Saving the Old Technology

Over Christmas I tried to start scanning the negatives of photos that I had taken as the kids were growing up to get them into the digital world. I failed.

I wanted to save them as 16 bits TIFFs so that I could get the maximum details from them, but the scanner and associated software just did not work correctly and only ever saved the first image of a strip of 4.

I had a second go at it today and failed again. I RTFM'd, which just assumed that everything was operator error, and didn't cover anything like the problem that I had. I Googled it and having waded through many posts about the maufacturers never having fixed the problem, even though it had been there for many years, I finally found a reply from an employee who gave the instructions on what had to be done, buried at the bottom of a very long post - edit the XML in the config file. This is something that I do as part of my work, so no problem to me, but not something that many users would want to do.

While editing the XML I also stopped another annoyance and made it remember that I wanted to preview the scans before proceeding with the 20 minute process of it scanning the negatives.