I am scanning a bunch of photos from albums on a flatbed scanner.
My scanner software (epson scan) which came with my hardware (Epson
perfection 3200 photo) can do something similar. For example, when I
scan a page from a photo album, I can do it in either full-page or
"thumbnail" mode. Thumbnail mode will do a preview, then try to
locate the individual photos on the scanner, then allow you to scan
each image individually. However, this requires a lot more time,
since it has to preview and then do several separate scans. It is
MUCH faster (30 seconds vs. 3 minutes) to just scan the full page and
save that as a single file than it is to do the preview and individual
scans. Furthermore, the auto-photo-detection feature is not too
accurate, sometimes it can't find the individual photos.
Thus, to save a lot of time, I have choosen to scan the full photo
album page into a single file. But, now, I want to run some software
to quickly load an image, search for all the photos, ask for my input
(optional), and save each photo as a separate file. My ideal answer
to this question would be the name of the software program which can
do this. The software needs to at least have a free demo and should
not cost more than $200. I don't know if Photoshop has this feature.
A non-ideal solution would be to load the image in my favorite image
editor, draw a rectangular seletion box, copy it, paste it into a new
document, save the new document, and repeat for each photo in the
image.
A more ideal solution would be an image editor where I could write a
"plug-in" to do some of this work, or maybe an image editor would have
some of the functionality, but I could link it all together with some
macro or visual basic type thing. Or, I suppose I could try (or find
someone) to add this feature to the GIMP or other open-source image
editor (??). An acceptable answer for this type of solution would
require less than 2 hours of me coding (macro, scripting, etc).
I use windows, but could get access to linux if you found something
there. I don't have a mac, but would be curious if this software
existed for a mac.
I already own/use: MS digital image suite and IrFanView. |
