I have about 16,000 photographs that I want to scan and make a digital database containing the photograph, names of all those in the photo, the location, the event and the date. Does anyone have any advice on how to create this database and what type of scanner to purchase? Thank you, Jerry Lawrence

-- Jerry Lawrence (jerrylawrence@mindspring.com), March 09, 2000

Answers

I was in the situation two years ago, some 20,000 images needing to be scanned and put in a database. I did one thing right, bought Image AXS Pro for my database, very user friendly, you can batch process keywords, locations etc, quick entry. The one mistake I made was buying a transparency scanner without batch feeding capabilities, a very expensive proposition two years ago. I literally have to feed in a slide every two minutes although I can still work on other jobs. If I were to do it again I would make sure that a feeder with a capacity of 50 slides or so was available. I know some of the Nikons have this feature, I expect others. I would probably be finished by now, as it is I stand at my 4,000 most useful images in a database and still have much work to do. Hope this helps.

-- Kevin Oke (okephoto@gulfislands.com), March 11, 2000.