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I need to archive loads of old photos, and the scanner software that comes with my HP 6310 is a hassle to use. Are there some other apps out there that would be friendlier to use? I am mostly interested in the highest throughput for the least effort.

  • Scanning old personal photos for archival.
  • No OCR needed.
  • No cropping, smoothing, or other effects required -- just a blind scan at a specific resolution..
  • Open-source stuff, or at least low cost, would be nice.
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4 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

VueScan provides a 1-window scanning interface. Try it out. It is often considered the gold standard for scanning software.

VueScan

However, if you want cheap, or no cost, though not open-source, give the Windows Image Acquisition stuff a shot. Just double-click your scanner icon that appears in "My Computer".

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... or open your image processing software of choice, look in the menu for something like 'select source', choose WIA instead of HP, then hit scan and bid farewell to the HP scanner interface. – Molly7244 Sep 2 '09 at 16:53
up vote 2 down vote

What part of the scanning software is problematic? If the scan dialog itself is OK, then the TWAIN-based batch scanning functionality of IrfanView may be useful: basically you specify a base name, and it will keep popping up the TWAIN dialog and save the images to that name with an autoincreasing index.

This is a very efficient way to do lots of scanning, but does of course nothing to alleviate a bad user interface.

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Ok, I confess. This is for my mother, and she seems to think it's confusing. I have not directly used this software, and in my experience it's not too hard to find the basic scan and save functionality in vendor software. Still, I wanted to hear some personal preferences for scanning apps. – Chris Farmer Sep 2 '09 at 15:51
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If it's for your mom I seriously recommend WIA (Windows Image Acquisition). It practically handholds her all the way through to even giving her an option to open the folder containing the scanned image. – caliban Sep 2 '09 at 15:54
up vote 2 down vote

I'm a huge fan of Paint.NET, and it can receive images from a scanner.

http://www.getpaint.net/

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"and it can receive images from a scanner." is that so? :) well, many programs can receive images from scanners, but that's not the question. Chris is looking for an alternative scanner interface, Scoopdrems got that right, WIA is already in place, easy to use and gets the job done. – Molly7244 Sep 2 '09 at 16:49
"I award you no points, and my God have mercy on your soul." "Okay, a simple "wrong" would've done just fine. " -- Billy Madison – user2367 Sep 3 '09 at 18:13
up vote 0 down vote

Warrant : I'm not sure if it answers your question, as I'm not fully sure if it really does the job, or only calls the scanning program you want to avoid.

Picasa has an option to import photos from scanning. It would be rather easy to use for someone who would be confused by a more complicated software, and would probably ease the ordering and classifying of all these scans, afterwards.

Picasa help section about importing.

Again, I'm not sure how Picasa does the job, I don't have a scanner here to give it a try. maybe someone can give more details about it.

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