one by one? And scanned them one by one?

I gotta say…

You may be insane, but you get the job done, as opposed to me, who am still trying to figure out the best way to do it.

That’s why we are still trying to understand how they built the pyramids, while the pyramid builders simply did it.

limelight79 Mar 10

Yeah. I don’t remember how many of the pictures I scanned were prints, but it was quite a few, maybe close to 1,000. As I said, just watched TV and did it. It’s pretty mindless once you get into the groove doing it.

Like I said before, I did try to find the negatives and scan those instead when possible. Better quality and more efficient. But for quite a few, no negatives. I also had to take pictures out of frames and stuff like that. My parents wedding picture was in a cardboard frame I had to disassemble carefully…

I did the same with my own photos during the lockdown years. Started by scanning physical photos, then got hold of any old negative scanner which supported APS. I’ve scanned everything except I seem to be missing one of my APS negative cartridges. I now can’t get rid of my negative scanner because I know I’ll find that missing cartridge as soon as I do. I also can’t do much with the old PC as it’s the only full size one which will take the SCSI card that I have.

limelight79 Mar 15

Damn, aps support?! I assume you have to take the negatives out of the cartridge.

There’s a seller on ebay that 3D prints negative holders for the scanner I have, so for example I could scan the 110 cartridge (not the really old roll film) negatives I have. I wonder if he makes one to do APS.

But on the other hand, the APS camera I had was cheap, point and shoot, and the prints came back with a note that they were severely overexposed, so it probably wasn’t even working correctly. Not much point in spending money to save some forgettable shots of a local river.

Yeah, it’s a Canon scanner (can’t remember the model of the top of my head), a lot of the listings I saw for it were missing the APS part so maybe it was an optional extra?

They are mounted in the scanner cartridge and then the scanner takes care of advancing through them - or maybe it was manual. I can’t remember now!

I had more rolls of APS than I thought, quite cool as you get the full frame rather than what was selected on the camera, so you see bits that were hidden for years.

Edit fs2710 - just looked in the metadata!

Spice Hoarder Mar 8

You got rid of 80TB of storage? In this economy?

limelight79 Mar 8

I think he meant he kept 80 TB of storage.

how_we_burned Mar 11

Yup.

My brother was house sitting a few months ago and asked me why I have several draws filled with stacked HDDs.

I shrugged and blamed mum

Hey the copper inside those bad boys will be worth a fortune in 50 years