Picasa Tip: Scanning Old Photos

Do you have a scanner and some old photos you want to scan? Have you started to read the manual and given up on figuring it out? I have good news for you! You don’t have to figure out the software that came with the scanner, because Picasa can handle it all for you, it’s just like importing from your camera but, instead of camera, you import from the scanner.

**News Flash**
Google Announces
Picasa for the Macintosh!

ok – back to the topic …

I was visiting my Mom’s and we started looking at old pictures. Between the two of us we could identify most of them and I wanted to preserve them. She has one of those all-in-one printer-copier-scanners. So, here’s what I did:

Make sure everything is connected and turned on!
Put the photo on the glass of the scanner – face down
In Picasa, click ‘Import’
Click the arrow for the drop down list of devices. You should see your scanner listed … select it
Now you will see a screen that depends on your scanner. There should be an option to ‘Preview’. Click that.
You should now see your picture, there may be some settings you want to change here, but if it looks OK then
Click the button to Scan
When it’s done scanning, you’re back at the standard Picasa Import screen. Click Import all.
Select a folder to put it in. I made a folder called ‘Old Photos’ for the first one, then, for each subsequent scanned photo, I selected that existing folder from the drop-down list.

I scanned 53 old photos in this manner. It took me somewhat over an hour. Then I just took another few seconds to use Batch Edit and do an ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ and ‘Sharpen’ to all 53 at once. I think the results are great. What do you think?

This is a photo from circa 1962 – me at 10 years old in Alaska. It looks better than the original!

GOT Class Members can also view related videos:

Importing from Camera
Sharpen and Batch Edit
Basic Editing Features
Retouching

Tags: importing photos, Picasa, scanning photos

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 Organizing, Picasa, Videos

3 Comments to Picasa Tip: Scanning Old Photos

Gerald LeRoy says:

January 7, 2009 at 10:23 am

Chris, we just got a big box of old pictures out last evening and started sorting them! Watch our blog and we’ll soon have a few of them on display!

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Wayne James says:

February 3, 2009 at 6:41 pm

We had a cousins party at one of their homes. The cousins came from all over the south. The point of a cousins party is as we were growing up and we visited each other, we took their pictures and they took ours and then went home. So if you had a big family and they were always taking out the “Kodak” there are probably some very nice shots of you own family that never got to your house. I prefer Photodex over Picasa, it too and most programs that are Twain compatible will make a scan. Keep up the good work, we hope to be full time soon when whe sell our Computer Store 23 years is enough!

One more comment I have found the best way to scan is to sort the photos on size of the photo. That way you won’t have to preview scan ever photo and it won’t leave extra white platen that takes up space, yeah I know you can trim them but it takes a long time to trim them up.

Keep up the good work!

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Geeks on Tour » Blog Archive » Picasa Tip: Fill-in Preprinted Forms says:

March 10, 2009 at 1:53 pm

[...] forum about scanning a preprinted form. A past Picasa tip explains how you can scan things just using your scanner and Picasa – no scanner software to learn. This member needed to scan a preprinted form and she was [...]

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