Do you have a box of 35mm slides you’d like to convert to digital photos? You have two ways you could proceed. You could either buy a scanner that is capable of scanning film (both positives or negatives) or you could farm out the work. GT Recording, HomeDVD and iMemories are 3 such companies which offer slide scanning services. iMemories offers photo, negative and slide scanning.

If you want to buy a scanner you could consider something like the Canon CanoScan 9000F which has attachments that let you scan a few slides or negatives at a time at 4800 dpi. It costs about $200 or less. If you can get your hand on a discontinued Nikon Coolscan professional high-speed slide scanner, then you could use it. As I recall, these scanners could hold 20 slides at a time and would scan each one at about 4000 dpi in about 30 seconds and automatically move through the entire stack.

If you prefer to farm out this work you could drop off your slides at GT Recording in Seattle. They charge scan slides at either 3600 or 7200 dpi. They charge a flat $15 setup fee. They have different price tiers that currently look like this:

• less than 100 slides cost $1.25 each
• 100-499 slides cost $.99 each
• 500-999 slides cost $.89 each
• more than 1000 slides cost $.79 each

iMemories scans at 600 dpi and charges $0.49 per photo, slide or negative

Home DVD offers a range of resolutions at different prices. Refer to the table below for details. They’ll scan both photos and slides.

For photo transfer to DVD, your price is $0.99 per photo for any size up to 12 x 15 inches in size. All slides and photos needing to have additional adjustments to bring out the best image possible will be brought into Adobe Photoshop for repair at no extra charge.  Below is a chart that will help you determine which resolution would best suit your needs:

The per slide/photo charges described above include the price to burn your digitized JPEG images of your 35mm slides or photos onto as many DVD-R discs as necssary. There is a minimum charge of $45.00 per job.

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Do you have boxes of papers that you’d like to scan so you can empty your closet or storage area then easily access them on your Mac laptop when you travel?

Do you have some large blueprints or drawings that don’t fit on your office scanner? Do you want to convert microfilm to be read on your Mac?

In any of these cases, you should check out US Archive and Imaging Services (USArchive). They are an Issaquah-based company that can help you with your scanning, document management and shredding needs while using their standard and large-format, high-speed scanners to scan any documents. They prep your documents first by removing staples, sticky notes and even paperclips, then they turn your documents into searchable PDFs or any other file type you desire. US Archive offers cloud-based and on-premise document access as well as storage solutions.  Once the scanning is finished you have some choices. They will return your documents in the exact order that you gave them to them, or if you’d like they can securely destroy (shred) the documents.

There are several factors that affect the cost of your job, but in general a rough cost would be around 9 cents per page (this including prep, scanning and indexing.) Note, a standard records box holds about 2,200 sheets of paper. I recently had them scan a box of my records and found them to be very responsive and friendly. If you’d like to learn more about US Archive and their services, check out their Frequently Asked Questions web page.  Another interesting note is that US Archive has partnered with AtWork. AtWork is a 50 year old local non-profit which focuses on finding work for people with disabilities. Hiring US Archive supports AtWork’s efforts to help teach new skills to these individuals and help them to get meaningful employment.

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Did you know that Apple’s Preview lets you easily annotate and merge PDFs as well as delete and re-order pages within a PDF? Preview is a free application which comes bundled with Mac OS X. Apple has been quietly updating over the years and it has become quite capable and user-friendly. Just a few years ago one would have needed to buy the relatively expensive Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional PDF Editor to do many of these tasks.

Note: There are slight differences in how certain tasks are done if you’re using OS X 10.5′s version of Preview. All of these demonstrations are done using OS X 10.6′s version of Preview.

It’s also important to know that the following techniques may not work on all PDFs. It’s possible for a person who creates a PDF to lock the file which prevent others from manipulating it. Typically, locking a PDF like this requires use of an application like Adobe’s Acrobat.

I’ve created short video tutorials on how to do the following tasks. Read the brief text description and then click the link to watch the video.

If you need more extensive editing capabilities then what is offered by Preview you should check out the relatively affordable PDFPen.

1. Reorder pages in a PDF – Open a PDF file then click the Sidebar button to view the thumbnail icons for each page. Click on one of the thumbnails and drag the page up or down. Look for the horizontal blue line that appears indicating the new location of the page. To remove a page you can simply click on the thumbnail icon for a page to select it and the press the Delete key on your keyboard.

2. Extract pages from a PDF – Open a PDF file then click the Sidebar button to view the thumbnail icons for each page. Click on the first page you want to extract. If you want to extract additional pages then hold down the Command key and click on additional thumbnail icons. Release the Command key and drag the thumbnail icons to the Desktop. A new PDF file will be created on the Desktop. Rename the file as desired. Open this new file by double-clicking to verify that it contains the pages that you want. You can re-order the pages by following the tip listed above.

3. Move pages between PDFs (Merge PDFs) – Open a PDF file then click the Sidebar button to view the thumbnail icons for each page. Open a second PDF and click its Sidebar button too. Position the two PDFs so you can view both file’s Sidebars at the same time. Select one or more pages from one file’s Sidebar and drag them into the other file’s Sidebar. Look for the horizontal blue line that appears in the receiving file’s Sidebar. This blue line indicates where the new page appear. You can re-order the pages by following the tip listed above. Go to the File menu and select Save to save the changes.

4. Annotate text in a PDF -  Open a PDF file, click the Annotate button to review a row of tools at the bottom of the window. Use these tools to highlight text in a variety of colors, draw a line through the text, enclose text inside a rectangle or oval, or add a note in the margin of the PDF.

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The Fujitsu ScanSnap is a compact, easy-to-use scanner which will scan a stack of two-sided pages and turn them into a searchable PDF with the press of just one button. I use my ScanSnap several times throughout the week to scan documents as well as receipts of various sizes. I highly recommend the ScanSnap.

I bought my first ScanSnap, the S510M, in January 2007 and it’s still going strong after 2900 scans. Fujitsu has replaced this model with the S1500M and the S1300.

I was fortunate enough to win an S1300 in a recent give-away by a Fujitsu representative. The S1300 can be powered by either a power cord or via a USB port on your computer. (It needs a second, separate USB port for transmitting the scanning data.) The software bundled with the S1300 includes some new features and is compatible with my three year-old S510M. If you own an older ScanSnap you can download the current ScanSnap software which is compatible with Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard.

The bundled Macintosh software includes Fujitsu’s own ScanSnap Manager as well as two third-party applications — Abby FineReader 4.1 for ScanSnap and ReadIRIS’ CardIRIS 3.6 for ScanSnap. FineReader is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application that let’s you turn your PDFs into searchable PDFs, editable Word or Excel documents. CardIRIS also does OCR, but is intended for business cards. It lets you scan a business card and turn it into a record in Apple’s Address Book.

The S1300 is also the first fully cross-platform ScanSnap model. In the past, ScanSnap scanners have been bundled with either Mac-compatible software or Windows-compatible software though the scanner hardware itself works with either Macs or PCs. The S1300 comes with one DVD which contains both Mac and Windows software.

Fujitsu has added a host of other appealing features over the past few years. Here are a few highlights.

• Right-clicking on the Dock icon let’s one select either Simplex (one-sided) or Duplex (two-sided) scans in case you don’t want to scan the back-side of a document such as a store receipt.

• ScanSnap Manager’s Application section lets you scan a document directly to a number of destinations such as iPhoto, your printer or an attachment in a new email message.

• Marking text with a highlighter pen will turn that text into a keyword in your searchable PDF.

The paperless office that has been prophesied has not appeared, but my ScanSnap lets me reduce the amount of paper records that I have in my filing cabinets. I scan most documents so they are always available on my laptop. Of course, a robust backup system is important if you’re going to entrust all of these documents to your computer.
Note: ScanSnaps do not conform to TWAIN, ISIS and WIA standards.

Update 03-2011: I recently learned that Fujitsu has created a number of ScanSnap Tips and Tricks including one on how to clean your ScanSnap and how to replace the consumables.

Update: 01-2013: MacWorld recently published a comparison between ScanSnap’s current high-end scanner, the ScanSnap iX500 and Neat’s NeatDesk.  Read the comparison yourself, but I’m glad that I have a ScanSnap. I might check out Neat’s software for Mac. If I like it, I can configure it to use my ScanSnap.

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