Recently I’ve been on a tear to scan my old paper photos before they turn into dust.  My first attempt has been reasonably successful.  I hired a lady to scan photos for me and at the end of the day, it came out to about $0.36 per photo.  I paid the lady $10 per hour. 

The process was as follows:

  1. She would scan the 3 photos at a time into Photoshop in the configuration below.  The important piece here is to leave space both between the photos and the edges of the scanner and between the photos themselves.  Why?  Because the next step would not work without it.

  2. Then she would apply Photoshop’s Crop and Straighten Photos feature, which would split the photos into 3 separate images. 
  3. The lady would rotate each individual photo properly.
  4. She would then save these 3 images separately.

After she left, I was left thinking that several things could be improved upon:

  1. For instance, maybe Photoshop could somehow be automated to automatically apply the Crop and Straighten Photos feature and perhaps save the file. 
  2. A better scanner would mean faster processing and cheaper rate per photo. 
  3. At the end she processed a total of 110 photos.  This is not bad, but I have 1500 photos at least. 

To automate Photoshop I headed to the Adobe forums.  I posted my problem there and 15 minutes later or so I had my answer.  It turns out Photoshop CS4 not only supports scripting, it has a full blown Integrated Development Environment with an editor, debugger, etc… that ships with it.   Some chap wrote me a script that would take a file, apply to it the Crop and Straighten Photos feature and would save the 3 resulting photos as separate files.  This worked like a charm.

Once the photos were separated, I needed to find a way to bulk rotate them into the right position.  I set the view in the folder to Thumbnail, selected all the photos that needed to rotated clockwise, right-clicked and selected ‘Rotate Clockwise’.  Ditto for counter clockwise. 

Armed with the new process, I had a friend loan me a faster scanner (just your average HP all-in-one device).  I called the lady back, and this time, all she had to do was just scan 3 photos at a time and save the resulting file.

After she left, I ran the script on the folder where she saved all the images, then rotated them properly – this took a total of about 3 minutes.

I calculated the monetary damage and it was really really good - $0.19 per photo - cheaper than any commercial service out there.