Divide By Zero - a blog by Kamran Ayub

Just today I was tasked with the job to scan in about 50 pictures so that we could store them online for our family members to see and for others to print out and add to my great grandma’s birthday photo album.

I thought it would take forever but in just one hour I was able to scan all of them in, edit them all for better picture, and upload them to a web album that my family could see.

What You Will Need

• Photoshop CS or above
• Scanner or printer with scanner
• Google Picasa2 or equivalent photo editor/organizer
• Google Picasa account
• A lot of RAM

1. Scan in Photos

Here is where you can be creative. The idea is to scan in a batch of photos, as much as your scanner can fit, and keep doing it until you don’t have any left.

With Photoshop, this is real easy.

Click File –> Import –> Name of your scanner/printer

This should launch ScanGear CS. Here’s why ScanGear CS is amazing. It has a super quick preview feature to see what’s being scanned, it lets you crop the image to your liking, and it can scan with many additional features like DPI and photo enhancement.

For options I have everything set to “OFF� and “None� because I’d rather edit it directly. I use a 300dpi setting for friendly and sharp printing.

Set up the photos in the scanner and press Preview in ScanGear. You should see your photos show up. Crop it so that you get all the photos and click Scan.

Keep using Preview and Scan until you’ve scanned in all your photos into Photoshop. Depending on how much RAM you have, you may only get through 3-4 batches before your computer slows down. I have 2GB of RAM so I scanned in everything just fine.

2. Slice and Dice

Here’s where some magic happens. We will use the Slices tool to split each image into their separate photos.

Select the Slice tool, then drag a box around each photo. You may have slightly tilted photos… if that’s the case, you can use the Select tool and then transform it to be straighter. I didn’t care so I just sliced so that it cropped out any slanted edges.

Once you’ve done that, go to File –> Save for Web

It might warn you about slow response, ignore it. In the Save for Web dialog, use the Slice Select tool to double-click each slice and give it a descriptive name. These will be your filenames.

Now hold the Shift key and select each picture slice. Make sure you’re exporting using JPEG and 100% quality.

Click Save and in the Save dialog make sure “All selected slices� is chosen, not “All Slices.�

Pick a folder to save them in and voila, you’re done.

Now do the same thing to each of the other Photoshop documents.

3. Organize and Upload

As far as we’re concerned, we’re done. However, chances are you want to organize these photos and upload them to the web. I use Picasa because I like its easy-to-use interface and it’s fairly evolved feature-set. I also chose Picasa Web Albums because they have 1GB of space and allow me to upload the original sizes. For reference, my 66 pictures only take up 31MB of space on the Picasa web album.

Start up Picasa and organize your photos. Add captions, rotate them, fix their color (the “I’m Feeling Lucky� option usually is all you need), fix Red Eye, etc. Then just select all the photos you want to upload and choose “Web Album� at the bottom.

4. Alternatives

If you don’t own Photoshop but still want to streamline your editing, try The GIMP editor. It’s free and duplicates many of the functions Photoshop offers. What you may not get is a nice scanning software like ScanGear CS. It’s fast which is more than you can say about software like HP or scanner manufacturer software.

All I’m doing is batch scanning photos and slicing them to make them easier to scan and upload.