Weekly Discussion: 15 April 2024 (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

I've started a website to try to document my family history from my great grandparents on down. So far it's mostly been digitizing obituaries and VHS tapes, and putting them in a wiki style format. I haven't figured out the best way to scan thousands of pictures. Overall, it's been fun so far and I'm learning a lot about web hosting and video hosting.

Most of my hobbies so far have just been time-wasters. It's nice to be involved with something that'll (hopefully) be around after I'm gone.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

That's a cool project. :)

For scanning, have you tried an MFC printer/scanner with a scan bed? I've only used it on documents, but it might work on photos as well. Theoretically, you could just place a stack on the feeder and scan them all at once.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Yes, my scanner works fine for the few pictures I've done so far. The only problem is that there are tons more to do. Plus some of them have been in photo albums for decades and I'm afraid to peel the plastic page cover off because it could peel a layer off the photo - I've already had it happen. And my scanner is a cheap all-in-one model designed for documents, so when it feeds anything in, they curve around a pretty narrow roller, which could damage some older photos.

I'll probably send the albums off to a pro, since they have large format scanners. They can just scan a whole page at once and crop out the photos individually, that way they don't have to worry about damaging anything.

I'm not too worried about the money, the toughest part is figuring out how to organize and catalog all these pictures of mostly people I don't know. AI would be a huge help with organizing the images, but I can see a lot of people having a problem with it.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

You could use AI to do the initial tagging and cache the results in a SQLite database or something. That way everything remains pretty static while also saving you time.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I've already got a setup for tagging my own images, working on getting it GPU accelerated. But my family (us being people of color) are really adverse to anything involving AI, even if it's local and right here on my own computer. No worries, though, I can make do without.