cfoley said:
Oogiem, your advice for the photos is top notch but it is in conflict with my principals for an overarching project: to have fewer possessions to look after and to buy fewer luxuries. I honestly don't know how to proceed because your advice on future uses of the scans is sound. However, it means buying an expensive scanner, probably buying hard drives for the larger files, and curating a separate set of jpegs to use and share.
Well the other way of looking at it is that a high quality scanner is a tool to get you where you need to be. Especially if you are going to destroy the pictures then you really MUST do as high a resolution scan as you can possibly manage even if it's stretching your resources now. I tried to go cheap on the initial set of scans I did for my own stuff, but kept the slides anyway, and now I'm glad I did. The files I did initially are crap and I need to go back and scan them all again properly. Scans I did after reading that book and really looking at the expected increase in storage capacity of hard drives vs how long it will take me to do the scanning means that the scans I did later are still acceptable for archival needs.
It's pretty easy to set up a macro in Photoshop to do the downsampling for a jpg version for access/general use.
I'm using Lightroom for my cataloging/curating of pictures. Complex program but very powerful. One warning, think about the taxonomy of your tags before you start tagging pictures, changing them later is possible but difficult and you really need to figure out how to do the tags so they are useful over the long term. I'd suggest doing a small subset of typical pictures, say 1000 or so and play with tagging and workflow before committing to the full project.
Also, document all your procedures and revisions of SW used, scanner settings etc. Especially if the project will take years (as mine is doing) so that each time you pick it up again you have a way to get back to what worked last time easily. And once you have a working workflow don't change the software used without a really good reason. Newer versions often break perfectly good workflows and then you have to add the project of get a new scanning workflow to your tasks.