Batch / auto straighten & crop scans?

[hhost05]

I know this question has been asked before. But I can't find a satisfactory solution to cropping individual photos from a scanned image (which usually consists of 2-4 prints).


I know the easiest way is to automate this with photoshop's crop & straighten function. But its accuracy leaves a lot to be desired (i.e. sometimes crops a bit too much, other times leaves a tiny white border. And it is almost uniformly bad at leveling slightly askew photos). I also tried a bunch of standalone software, such as scan tailor and paper scan, but they were worse than Photoshop in my opinion.


I saw some of the old scripts @Stephen Marsh created, but when I run them on my Applee Silicon Mac, they just crash. 

Here's an example of what my original scanned file looks like. It'd be best if I can automate this entire process, as I'm looking more than 1000 old family photos

[LAMY2017]

hhost, as long as we're asking for a miracle solution, double-sided scanning would be great. One of the difficult parts of scanning larger numbers of prints is turning the prints over to find ID, then naming the file (people)_yymmdd.jpg.

4 prints/scan = 250 passes, ignoring the crop & straighten/save as separate files.

In my experience, I minimized that mess by aligning the prints on the scanner glass as carefully as I could (at the cost of taking even more time).I saved the "contact-sheet file to go back to manually rotate and crop the files with which I had trouble.

Maybe look into buying or renting a dedicated photo scanner? [old name brand] digital film scanners on Amazon, $405US and up are possibilities. Skewing can occur when using motorized feeders [automatic document feeder], but it could be helpful.

For our sakes, maybe someone else in the community has a better solution.

[Conrad_C]

Photoshop Crop & Straighten, written many years ago, is relatively simple and very picky about a clear difference between the background and the items on the scanner. It can easily be confused by a non-uniform (textured, dirty…) background, photos packed together too closely on the scanner, ambiguous edges (torn edges, irregular borders), etc. It seems to work best if the original scans were done in a way optimized for the quirks of Corp & Straighten.

I have been using VueScan software for many years. Mostly with a film scanner, but more recently with family photo prints. Its Multi Crop feature can detect multiple frames in a filmstrip scanned on a flatbed scanner, or detect multiple prints scanned on a flatbed. For that last one, I seem to have better luck with VueScan Auto Crop + Multi Crop than with Photoshop Crop & Straighten. One reason I prefer Multi Crop is that it proposes multiple detected crop borders in the scan preview, then you can adjust the proposed crop borders in that preview, so that when you click the Scan button, it turns this into multiple final scan files exactly the way you told it to crop. The demo below shows how this works.

VueScan is not free and people balk at that, but for me personally, I chose their One-Time Payment option many years ago, and it paid for itself many times over because I do a lot of scanning and its Professional Edition scanning features are very deep — usually much better than the software that comes with a scanner. 

LAMY2017 asked about double-sided scanning. I was surprised to find out that is now a thing. Keith Cooper at Northlight Images has been writing about digital photography, scanning, and printing for many years, and a few months ago he did a rather detailed review of the Epson FF-680W, which can scan both sides of a print. It’s designed for bulk scanning. His review is linked below, and on that page you can also watch his YouTube video review of that scanner.

Epson FF-680W print scanner
Quickly scan both sides up to A4/letter

[LAMY2017]

I appreciate the info on this scanner, Conrad.

The US Epson website shows two products -- $39.99 certified renew, $599.99, also available from seven other resellers (yes, price is fixed). I'm intrigued.

[hhost05]

Curious if you have any personal experience with the FF-680W?

At first, I thought it was crazy to get yet another scanner when my Epson V700 is working perfectly. But I'm so incensed by this issue I'm thinking of just getting the 680W. But I heard it has bad IQ and much more concerningly, damages your photos.  

[LAMY2017]

Yes, it is a bit pricey for a photo-only scanner. I have not used it but I have need to scan hundreds of photos (after I take them out of their "magnetic" photo albums, a literally sticky issue). I have $hundreds tied up in orphaned scanners that won't run on updated operating systems, so price is a consideration. It doesn't help with with the 10,000 slides in another project.

As far as damage, high-speed feeding of photos -- old, curved, bent, thick/Poloroids -- certainly increase the odds of damaging them. The best archive is a print; magnetic media aren't really as trustworthy as a print, imo.

[Conrad_C]

I don’t have personal experience with the FF-680W. Keith’s review linked above says the image quality isn’t the best, that the scanner is great if you just need to get a lot of scans done that are good enough for quick family sharing. He says if he wants to scan to create a source for high-quality correction, retouching, and enlargement, he’ll re-scan that original on his Epson flatbed scanner.

His review has some comments about its bulk feeding, pointing out features such as its “Slow Mode” in case there are problems, and also says

For delicate prints, there is a transparent carrier ‘wallet’ to put pictures in. Use this for damaged prints where the feed mechanism may have issues or potentially damage your print.

But yeah, I don’t totally trust automatic document feeders too, based on my experience with common office copiers/scanners.

Also, I forgot to mention something earlier about VueScan, in case you’re considering it. Although its main purpose is running scanners, you can also load images into it. So if you already have a scanned image that totally failed with Photoshop Crop & Straighten and you want to see if VueScan can do better, you don’t have to re-scan it. Load the scanned image you already have into VueScan and have it process that file. Below is what it looked like after I loaded into VueScan the screen shot you originally posted, and enabled Multi-Crop. VueScan is already ready to split them up into multiple files. At this point I had not adjusted any of the proposed crops. VueScan seems to mistakenly think that some image groups are the same crop, so I would have to go in there and set up a separate crop for each one, but that won’t take long to fix.

It actually didn’t like the screen shot file as downloaded, I think because it was a PNG. But when I re-saved it as JPEG, it worked fine. I think this is because VueScan expects a file format that would come out of a common scanner, such as JPEG or TIFF.