Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Seperating photos in a single-image scan with MS Picture It

Jan 3, 2005 1:13PM PST

I am trying to scan several hundred photos to archive. I am using MS Picture It! Photo 2002, v6.0 along with my Epson (Perf. 610) flatbed scanner. What I want to do is place 6 or 8 small photos on the scanner, run a single scan, then seperate each one from the scanned image and save each with it's own file name. With so many to do, I thought this would be easier than to scan each photo individually. However, I can't seem to find any way to do the seperation process in the program helps.

My computer is a Dell Dim.4600C P4, running Win XP Home SP 2. The "Picture It" program came with the machine. I'm sure there are better programs that would do the job I want easier.

Any help appreciated,

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Seperating photos in a single-image scan with MS Picture It
Jan 26, 2005 12:54PM PST

There is a way to do it the way you want by placing numerous pictures in the scanner and scanning one large picture but you could also place all the pics on the scanner and still scan one at a time until all pics are done. If you make one big scan of all pics at once you'll need to save the image to be used again and again. By this I mean once you have saved the big pic and opened it PictureIt then you should be able to crop the big pic to one of the smaller pics and save that new pic with a unique file name. Then you would have to reopen the big pic and recrop another small pic from it. Your pic quality may suffer doing it that way.
I place 5 pics on my scanner and scan them individually. After placing the scan box around a pic and scanning it I just move the box to the next pic and scan again. Yes, its time consuming (50 minutes for 73 pics) but it got the job done. My Espon scanner came packaged with a good Twain driver that allows me to add a prefix to file names, then it automatically numbers the files starting with whatever number I choose and allows me to scan as many individual pics as I want before saving them all at once. The only limitation is RAM and 512MB does the trick.

- Collapse -
This might work
Feb 7, 2005 10:21AM PST

I don't use Picture Perfect, I use Photoshop. However, it makes sense to fill your scanner bed when scanning a large quanitity of photos - and I would think most photo scanning software would be able to accommodate it.

This is how I handle it in Photoshop. Scan the entire bed. Then using the select tool (in Photoshop it is a dotted permiter box - not the cropping too) select the photo you want to copy first by making a box around it. Use the copy command, then tell it to make a new file - in Photoshop the new file will be the exact size of whatever you have in your clipboard. Make the new file and paste the image into it. Do this for each image you scanned until you get to the last image - then crop it to the last image with the cropping tool. This definitely saves time when scanning large quantities of photos.

I hope this technique works in Picture It.

- Collapse -
IrfanView
Feb 11, 2005 2:32PM PST

In IrfanView you can scan in a group of pictures at one time. Then just "lasso" any rectangular portion to crop and save it in any of over a dozen formats.

If you just do all your scans first and save each, then you can open each of the scans and do as many individual crops as you want out of that one scan.