The scanner is really designed for documents. I scanned 27,000 pages from my wife’s research folders – mostly photocopies of journal articles – and saved them as PDF files. I then OCR’d them using Abbey Fine Reader so all the text in those PDF files became recognizable as text. So now she can use Agent Ransack (wonderful free program) to search all her research notes for any key words she wants in a few seconds. All her research folders, created over 20 years, went into the dumpster. That freed up a complete bookcase.

Google and Amazon both offer amazing cloud storage options. Google lets you store an unlimited number of photographs in the cloud, provided they are less the 2048 pixels wide. Even better, you can search your photos by person, landmark, or object. If I want to see every photo I took of my wife, I just have to click her image and they all come up. If I type in “rainbow”, I see all my photos of rainbows.

Amazon allows unlimited photo storage and 5gb(?) of data storage for Prime members. I blew their data storage limit so I pay a bit extra for that.

Digitize and toss, or sell on eBay if the originals have potential value.

Surellin Says:
August 20th, 2015 at 3:49 pm “If you look very carefully at the gentleman getting his shoes polished in the lower left, it has a resemblace to Doctor Who. Or so it is alleged.”

Hmm.

charles Says:
August 20th, 2015 at 6:01 pm “Yes, and that large white spot in the bottom center is from when the Tardis arrived and left during the film being exposed.

“Lucky for us, there are no known Daleks in the photo.”

FIFY, charles.

Look in the building in the center of the photo, at the third window down in the center of the building.

I’m pretty sure that is, indeed, a Dalek, peering through the glass.

Not all of course. For every three or four Benjamin Butlers or David Hunters, there are one or two Robert E. Lees or US Grants.

Then, in contrast, look at those cityscapes and street scenes of bourgeois America from the 1890’s through the 1920’s.

What surprised me most was how people in the post Victorian, early decades of the 20th century, presented themselves when they went out in public. Didn’t seem to matter what economic class they might have been.

Well, try to look.

I had in mind to link to the folder from which this linked image https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Michigan_%26_Griswold_circa_1920.jpg originally came.

However, the original U of M link informs us that the collection of those amazing [large format] images has been “retired” and turned over to the Detroit Public library; which provides neither the format nor the indexing. Glad I downloaded them while I had the chance a few years back.

Now, I guess there are plenty of historic photos from the Bowery, or Five points where folks are slouching, shabby, and sullen, but that did not seem to be the demeanor of most Americans casually going about their business during the era I saw captured.

Makes you wonder if our view of life isn’t just a bit jaundiced by what we are daily bombarded with (being a little facetious here).

“I don’t know, maybe this is widely known, but I’ll mention it anyway. The Library of Congress has a large collection of photographs. Many of them have been scanned, and can be seen at the Library’s web site.”

I have always found the early 3 plate color photographs from Czarist Russia to be among the most interesting.

You can search or browse a single collection — e.g. “daguerreotypes” — or you can search all the collections at once. The Library can make reproductions, but I’ve forgotten what they charge, and some photos have copyright restrictions.

Here’s a link to the daguerreotype collection http://tinyurl.com/pbkq28l

http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/wallpaper/photography/photos/milestones-photography/niepce-first-photo/