How to Simplify Photo and Album Scanning
Cropping is the most time-consuming part of scanning photos. This post shows you how to automate cropping, in order to speed things up.
When you scan photos or an album with a scanner or digital camera, the scans will look like this:
Some scanners can automatically crop the scans, but for most scanners — and all digital cameras — you’ll perform this repetitive and time-consuming chore manually. Insufferable if you have hundreds of photos.
How Not to Crop
On Mac, the default apps to crop photos are Photos and Preview — but as we’ll see below, neither is great when you have to crop a boatload of photos.
In Photos, you would open a photo, click Edit, select Crop, drag the cropping guides to enclose the required area, straighten the photo if needed, and click Done. Then repeat with the next scan.
However, if your scan contains multiple photos, there’s a problem: When you crop and save the first photo, it’ll replace the original scan — so you can’t crop the other photos. Bummer!
In Preview, you would open a photo, drag the cropping rectangle around the required area, and save it as a new photo. You’ll still have the original scan, so you can also crop the other photos. However, if any of photos needs straightening (e.g. top left), Preview can’t do it.
How to Crop
Scan one or multiple photos at a time and save the scan in a folder on your desktop. Once you’re done scanning, turn to cropping. If you have Photoshop, open it. Otherwise download SnipTag from the App Store (for Mac only).
With Photoshop
Open a scan, then in the top menu click File, Automate, Crop and Straighten. All the photos in the scan are cropped (and straightened, if required). Review, save, then repeat with the next scan.
With SnipTag
Open SnipTag. Drag and drop all the scans from your desktop folder into the app’s left pane. All are cropped — straightened, if necessary — and saved in the app’s right pane.
Extra! How to Add Metadata
Metadata is an integral part of digital photos. Digital cameras automatically stamp camera make and model, aperture, focal length, shutter speed, image format, date & time taken, location etc. in every photo. You can also add extra details e.g. description, keywords etc. with metadata editor programs. This not only preserves all the important details about the photos; it also makes the photos searchable on all computers and in most photo programs.
One big problem with scanned photos is that EXIF Date Time Original shows when it was scanned, not when it was actually taken. So if you scan a 1950s photo in 2021, it’ll have a 2021 date. As a result, no photo program will be able to display it in the correct chronological place. As such, it is important to edit and add metadata in scans. At the very minimum, correct the date. If you don’t know the exact date, add only the year. It’s also a good idea to add other metadata, e.g. titles, descriptions, locations, keywords etc.
With Photoshop: In the File menu, click File Info and add the details. In Photoshop you can only do this for one photo at a time but other Adobe products e.g. Bridge allow batch editing.
With SnipTag: Switch to Tag mode, select one or multiple photos, click the Captions button, and add the details. SnipTag adds these to metadata, and you can also imprint the Date, location and description below the photos when exporting them to another program.
Extra!! How to Improve Cropping Accuracy
· Spacing between photos: If scanning multiple photos per scan, keep about 1 cm (1/2 inch) gap between the photos. If they are too close, edge detection and cropping won’t be accurate.
· Margin around photos: Keep the photos 1 cm inside the scan’s edges, such that a bit of the background is visible all around the photos:
Hopefully, this workflow will save you many hour of tedious work. Check it out, and post a comment if you have any questions or difficulty.
