the gimp is not that hard
i made the switch form a decade + years in photographic Darkrooms ( custom color and black and white HAND enlarging ) to the gimp in about two weeks

now that was back in 2001

the gimp is actually a bit more intuitive to use , than Photoshop .

start with the current Gimp 2.8 docs
http://docs.gimp.org/2.8/en/
SIGNIFICANT changes have accrued that docs for 2.6 CAN NOT be used for 2.8 ( other than the basics)
nor can the very old docs for gimp 2.4 be used for 2.8

gimp 2.8 is VERY different than the old 2.4


in your first post you mention a rather old scanner using win NT
that will be a OLD usb1 scanner
usb1 WAS dead slow back in 2003 and in 2013 it really IS DEAD slow

pick up at least a usb2 ( or better yet a usb3!!! ) scanner
some flatbed scanners have a "film/slide tool
these are GARBAGE !!! unless all you want is a "web thumbnail" something like a 320x240 px image
BUY a usb2 or usb3 DEDICATED film/slide scanner !
Any mid priced or ON SALE one will do for home use .


i use the highest resolution possible 1200 or 2400 ppd ( but this makes for some VERY big images )
An image in excess of 24,000 x12,000 px on a side

Now I work with some VERY BIG image data sets, and a image that has the long side of 12,000 px is a SMALL image for me
anything under 500 meg. is small for me !


i think that i image that is 12 Gig is big .

so you will have to decide on just HOW big you want the scans .and just how many extra hard drives you will NEED to buy


then somethings can be automated
The Gimp is NOT that great of a tool for that

I like the terminal program
"G'Mic" -- GREYC's Magic Image Converter
http://gmic.sourceforge.net/

custom rules can be made to automatically manipulate images in say ~/Scan folder

and it is FAST , very fast .In speed it is a F1 race car as compared to a "model T " ( Imagemagic is the "model T ")

most people i know hate that "GimpShop" one window thing worse that the bubonic plague !
I avoid it at all cost .




edited

a few notes on old images

cracks can be fixed fairly easily .The current gimp has a heal tool and a plugin "resynthesizer.tar.gz "
http://registry.gimp.org/node/25219
it has some inpainting python scripts that do a good job

on "koda-color" slides ( VS the WAY WAY WAY BETTER "Koda-Chrome" ) are going to be VERY faded in the green and blue emulsion layer leaving a very faded red/magenta image
this can only really be fixed by synthetically recreating the missing color data ( there are some tutorials on the net )

Rolls eyes....

Parallel port --- as I wrote in my original post.

And yes, horribly slow, as I also already mentioned in my original post.

I already wrote in a previous post that I intended to buy a dedicated film scanner for the negatives and slides.

Yup, that's one reason I always avoided GIMP. I am in the camp of folks who never wrapped their head around the way GIMP was designed to be scattered all over the desktop. I haven't bothered looking at GIMP with the newer single interface, but I'm sure that sole change will provide me some mental peace of mind when I try.

There are other tools too, such as digikam.

@Woodsman,
You have what you need to do the job, it is just a matter taking the time to do it.
A new scanner, etc., might make it a bit faster, but not by much.

I scan almost daily and use a old (now) HP3750C flatbed scanner (USB) with a built-in negative/slide scanner. Does the job, BUT, as I've said elsewhere, when used used with Sane/Xsane (Sane will be your backend regardless of what other Linux software you use) the results are grossly inferior to the results using the HP software in ms-windows. So, I have XP running in VirtualBox and it all works nicely. After
the first couple of scans, i.e., the tube warms up, I can't imagine it being any faster.

I've done most of my slides, etc. from over 40 years ago and all my photos and important papers, and many of the negatives. Once scanned you can use other software, e.g., The Gimp, to "improve and/or repair" some of your old photos.

I was very disappointed to find that over the years, while in storage (properly stored) some of the Kodachrome slides faded to almost ghost images. These were taken back in the years when Kodak was trying to come up with more "environmentally friendly" chemistry and were processed by a Kodak lab in France.

Good luck. It is a big project, but the results will be worth it.

Are you saying the scanner software makes a difference? That even the old Photo Editor in NT4 is superior to SANE/XSANE? I have XP cleverly hidden on my laptop. I could connect a USB scanner to that system rather than my main office system, which is only Slackware.

I'm not against non free/libre solutions, I just want to ensure I'm reading your post correctly.

chances are that was kodacolor

i have processed both and the chrome needed re-exposure during processing with a 8 Hour lifespan for the chemistry ( a royal pain in the "bleep" )

the kodacolor fades BIG TIME
now every so often a batch of kodachrome might fade if stored correctly ( bad processing )


it can
but HP software is rather good
it almost always will "just work" in linux
if i press the scan button ( on the scanner) a ppm ends up in my ~/Scans folder
it is use gimp +xsane , well i can do anything to it
or just the xsane gui , without gimp
HP supports Xsane

I once scanned a collection of about 600 photos using an Epson Perfection 3490 flatbed scanner. I used scanimage, Gimp, a shell script, and the then-latest version of Slackware.

I had three different sizes of photos. After setting the scanimage parameters in the script, I could batch process all photos of the same size. Put photo in scanner, hit enter, put next photo in scanner, hit enter, etc.

I archived both the original TIFF files from scanimage and the color-adjusted JPG files from Gimp. I found that the scanner wouldn't produce very dark blacks, so I had to manually adjust each image. I later converted the original TIFF files to PNG.

This took a few days and generated 9 GB of data. It is a good winter project.
Ed

Interesting. Once upon a time, long, long ago I was a Kodak dealer and as far as I know Kodachrome processing was never possible outside of a lab, usually Kodak owned. However, at the end of Kodachrome's 75 year run, there was one Kodachrome machine left in the world and it was privately owned by a small lab in Kansas. It was shut down in December 2010, and sold for scrap.

Ektachrome, OTOH, was done by large and small professional processors and could even be done at home if one had the patience. I remember selling the kits.

Yes! Absolutely! BUT, it depends on the scanner chip set. Some chip sets are better supported by Sane than others. Yours might be supported by Sane, it might not.


Again, it all depends on the chip set in your scanner and how well it is supported by Sane. You can go to the Sane web site and check their list of supported devices.

http://www.sane-project.org/

You might consider running some comparison tests between your Photo Editor/NT setup and your Linux/sane setup, and see which one does the better job.


HP provides Linux drivers for all their printers and "all-in-one" office products, but they do not provide drivers for their standalone flatbed scanners. Why I don't know.

I've read this thread with interest. I want to embark on a similar project. I have thousands of family slides (Kodachrome, Agfachrome, Ektachrome, and a bunch of unknown), color negatives (Kodacolor mostly), and some black and white 35mm and medium format negatives. On top of that, I have a couple hundred 50 foot reels of 8mm film, nearly all Kodachrome.

I have an Epson Perfection V750 flatbed scanner that I plan to use for the slides and negatives. I have a Moviestuff Workprinter that I'll use for the 8mm movie films. I'll most likely use a dedicated Windows system for all of it. I think Adobe Lightroom will be adequate for my still photo needs, but I'll use GIMP if I need to. I'm not sure what I'll use for editing the movie film. Thankfully, all of it is silent, so I won't need to worry about audio.

Most of the Kodachrome slides still have brilliant color, but the Ektachrome hasn't fared so well. Most of it has faded badly and turned magenta.

It's going to be a huge task, but I plan to work on it slowly and steadily for however long it takes.

I have scanned and cleaned up black-and-white prints and negatives, color prints, and color slides, using Slackware, GIMP, and xsane, with good results. But I have never had success with color negatives. Color negatives (it turns out) are not color balanced, and need extensive color correction when scanning. I'm not saying it can't be done with xsane + GIMP, just that I have never been able to get decent results.

I had a relative who wasn't willing to let me take his large collection of photos home. Bit by bit, over about 10 visits to see him, I used a scanner that you feed the photos into to scan the pictures. While they weren't amazingly hi-def results, I did get what I wanted, which was a good enough copy that if he ever lost the originals in a flood or fire, I would have at least something.

It requires no computer, as the photos are stored on an SD card, up to 8GB for the one I have. It plugs into my laptop via USB and shows up as an external drive, so copying the files off when done was simple.

Benefits:
1) quick; I scanned a box of my personal photos while sitting on the couch and watching TV
2) easy; if I felt like it, I could scan each picture twice and still feel like I'm saving time. For some photos (my uncle had a couple with small notes written on the back from when he was in the military and was sending them to his wife), I could scan the front, and then scan the back right after.

Downsides:
1) again, the quality wasn't the greatest. I think most pics were 500K in size after scanning. I don't have it with me so I can't tell you the actual resolution. But they were good enough that if I were to print it out at the same size as the originals, you couldn't tell much of a difference
2) no built in organizing, I had to wait till they were all done to deal with that mess

As for the organizational side, my digital photos taken with my phone and digital camera are all named by the date taken, so initially I was stumped as to how to rename these. Searching around, I found someone doing a similar job who took to categorizing them first by the apparent year they were taken, then by subject. So I did something like that, making directories for each decade and then sorting as I thought was right. YMMV of course.

For what its worth, here is the script I'm running:

The location is for:

Address: Alum Creek State Park
Latitude: N 40 11' 30"
Longitude: W 82 58' 23"

Its real easy to script the data to a bunch of pictures at the same time. Don't know if I'll ever need some of it but its there just in case.

2 members found this post helpful.

I bought some transparancies of 80s/90s cinema stars and TV-film scenes recently and during the winter holidays I thought of scanning some of them in. I used to work for a photo agency about 10 years ago and what used to be very important (and probably still is) is the IPTC/XMP-information contained in the image as for example: Which actor can be seen in this picture? Which film/series does it belong to? as well as keywording.

So far, I have been experimenting with "exiftool" as well as this Perl-library and will probably also write a script to put copyright information and "Special Instructions" in:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Image-IPTCInfo/IPTCInfo.pm

I have an Epson Perfection V500 Photo which works with Xsane but uses a proprietary driver. I also acquired an Epson 2400 Photo which can also scan transparancies with a "free software" (as in freedom) driver. The only drawback I can see is that the V500 has FARE support (to remove dust and scratches while scanning) but I couldn't find any option to use this in Linux. There is also "vuescan" from http://hamrick.com/ - but I haven't tried this yet.

As for the database I thought about using "Photo Organizer" - http://po.shaftnet.org/ which runs on PostgreSQL and PHP or maybe this application here: http://alexking.org/project/photos - I also thought of running my own dedicated server (possibly with RAID) in an Intranet environment as well.

I've been using kphotoalbum for the viewer/front end. I use the IPTC/XMP fields in documents I scan as well. My goal is to keep/store as much information as possible. I looked back at old pictures and I don't know how old I was or where they were taken or who the other people are. So I tried to make it a goal to add as much in mine as I can, I'm using the GPS coordinates for location since location names and addresses can change.

I have 'GIMP 2.6 for Photographers - Image Editing With Open Source Software [Goelker, Klaus 2011]' as a pdf. It's 25MB, but if you want it, send me a PM with an e-mail address and I'll get it to you.

Also, I know this is an 'all-in-one' type of hardware, but the scanner part of it is really, really *fast* (at least at 300dpi). I just tested it with an old pic and saved it in png, jpg and tif, each at 300dpi and 600dpi.

At 600 dpi it took about 10 seconds to scan the pic. At 300 it took about 4. The tif pic saved at 130MB, the jpg and png saved at 3.4 and 4.2 respectively. The scanner starts up and starts scanning almost instantly from 'rest' mode (whatever it's called where it's not using hardly any electricity just sitting there waiting for a command to start to do something).

It's an Brother_HL-2280DW. Got the drivers from their website. Took a little fiddling but oonce installed, it works a dream (to me at least). I use skanlite, but it works just as well with Xsane and probably the GIMP too.