This caused me to increase the storage capacity and was actually the impetus for the purchase of the pair of Thecus NAS units in 2008. The storage impacts and other computer-related articles are discussed here.

This article addresses the scanning side of the project.

In reviewing this project, we had a large number of formats (sound familiar?) that needed to be addressed, and it grew beyond the original proportions when we decided to add in the summer of 2011 paper reference files.

• Reflective material:
  • photographic prints up to 8 x 10 inches, colour and black and white
  • photographic albums containing multiple prints
  • magazine and newspaper articles, standards, other documents up to letter / A4
  • larger-sized newspaper articles
  • engineering drawings up to 11 x 17 inches (ledger)
  • engineering drawings larger than 11 x 17 inches
• Transparent material
  • 110 negatives (colour and black and white)
  • 35 mm negatives (colour and black and white)
  • 35 mm transparencies (including Kodachrome and Agfa Rapid)
  • 127 “Brownie” negatives (colour and black and white)
  • 120 roll film (6 x 6 and 6 x 7 colour transparencies and black and white negatives)
  • 6 x 9 cm (Plaubel? black and white negatives)
  • 616 “postcard” black and white negatives
  • 4 x 5 colour transparencies and black and white negatives
  • 5 x 7 colour transparencies and black and white negatives
  • 5 x 7 black and white glass negatives in tricolour sets
  • 8 x 10 glass negatives in tricolour sets

This collection has come together from many sources. The biggest chunk is mine,  but I have materials from my family, my wife’s family, my stepmother’s family, and my mentor, NYC fashion photographer, Milton F. Gentsch. All of Milton’s prints were donated to the Fashion Institute of Technology, but they did not want the negatives, so I have retained about 3 cu ft of them, including all the tricolour glass negatives.

The bulk of my collection is 35 mm transparencies, and the bulk of the family photos of my immediate family were on 35 mm colour negative.

My son Robert and I scanned in 2008 and my sons Michael and Robert did split-shift scanning in the summer of 2009. Robert did a few family albums in 2010 and did a massive job on paper and slides in 2011.

We started out knowing we’d need a great 35 mm tool, so bought (apparently just in time) a Nikon Super Coolscan ED-5000 with SF-210 slide feeder. We had a Hewlett Packard Scanjet 5590 with duplex sheet feeder. We soon realized we needed a high-end flatbed scanner so, after doing some projects for people, purchased an Epson V700.

Our scanning rules were basically simple:

Quality 35 mm images were scanned to 36 MB files (12 MP, 8 bits/colour) and snapshots were scanned to 18 MB files (6 MP, 8 bits/colour). this was based on many considerations, including the fact that the Nikon D100 images (6 MP) were more than fine for any family images, the Nikon D200 images were really good (10 MP), we were already investing a whole bunch in storage already. We used a light touch of Digital DEE and Digital ICE to improve the non-Kodachrome, non-silver images. We retained all the transparencies in archival hanging slide sheets, and packed the negatives into semi-archival cardboard boxes sorted by year.

A few selected high-quality transparencies were scanned to 144 MB (24 MP, 16 bits/colour). Some of the low-volume high-quality items were scanned at reasonably high resolutions. For example, some 5 x 7 negatives were scanned as 350 MB files (175 MP, 16 bits). Most of the negatives were scanned at 6 MP, but a few were scanned at 12 MP, where I had experimented with higher-quality negative film instead of transparency film.

In 2011, as we started to scan paper documents as well as images, it became clear that the HP needed to be retired, and we replaced it with a Xerox DocuMate 3115 (made by Visioneer) double-sided sheet-fed scanner. The documents were scanned directly to PDF and the original paper copies were recycled after the scans were checked. These were magazine articles and (mostly obsolete) standards that I had saved as general reference. Some of the documents from organizations were returned to that organization (sometime without scanning) to assist in completing their archives. The document scanning was mostly done at 300 dpi, which is about 8.5 MP.

We also found a Brother MFC-J6510DW all-in-one on sale in 2011 and picked that up to handle the 11 x 17 scanning chores. It has a single-sided sheet feed on the scanner, but will print double-sided, but not well at 11 x 17 as it requires a 0.8 inch margin. Otherwise, it is a bargain for large-format scanning, although it still needs to make one splice if you’re scanning a record jacket, but that’s better than three splices, four images!

In all cases, we used the native scanning applications and found them to be adequate.

Other than the document PDFs, we saved all scans as uncompressed TIFF files in folders sorted by year, with month-day-event subfolders. All TIFFs were also converted to JPG images for fast access and ease of use and, due to the Adobe Lightroom requirements, kept in the same folders. We used Advanced Batch Converter to generate the JPGs. The software performed very well with one exception. I have a large number of Nikon D100 NEF images that do not have the corresponding JPG image–all the D200 images are shot with the camera generating both NEF and JPG–and the colour balance of the Advanced Batch Converter conversions from the D100 NEFs was substantially off. I have not looked into the issue due to lack of time.

I love Adobe Lightroom, but have not had enough time to enter every image the way I’d like.

We used two older XP computers for this task. Both were Pentium 4 computers with 3.0 GB of RAM. One was 3.0 GHz and the other 3.2 GHz. The Brother, Xerox, HP, and Nikon have all been connected (at one time or the other) to our newer Windows 7 64 bit machines. I haven’t tried the Epson, because that sits nicely with the 3.2 GHz XP machine as a photo workstation.  The Xerox now sits in the studio to quickly handle all document needs, and the Brother connects over the network, though we often use a USB key when we scan on it. The Nikon created a challenge for 64 bit Windows, but we fortunately found this link. Nikon’s response is here and I did purchase Vuescan prior to finding the fix link. I went back to Nikon Scan as while Vuescan is competent, I thought Nikon Scan looked better. I did try Silverfast which came with my Epson V700 and preferred the native Epson scanner software. I know Silverfast is well respected, but I did not want to spend the money when I was happy with the Nikon scanning software.

We currently have about 1 TB of images. We have two redundant Thecus N5200 PRO NAS units, each with five 1 TB drives, for a total capacity of about 4 TB per unit. These two units are located in different buildings and the remote one is a mirror of the local one. We also have a set of large-capacity (mixed 500 and 1000 GB) portable USB hard drives that hold a third copy of the images and other portions of our NAS units. These are in a rugged steel case, located about 3 km away. This set was added following the devastating tornado that hit Goderich.

Total scans:

Year   35 mm negs   35 mm transparencies    other       document pages
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2008      2,500            10,500
2009      5,500             2,050            775
2010                                         300               200
2011                       11,650                           11,200
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Total     8,000            24,200          1,075            11,400
Total scanned 44,675    digital images 17,299 NEF + 1000s of JPGs
      over 62,000 images total

Going back to the initial list, as of 2011, the following are complete:

• Reflective material:
  • photographic prints up to 8 x 10 inches, colour and black and white
  • magazine and newspaper articles, standards, other documents up to letter / A4
  • larger-sized newspaper articles
  • engineering drawings up to 11 x 17 inches (ledger)
  • engineering drawings larger than 11 x 17 inches
• Transparent material
  • 110 negatives (colour and black and white)
  • 35 mm negatives (colour and black and white)
  • 127 “Brownie” negatives (colour and black and white)
  • 120 roll film (6 x 6 and 6 x 7 colour transparencies and black and white negatives) (my collection)
  • 616 “postcard” black and white negatives
  • 4 x 5 colour transparencies and black and white negatives (my collection)
  • 5 x 7 colour transparencies and black and white negatives (my collection)

And the following remain to be completed. The key thing here is that all of the personal/immediate family items except the 35 mm transparencies are complete.

• Reflective material:
  • I do not want to say this is 100% complete as there is always something that comes up to scan, but, overall, all the back archives have been scanned.
• Transparent material (my collection)
  • 35 mm transparencies (including Kodachrome–perhaps 15,000 images, although some pre-selection process may occur)
• Transparent material (my father’s and stepmother’s collections)
  • 35 mm transparencies (including Kodachrome, Agfa Rapid, and possibly some silver-based images–perhaps 5,000 images, although these may be scanned selectively)
• Transparent material (Milton F. Gentsch collection–perhaps 2,000 images, although only several hundred may be scanned)
  • 120 roll film (6 x 6 and 6 x 7 colour transparencies and black and white negatives)
  • 6 x 9 cm (Plaubel? black and white negatives)
  • 4 x 5 colour transparencies and black and white negatives
  • 5 x 7 colour transparencies and black and white negatives
  • 5 x 7 black and white glass negatives in tricolour sets (also contact prints exist)
  • 8 x 10 glass negatives in tricolour sets (also contact prints exist)

This has been great fun, and I enjoy having access to these images. I find I use some of them more.

My great joy will be to be able to publish online my series of images of the Cathedrals and Abbeys of England and recreate the personal slide show in a modern format. That won’t go online as the music is copyrighted.

I cannot talk a lot about this project, as I have other work to do, but one of the major influences on some of the decisions I’ve made has been the writings of Tim Vitale. His papers provided great insight into what scanning resolution was necessary. I highly recommend these three papers:

• Brief History of Imaging Technology
• Film Grain, Resolution and Fundamental Film Particles
• Estimating the Resolution of Historic Film Images: Using the Resolving Power Equation (RPE) and Estimates of Lens Quality

I would like to thank Sue Bigelow of the Vancouver City Archives for introducing me to Vitale’s work. Sue is a great resource in this area and has a published paper. That link points to a copy of the paper at Wilhelm Imaging Research, which is a fascinating site for this type of work.

Here are links to the scanners mentioned:

• Nikon Super Coolscan 5000ED (going for crazy prices on eBay)
• Epson Perfection V700 Photo
• Xerox DocuMate 3115
• Brother MFC-J6510DW
• HP Scanjet 5590 (currently in retirement)

As an alternate perspective to what I did with the availability of inexpensive labour which needed some work to occupy their summers, you might want to consider Larry Bolch’s approach. It has merit if you are scanning for access. I believe I’m scanning for preservation, so I think what I did was correct for my needs and available resources, but Larry’s points should be read and understood prior to making any decision.

These boxes have bubbled to the top of the priority list. The interior and slides seem to be fine…for now, and the other boxes are showing little or none of the symptoms of the one (which is probably not the oldest). The slides in this box date from 1983, but the box is almost certainly older. The Logan and Brumberger steel files are, as expected, holding up well, but I am migrating the images to hanging slide sheets from Transparent Office Products. I suspect that I’ll end up with about 2,500 sheets with probably 16 slides/sheet on average…and that will fit in seven file cabinet drawers (2′ deep). These sheets were originally sold by Franklin Distributors until Transparent took them over about half a decade ago. I bought my first sheets from them in 1991 or 1992 and they are still doing fine. Some other alleged to be archival sheets from the same time did not do as well.

We are scanning all of the images as we move them using a Nikon Coolscan 5000ED with SF-210 slide feeder.

For AAs and AAAs, I have selected the Maha Powerex Imedion cells which retain a charge for an extended period of time (spec’d at 15% loss per year). I have invested in two of the MH-C9000 Wizard One chargers for my office and two MH-C401FS Mini chargers, one for my bedroom and one for the church sound booth. These are both available alone and in kits with cells from Paul’s Finest where he is selling the international version with a multi-voltage “wall wart” for a reasonably good price with great service.

While the MH-C401FS charges batteries individually, and does a good job of it, the MH-C9000 Wizard One is amazing. It will determine the remaining capacity and will even test and condition cells to the IEC standard. For example, I was having a problem with some cordless phones that used 3-cell NiMH battery packs. I took the pack apart and put the three cells in the MH-C9000 and it told me that they had a capacity of about 70, 40, and 40 mAh for each of the three cells. I immediately replaced these three cells with three new Imedion AAA cells that have about 800 mAh capacity each.

I have been using the Maha cells and chargers since April and am very pleased.

A special-purpose option in this are the 3.7 V 14500 lithium polymer AA-sized cells. These will obviously damage many devices that could physically accept them, but for the latest breed of LED flashlight, such as the 4Sevens Quark AA lights (USA site),  these provide superior peak output at the highest setting with the understanding that you can also use standard NiMH cells in an extended emergency with the loss of some peak output.

I have been using the AW-139 dual-cell fast charger also since April with great success. These will charge the 14500 cells mentioned above as well as 17670 cells which are the size of two 123 cells and work well in some LED lights that use two disposable 123 cells. I have been using the Pila version of these cells for about five years in my SureFire L4 LED light and have now bought four more cells for other flashlights. These are available from 4Sevens (USA) as well as other places such as www.dealextreme.com. Make sure you get the protected cells.

Recently, I did a thorough search for 9 V rechargeable batteries for wireless microphones at church. I was pleased to discover that iPowerUS (they have a Toronto office) was able to provide lithium polymer 9 V batteries that far outperformed the available NiMH offerings. We bought one DC9V charger and eight DC9V-520mAh batteries for alternate use in four wireless transmitters that we use regularly. We expect this system to pay off in a year or less.

I also bought their GC-60 tester/charger for my NiMH AA and AAA cells which, so far, looks excellent. Both chargers come with a “wall wart” and a car cord.

See updates in this article.