Scanning photos doesn’t have to be an organisational nightmare. Jane Hoskyn explains how to digitise and sort whole albums of photos for free
You might assume that turning your dusty old photo prints into digital photos is a right palaver. And, until recently, you’d have been right. You had to fork out for an expensive flatbed scanner, then spend days, weeks and months using the infernal thing to churn out massive files with meaningless names like ‘1931304_47829780167_8088_n.TIFF’ – not the most charming title for an image of your wedding day.
But things have changed fast, thanks to powerful scanning and tagging tools that make this once-Herculean task quick and easy. Here, we reveal the best new ways to capture entire albums of prints, then organise them using tags so your favourite scanned photos are even easier to find than when they were in albums on your bookshelf - and it won’t cost you a penny.
Scan your prints
Google’s new PhotoScan app (Android and iOS, www.google.com/photos/scan) turns your phone or tablet into a scanner for digitising old photos. It’s specially designed to reduce glare, so it’s great for scanning photos without having to remove them from glass frames or albums.
The downside is it’s a bit tricky to get the hang of. You have to move your device’s camera slowly over the photo and “join” four dots in a smooth, level action. That’s easier said than done, especially if your hands aren’t as steady as they once were. But it’s still easier than fiddling with a flatbed scanner, and the results are very impressive, especially if you shoot in good natural light and take your time.
PhotoScan integrates with Google Photos (https://photos.google.com), so you can scan, edit and save unlimited scans without having to pay for storage.
If you have a lot of albums or photos to digitise – or simply don’t want to risk ruining your photos by peeling them off self-adhesive pages – then try Photomyne Album Scanner (Android and iOS, www.photomyne.com), which lets you scan multiple photos in one go. Unfortunately, the free version now limits the number of photos you can scan. The full version costs just under a fiver, but could be well worth it depending on how your physical photos are stored.
Rename your scanned photos
Once you’ve scanned a batch of photos, or if you have a folder full of scans waiting to be organised, you can edit their filenames using the free XnView (www.xnview.com). It’s small (10.63MB), fast and very easy to use – you don’t even have to import your photos. Just open the program, then click a folder to instantly see all the photos it contains.
To rename a single photo, right-click it, click Rename (or press F2), enter a new name, then press Enter. To rename multiple photos using a numbered sequence, select the photos, press F2 and then choose a filename that describes the whole batch. To help with future searches try to include as much information as possible in the name – for example, 2010-NYC-Nikon_f5-####. You can also determine the numbering structure by using hashtag (#) symbols. The ‘####’ in the above example will make the numbering start at 0001 and progress sequentially from there.
To get XnView, go to its website, click Download (in the XnView MP panel at the top), then ‘XnView Min. Setup’, and then run the installer using the default options. To get a portable version you can run from a USB stick click ‘XnView Min. Zip’.
Tag scanned photos with the date they were taken
Change the date of your scanned files to when the original photos were taken, instead of when you scanned them. To do this in XnView, select a photo (or photos) as before, click Tools, then Change Timestamp. In the window that opens, click ‘Specific date and time’, select the date in the box, and then change it to the date the photo or batch of photos were actually taken. You can also add a ‘File Date modified’ if you’d like to include the scan date as well. The date format, you’ll be pleased to hear, is UK format (day first).
Embed keyword tags in your photos
Fans of the brilliant free photo program FastStone Image Viewer (www.faststone.org) may wonder why we haven’t mentioned it yet. It lets you rename and re-date your photo files in just the same way as XnView, and is even easier to use. However, XnView has a decisive advantage over FastStone - it lets you add and organise keyword tags, using a powerful IPTC manager.
IPTC (www.snipca.com/23575) is a widely recognised metadata standard. Your IPTC keywords remain embedded in the photo file, whatever program or platform you use to open it. You can view IPTC metadata in Windows File Explorer by right-clicking a photo, clicking the Properties tab, then clicking Details (it calls keywords ‘tags’, just to be contrary).
To add keywords to a photo in XnView, select the photo, click Edit, Metadata, then ‘Edit IPTC data’ (or press Ctrl+I – that’s an upper-case ‘i’). On the Keywords tab, enter your keyword in the text box at the top, then click Add. A keyword can be two words (for example, ‘southampton university’). When you’ve finished editing the list, click Write, then Close.
Get back your Windows Photo Gallery tags
Windows Photo Gallery had its own easy-to-use tagging system, in addition to IPTC keywords and metadata. Microsoft may have abandoned the tool, but you can still use the tags you created with it. The catch is you’ll need to install Adobe Bridge (www.snipca.com/23570), which is free but requires 1GB of hard-drive space.
Bridge isn’t a photo-editing program like Adobe’s better-known (and expensive) tool Photoshop. It’s only for organising photos, and it’s absolutely brilliant at it. It lets you add keywords to multiple photos at once, search for photos using existing keywords (including Windows Photo Gallery tags and IPTC data), add watermarks, and even upload your photos to Adobe Stock to sell to the public.
Installation is a hassle, but worth persevering with if you have a large collection of photos to organise and you’re looking for a Photo Gallery alternative. You will to need to create a free Adobe ID during installation, and install the Creative Cloud program first. After you download and run the Adobe Bridge installer, Creative Cloud installs and opens automatically. Click Home, then ‘Install an application’, and then click the Install button next to ‘Bridge CC (2017)’. Bridge itself is 661.44MB in size.
To use it, you’ll need to keep Creative Cloud on your PC as well. Installation finally over, launch Bridge then navigate to your scanned photo files, then click Keywords to start adding or editing their keyword tags. Use the search box to find photos by keywords and other metadata.
WHY BOTHER TAGGING YOUR PHOTOS?
Keyword tags (‘keywords’ in some programs, ‘tags’ in others) are virtual labels that you can add to digital photo files to help organise them. For example, add the keyword ‘dog’ to all photos with your dog in them, and your dog – or rather photos featuring your dog – will be much easier to find.
Many people don’t bother tagging their photos. After all, digital photos will already have metadata – including date taken and file size – embedded automatically by your camera. But basic metadata won’t help when you’re dealing with scanned photos. The default metadata of a scanned photo records when the photo was scanned – not when it was taken – and this won’t help you locate them in your cluttered hard drive.
Tweak the metadata of your prints as you scan them and they’ll be much easier to search for and organise later on (see the ‘Embed keyword tags in your photos’ tip above).