Best way to SCAN 2,500 PHOTOS - Epson FastFoto FF 680W Review

have any of you guys ever shot photos on film and ended up with this so basically before digital we shot all that pictures and we would send them off and it would come back in little envelopes like this for each set of photos and we get all these prints and a set of negatives for each photo and that was fine and then a lot of us amassed collections like I have here now here's the thing in the past this was the way we did it we put them into albums and we shared them with friends maybe you have gone through albums and you look to the photographs and really enjoyed them but there's a problem one is we've got all these photos everywhere what's in there what happens you know in case of a fire or something bad happens we're gonna lose all these photographs another thing that could happen is they could deteriorate over time and then you want to find a specific photo how do you find it unless you go through mountains and mountains of albums you can't share them on Facebook you can't put them on social media and then when you want to show your friends the photos that'll sit down for about an album maybe and then they're gonna start to get bored when you've got all of these photos okay so what we're going to be talking about right now is how I was able to find a solution and I'm gonna review this solution for getting all these photos into your computer [Music] so have photographs our memories let me explain our mind is kind of like a hard drive this is a certain amount that we can fit into RAM which is stuff this front of mine that we can really focus on then we go into storage which would you know be in the back of our mind where things you know we still remember they're there but we need something to jog our memory it's there but we've completely forgotten about it's like we know something that we've forgotten we know it and then later on sometimes all we remember about them is what we told ourselves about them before so we don't necessarily remember those experiences but we remember the stories we told ourselves about those experiences and you know everything tends to get faded but what happens is when we look at a photograph it transports us back to that moment and there's something that could be stored far away in your mind that you completely forgotten about and then suddenly you're reliving that moment you're like wow I remember this I remember I was on vacation I remember who I was with us with my family members you know we were at this beautiful place I remember what it was eating anything you can remember it again so what it is this actually a retrieval system that enables us to retrieve those memories so these things are priceless now you can take millions of photos of buildings or statues and guess what those buildings and those statues are probably gonna still be there in years to come however the people were there there with you at the time those people might have passed on or they've gotten older even when you look at a younger picture of yourself sometimes it's a little crazy particularly the clothing but it brings back those memories it allows you to relive those moments I can go back to the statue or or the Hat the hill at Waterloo that I was at 20 years ago I can go back there today and I've got better equipment better cameras I can take better photographs of that place but I can't take better photographs of that memory when I was there in the pouring rain there with my friend Maria we were taking photographs and we braved our way to the top in the storm now when I look at that photograph I can remember that okay so here's the thing I've got all these photos here and these apples and trust me this is a lot neater because I've actually gone and organize these these were just in a massive box of all kinds of other garbage you know extra envelopes and postcards and you know how it goes you know how the boxes go so right now I've got this stack of photographs and you know I know I need to digitize these things so I want to have a digital backup of my life now here's a problem when I look at this I just get sick to the pit of my stomach thinking about this major task in front of me what can I do with this and I looked at a couple of solutions one is I've got a pretty good flatbed scanner and so I was like well why don't I just scan these on the flatbed scanner well you know these are twenty four thirty Six's you know I can put these like maybe three at a time and scan them and then I can use Photoshop to do crop and straighten photos save a little bit of time and recommended vigil photos but you know it's gonna take a long time so the services I could send these so I could box all of these up and I could ship them off but here's the thing what happens if these get lost these are my memories are gonna be gone forever or the other thing is what about privacy I'm gonna have strangers going through all my personal photographs I mean if you want to do that I would say you know you're comfortable with the risks and you don't care about other people then go ahead bundle up your photos and ship them off and get them done is probably your easiest solution so one of the companies I work with Epson contacted me hey we've got this device it's called the phosphor toe are you interested in reviewing it so here's the Epson fast photo ff6 atw right now I'm gonna review this what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you exactly what it's supposed to do and we're gonna put it through its paces and I'm gonna talk about my experience scanning these because it's 2,500 photographs here and I already scanned them all so I'm going to tell you about my experiences I can tell you about the pros and cons of this and then you can decide if this is a solution you're looking for okay so here's the thing this is a Portable Document photo scanner and so the promise here is I can take stacks of photos and I can load them this can batch scan my photographs up to 1200 dpi and it can also restore the photographs at the same time so can enhance them with this we're and it can save it on my hard drive or in the cloud or whatever I want okay so let me give you my review on the Epson fast photo ff6 atw first of all I need to clear this mess up so here it is right there so let's talk about the specs this can scan it 300 600 or 1200 dpi it can scan up to one photograph per second it can also enhance the photos as you scan them it can also scan documents and the documents can also have OCR where it actually reads the text and turns it into a Word document this can save your photos simultaneously to your hard drive to Google Docs Dropbox so you can do cloud backup at the same time and also claims to be the fastest personal scanner in the world alright so this is pretty promising and it comes in a very very small footprint so in what I'm convinced I'm sold but the problem is does this work as advertised is it as good as what I expect so let's do a review right now I endeavour view as I said before I've scanned 2500 photographs on here so this is not just out of the box you know out of the wrapping and let's do a review I've used this thing and and I've got a pretty good feel of its capabilities now alright so first of all we need to connect it it comes with a USB cable so you can plug it in to you know your computer or just don't use it because it also works wirelessly now here's the thing when you first set it up you do need the USB cable unless you've got one of those routers where you just push the button and then it will recognize it otherwise you use the USB and that will connect it to the Wi-Fi but here's the cool thing about it I actually used it on my other computer my Mac Pro I used it all day yesterday and I worked on this thing until about 8 o'clock at night starting from about 11:00 in the morning so I put some time into this so why don't we just pop it open so this is how it pops open like this and in the front slides open here you can pull this out for Elijah photos or you can push it in here or for smaller photos now this just kind of stops things coming all the way out and all we need to do is feed them in here all right so what we have to do first of all is install the software and installing the software actually was quite easy and you just go and you download it and then you click the button and it pretty much installs itself now make sure you choose all the options and that includes the enhancing software and also the software that does the OCR and so here's the software is the installed a V and we can see I just finished there and I'm gonna click on finish now I'm gonna put a few photos in here now they recommend you shouldn't really do more than 30 photos at a time I have taken it up to 45 photos and it did work so here's the thing you want to have them photo side up and then you want them upside down so they're pointing away and then we just simply put them in here and close make sure they're nicely gripped now there's a couple of things to make sure one fan those photos make sure the photos are not stuck together because this separates them and will scan them one at a time but they can't be stuck make sure the photos of cleaning is no gunk on there however if you did get some gunk on there it comes with this little sheet here and you can insert the photograph in this sheet and then scan it in the sheet now also use this sheet if you're working on damaged photos or very valuable photos that you want to protect make sure you put them in there and make sure there's nothing like staples or things like that on there okay so once you've done that all you need to do is just hit the Scan button then it's gonna launch the Epson fast photos software all right so let's have a look at the settings in here we're gonna click on settings and the first thing is we can give these whatever we want to call them right now by default these photos are gonna go here and called fast photo then we have the options for enhancements so we can automatically remove redeye we can order in how to restore and I'll show you what it shows on here this is what we should get there's the redeye that's auto enhance and this is restore so you could do this in Photoshop or in Lightroom or you can let the software do it I notice that the software did a really good job of restoring the color in the car Trust was actually quite difficult to get the same result in Photoshop so I did compare this to working in Lightroom so using the software here I was able to get really good contrast and color natural colors however in Lightroom I was able to get almost as good contrast maybe not quite as good but I was able to bring out more detail in the photographs so with some work inside of Lightroom you can get better results but I found the results in here good enough for most purposes look at the options here we can directly adjacent front of which I don't recommend or we can allow it to create a copy of that photograph that's enhanced so we'll see the original and the enhanced photos we have both and then if you have one you really want to go in and fine-tune you can do that yourself inside of Lightroom or Photoshop to get a better result but for most purposes like sharing these with friends and family and putting them on the web the auto enhance is more than good enough all right so let's look at the scan settings scan settings here we've got different types of photos we can scan standard photos instant instant photos such as you know Polaroids and we can also feed in panoramic photos now if you want to go really fast we can do 300 dpi which is print resolution if we want to make them a little bit bigger archival scanning we can do them as 600 PPI which is going to be double the size of the photograph so it's gonna make it a little bit bigger and it's gonna give you a little bit more to play with if you want to go into Photoshop and do edits or enlargements and things like that and if you really want to get crazy you can interpolate this to 1200 dpi now if you already have Photoshop I recommend scanning these at 600 that's what I did cuz 600 meter live version of the photograph it's got lots of resolution I found that the 1200 takes a little bit longer but not a huge amount longer but I don't need all my photos at 1200 I can just go in and resize those inside a Photoshop later as I need them however if you feel like you need all these photos larger think of my head and do it at 1200 it takes one second for the three hundred three seconds for 610 seconds for 1200 but we've got the option is JPEG or TIFF but honestly I just go to JPEG remember these are for your memories these are for your photographs your personal photographs this is not what we're using you know to create the highest quality museum art so that's not the purpose of this particular scanner this is getting through lots of photographs and getting decent quality so you've got to set your expectations there okay so let's have a look and we can also scan the back of the photo at the same time and this is great that means if you've written things on the back you've got knows you've got memories or reminders of what the photo is where it was like some people used to write in the back of a pen or a sharpie and some of my photos have that the location to date it will also scan the front and back like really really quickly all right so we've got that option and we can also choose to you know decide how dark that'll be in order to save it so that means you know if we're not just going to scan a blank back everywhere with a watermark so we can set it where it's only gonna get you know things were a sharpie or different things like that okay let's look at a bunch settings so I've got the option for autorotation which honestly didn't really work that well for me they might guard the code photo so it can actually work on the photos that have got the you know that occurred a little bit so what is gonna do is it's gonna get a vignette around the edges because you know the glass plate under here that it's using for scanning when it's curled parts of the photo gonna be closer to that scanning head then the the parts that go further away so you can get them vignette this is gonna correct for that vignette then we get to reduce lines and streaks so what's happening is this is moving through the sheet feeder as it's going through you know it's moving pretty quickly we can set the sittings there to reduce any lines or streaks that could happen in there I choose the upload so this is where we can choose to upload it to Dropbox or Google Drive now we can go down the scanner settings and we can change things here you know I power off time and different things like that and then we can choose applications to scan from so we turn that on and basically what that is is when we hit this action button here this determines what apps going to be working so right now I've got it set to first photo which means it's gonna automatically be set up to scan photos I click that it's gonna do photos if I prefer to do documents I'll change it to Epson smart scan now fast photo and smart scan both come bundled with this so we gonna hit close and at this point here I'm just gonna click on start scanning so now we get this option it's gonna pop up and if you know the year of the photo we can go in here and it's actually going to organize it by year so these photos were taken back in 95 just doing this as a painting the file name here so it shows me in 1995 so it's gonna organize it by year and date so let's just choose February and you can see this makes it easy for me to find the photos and the subject is UK because I was in the United Kingdom for there and that's what it's gonna do and it's gonna use an incremental number now I can also create a subfolder here if I turn that on notice under here it's gonna create a subfolder and I do this for every roll of film and in that way they're all going to be organized you're gonna be easy for me to find later on and easy for me to sort inside of Lightroom or Photoshop or other applications and if I don't want to do this each time I can turn on do not prompt in this one pop-up then we hit start scanning and now it's gonna scan all right so here we go we've scanned these photos and it gives me the option to scan the next batch so I could put more photos in there and I could click on scan next batch or if I'm done I'm just gonna click done scanning and now it's gonna process it so any of the image enhancements and all that kind of stuff is all happening right now then you'll notice that all of these photographs here are actually showing up in there and there's the original version with that kind of coloring and there it is enhance and you can see it's done a pretty reasonable job you know see how faded it is and there we go and now these are ready for us to share we can you know upload them to social media or share them with our friends and family so you know there's other options here we can click on the share we can go to Facebook we can send them on email you know we can go through all these things and here's the thing if you didn't edit these we can choose to edit them now so we can actually go in here we can rotate it and if we didn't hit the enhance we can hit that enhance right now notice it's going to apply that enhancement to it and it's at the restore button and we can see right there that we've got that done okay so my scan 2,500 photographs yesterday and I'm just so happy to get that load off my mind now here's some of the things I found when I was doing it it worked really fast in fact incredibly fast I was doing stacks and once I got into a rhythm I could pull them out of the out of the sleeve put them in here start scanning pull the Nix it out of the ski sleeve the previous one put it back in and by then this was finished so I got a little bit of a work flow going and it went quite quickly now as far as jams I had it jam twice and all I had to do is just click on here pop it open pull the photo out shut that and then go again and the jam was usually caused because maybe two photos were stuck together or something like that it would cause those apart from now if you've taken care of your photos you know most of the time it just went through just very very smoothly one thing to be aware of make sure you've got lots of space at left on your computer because my main computer was running low on hard drive space and one of the things I noticed is this caches and loads up into that space now when you restart the computer it will clear that cache but that cache will build up so if you've got you know plenty of space and you really shouldn't have a problem in my case I was getting a little bit low and so I had to restart my computer clear up some space and then I had no more problems with that as far as the quality the quality of these scans here are good enough they're not perfect you know these are not you know what you would use for your fine art you know for your commercial fine art work these are good for your memories for your personal photographs and they're more than good enough for sharing on Facebook or sharing with your family creating slideshows all these kind of things and just enjoying those photographs and enjoying those memories and when I say that you know they're nice high resolution so you could print these and they're gonna be fine now some of the downside of it I did find is I found some streaking in some of the images who started to appear on the sides you know some some lines there what happens is Epson recommends after every 300 scans you clean this and it comes off a little cloth here a microfiber cloth and what you want to do is pop this open and if you look in here you'll see that glass is there and there and then we've got these rollers and so what you want to do after you know I would say more frequently than that just give it a little wipe down and in everything will be fine because otherwise what happens as it gets dust in there and that dust is blocking part of that that scanning head and then when everything goes down its gonna show a blank part and then of course that line is gonna be smeared because the paper is moving down and as it's scanning is going to leave that that line on the side so if this is nice and clean you shouldn't have too much of a problem there with lines I still did find some even if I clean very faint lines in certain types of photos with particularly dark photos on a certain type of stock certain types of photo paper I found no problems and in other types of photo paper in the dark of photos I could see some of these faint lines now these are things I could easily get rid of him Photoshop so it's not a huge huge concern or a deal-breaker as far as this goes everything I read about it everything I saw in the box and everything yes this actually met and exceeded my expectations one the quality was as good as I was hoping for I wasn't expecting this to scan as well as a flatbed scanner but I was kind of worried that the scans would be you know just really low quality and they weren't the scans were good quality consumer-grade absolutely so the speed and the ease of use is better than I expected so you know what I never would have got this task done without this manually it would have taken me forever I you know I've been putting it off for years and I got it done in one afternoon using this as 2,500 photos and you saw all the rolls of film so you know if that's what you're looking for this is definitely a great solution but here's another question you know so I'm kind of thinking well you know scandal my photos now you know I'm good I don't need this anymore but there's another thing that it can do and that's paperless office or paperless house now it used to be a joke that went around saying you know a paperless office about as likely as a paperless bathroom but here's the thing I can do it in here I'm gonna show you right now I'm gonna take a notice that I got here and I found something that was not personally identifiable so but I would do this before I could do this with my bills and different things like that pop it open what you want to do is just close it down there now if you set up the software to do a document you can click on that button let me make this nice and big give it room and then what happens here is I can go under these settings and I can set this to be the default once again so I can just push that button if I want to use it as a document scanner and these are all the different things I can do with it I can just save it I can attach it to an email so if I need to email something to someone you know modern faxing or I can you know put it I can save it in the cloud Evernote Dropbox Google Drive I can print it or I can save it to Word in Excel now here's the interesting thing about going to word in Excel it uses OCR boom time that is viciously fast okay but how could I mean this is a lot of Typhon you look at this fine print all this stuff let's have a look and see how this came out well here it is there I'm awful one I put it upside down so why don't we just rotate it round and you know what it doesn't look too bad let me make this a little bigger Wow look at that that's clear and we look at the second one let's flip that around alright so there this what we scanned looking pretty good so let me click Next and what I want to do is I want to save this to word now it's analyzing it and I'm gonna hit save and take this up so everything is scanned in here but look at this I can select this this is real text this is editable text now I see a few little errors in here but it's not bad all this stuff looks really good and it even has their links and we can click on those links through there and it scans the images and drops those in so I gotta tell you I'm excited about that so you saw how quickly could scan those documents so now you can take all your bills and all those kinds of things all your documents and just scan them quickly the ones you don't need you can just shred them and get rid of that mountain of paperwork that you've had stacked up so not only can we now archive out all our photos we can also archive all our documents and for someone that's downsizing this is great so you know I can just clear up all this clutter just by using this device so anything is this is a little bit pricey it comes in at five hundred and thirty dollars but when I think about you know the peace of mind that that's bringing me I would have easily paid someone that money to scandal' those photographs for me and not only that I can use on an ongoing basis of scanning photos postcards all those things and I can also use it for all my documents so I can actually finally clean up that mess of my office and get rid of all that paperwork you've got no idea how excited I am about that and that'll be a project for another day or probably take me a day to scan all my documents and then shred them so anyway guys that's it that's my review of the Epson fast photo I'm really happy with it now if you have a lot of photos and documents and things that you want to organize I highly recommend this is a great solution it's easy to use and super fast and you know and if all you're doing is shooting digital photos and you don't have you know all these prints then you know check out my other tutorials on photoshop on Lightroom and I'll show you how to make those photos better and if you like these kind of more conversational style reviews hether subscribe button I also do Photoshop and Lightroom tutorials at least once a week so I hit that notification bell and then you'll know whenever I upload a new video and anyway if you like this smash that like button into dust tell your friends about this and drop a comment let me know what do you guys think is this something that is this well you know the solution you've been waiting for or do you have a better solution let us know in the comments underneath I'd love to hear from you so thanks for watching guys until next time I'll see you at the cafe and you know I'm even thinking about putting all my negatives into a safe box you know numbering them all of course I'm just giving away the prints I probably I'd be honest I'll probably hoard them but that I want to make it sound like organized you

Channel: photoshopCAFE

Views: 149,352

Keywords: Epson, scanner, FF-680W, fastfoto, worlds fastest scanner, photo scanner, scan photos, bulk photo scanner, review, indepth review, scanner review, scanner tutorial, tech review, Fastfoto 680, epson scanner, document scanner, colin smith review, photoshopcafe review, photoshopcafe, colin smith, tidy, marie kondo

Id: ixh7wPd38aA

Length: 26min 14sec (1574 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 01 2019