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.

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!

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

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.