iPhoto Ate My Hard Drive

We scanned a very large number of photos and slides for a client, she was kind enough to say she was happy with the results which she was going to load into iPhoto on her sleek new MacBook Air.
Having done that she wasn’t so happy. She complained that having loaded all the digital images she had no hard drive capacity left. Why?
I did some digging and found out how iPhoto treats the photo loading process. When you Import photos iPhoto actually copies each image from the source file into its own library, our client had taken a two step process. First, she’d copied all our files from the DVDs we supplied onto her hard drive. Second, she then imported into iPhoto. All went well and naturally she assumed the “source” files were those she was seeing in iPhoto. But the whole process had eaten twice as much disk space as necessary.
Solution - simply delete the copes of the photo scans we’d done. Disk usage back to a sensible level.

35mm Slide Scanner Amnesty

Today we launch a scheme to enable people to turn their cheap, nasty little slide scanners into valuable credit to use against professional scanning. We’re doing this to show people that the rotten results often delivered by these devices (blotchy shadows, bleached out highlights, artefacts, poor quality) is not representative of what a top flight scanner such as our Nikon’s can deliver.
The Amnesty allows a full credit (purchase price incl. VAT, postage) for USB 35mm scanners against scanning services for 35mm slide, 35mm negatives or prints. Details on this page - 35mm Slide Scanner Amnesty.

Unanswered Email?

I’d like to apologise to everyone who sent us an email in the last few months and didn’t get a reply. It seems that several hundred messages got stuck somewhere between our website and our mailboxes here. I’m now assured by our ISP that everything is OK, and I’ve gone through the backlog to apologise.
Please get back in touch via our contact page is there’s anything outstanding.

Backsides?

We’re a photo scanning service, sure, but did we go for the right name?
In the main we scan photos, most of them taken within the last few years. Increasingly we’re scanning photos that have historic interest. This is mainly relevant to the family owning the photos but we hope that as the Historypin service takes off we’ll be scanning photos with wider historic significance.
It’s noticeable that in so many cases the back of the photo is at least as interesting as the image on the front. Yesterday we scanned a collection including a 1927 photo taken at Southend airfield. It’s of an ancient bi-plane; the pilot is wearing a leather flying helmet, he has two passengers - one is bare headed the other is wearing an ordinary hat. They’re all waving at the cameraman. Ready for take off into grey Essex skies, the flight of a life time.
On the back are some notes. This was the plane in which an aunt took her first flight. The name of the pilot was there and indeed it was signed by him. Was this aunt’s first and last flight? Who was the Captain, a jobbing commercial pilot or a retired World War 1 air ace?
We can scan both sides. Maybe we should call ourselves the bothsides photo scanning service.

Historypin - Sunday Times

Interesting story today in the Sunday Times magazine, p22, by John-Paul Flintoff titled ”Our Ghosts in the Machine”. He covers several approaches to putting historic images on the internet.
Scanning through the article you’ll notice it covers Historypin in some depth, although sadly he doesn’t mention that we’re the official photo scanning partner for the service. The article looks at other ways of adding a historic dimension to modern images and locations. On the opening two pages you can see a great spread of images taken from Historypin which will inspire many people to look at the main site, as of this morning showing 10,966 photos.
Inspired, you might want to join in, I hope you do. If you don’t have your old photos available in a digital form contact us.

How Good is a Scan?

As a photo scanning service it’s hard to explain to people how good a scan is prior to them getting it. It’s also tough to find some measure potential clients are familiar with to express the quality, say, of a 35mm scan.
On Friday I came across the Panasonic stand at the Goodwood Festival of Speed where they were promoting their new Lumix range of top quality digital cameras. Looking in the detailed specification it gave the image dimensions in a measurement that meant something to me. Their top of the range camera delivers 4000 dpi.
They quote the camera as being 12.1 megapixels - so there it is, 1Scan photo scanning at 4000 dpi is equivalent to a 12.1 megapixel digital SLR.

Spy Photos

Big news on TV last night and in the papers this morning, the arrest of ten people in the USA on spy charges plus all the cloak and dagger world of passwords, message drops and being undercover. Yes, the photos too.
One of the people accused, according to The Times, sent messages back to Moscow inside otherwise open source images available on the internet. So today I’m sure someone will ask me how. The answer is complex and involves an awful lot of maths but it is perfectly possible. This field of mathematics is called steganography and I’m sure there are web sites somewhere that explain how it all works. We looked at it some years ago as a way of embedding data inside an image to enable copyright owners to prove, without doubt, that any given image was “theirs”. We dropped it as there were more manageable ways of achieving the same end.
If you’re tempted to add data to an image (but not encrypted to spy standards) just get to grips with metadata, you can easily add date, place, subject data and even a few personal comments.