Feedback Requested: Scalable Workflow for Family Photo Digitization
I’m preparing to digitize a personal/family archive and would appreciate feedback before I lock in the workflow.
Main questions:
Any major flaws or blind spots in this approach?
Any metadata/export pitfalls with these iPhone-based scanning apps?
Any recommendations for minimizing glare/curl issues in album captures?
Size Estimate (see photos)
Several thousand photos plus a substantial amount of paper documents/ephemera.
Roughly:
~50% loose prints
~30% albums
~20% photobooks
Mostly consumer point-and-shoot / disposable camera photos.
Most originals will be discarded after digitization. A small number of especially meaningful items will be retained.
Capture setup:
iPhone 15 Pro Max mounted overhead on fixed tripod .
Remote shutter via Apple Watch.
Fixed-height capture station.
Diffuse angled lighting.
Clear cast acrylic sheets used to flatten curled photos/pages:
12”×16”×1/4”
8”×10”×1/8”
Planned workflow:
Loose prints captured ~4 at a time with auto-cropping/splitting.
Album and photobook pages captured one page at a time.
Apps: Testing both Pic Scanner Gold and Photomyne to compare:
throughput.
auto-crop accuracy.
metadata handling.
Canon imageCLASS MF284dw flatbed scanner (2026) : for documents / OCR PDFs. ( allows scanning multiple pages into a single PDF.)
Output / metadata:
PNG output (intentionally choosing PNG over TIFF for smaller size and simpler handling).
Embedded metadata preferred over filename-based metadata.
Metadata entered during scanning will be minimal:
approximate date/year.
location.
event/description.
NOTE: All photos will also be passed through a subsequent LLM/OCR image analysis step for extracting text as well as image attributes such as indoors/outdoors, daytime/nighttime, scene type, scene description, objects in scene, etc.
THANK YOU