Over the past few weeks I have been busily scanning my large photographic collection. Not so much the genealogical photos, more the holiday snaps taken over a lifetime.

1992 – my first overseas trip

I made the decision to do this now after watching a friend preparing to downsize and realised that at some stage in the future I probably will also need to downsize. So, rather than waiting until it becomes a major rush job, I’m taking my time scanning all my large and heavy pre digital photo albums to create new smaller photobooks, the type that are now available through many companies such as Clickonprint etc, as well as wading through the various boxes of photos that didn’t make it into albums previously. Most of these I will happily just store on my computer.

Until last week, the process of scanning has been extremely slow – scanning one or two photos at a time then having to manually crop to separate them. However, last week I discovered my  friend is able to stick a whole selection of 4 or 5 photos on her scanner bed which will scan and separate the photos as one action. I couldn’t believe that in all the years of my computer use, I wasn’t aware there was software out there that could scan and separate at the same time!

After searching the internet for available software programs I settled on purchasing  the download program AutoSplitter from Chimera Creative Studio. At only US$19  it has radicalised my scanning. Whereas before I would tire of scanning after 10 or 20 photos, I am now whizzing through my stash at around 100 photos in the same time.  And the scanned images are very good quality (in fact, sad to say, better than my original scanning software which I had stuck with for years).

And one thing that this whole process has achieved, is the bringing back of wonderful memories of times past.