A few more sub questions

Any good resources about collecting and preserving these?

If I find a number of obscure ones what’s the best way to scan them in bulk to preserve them

Are there any good tools to convert cursive to print text (I can read cursive but not as well as I’d like, and some of these are very fine cursive writings)

Any other tips I should know?

Thanks!

    • bean
      2•5 days ago

      You’ve a lot of this stuff eh? What is the draw for you? Are they blank on the other sides? Like unsent ones or? It would be fun to look through them and also a great way to share.

      I urge you to consider WEBP format perhaps. Its quality remains and the file sizes are much smaller. Saving you room for more. Also if you do scan these, mayb something like a Doxie would work. I have an old one which is fantastic and quick for single side scans of this size, and no need for the lifting of flatbed and swapping. Saving much time if you have many.

  • @Zachariah
    6•5 days ago

    It would be awesome if you posted them using a gallery server software like Piwigo. It allows annotations.

    You should scan them with a flatbed scanner. That way even if the originals are ever lost, there’s a nice digital copy. VueScan is great software to use with almost any scanner.

    • bean
      1•5 days ago

      Hamrick.com? At first I thought it was a driver website. Scroll down to see features. MacOS also. Looks good for scanning. I’ve been using paperlesss-ngx in a docker. Never used before so I learned it just for this tool. It’s not as flashy and maybe isn’t aimed at photos, but documents instead. For photo stuff I’m using Lightroom classic. It’s also kinda new to me. But I’m learning. I’m hesitant to put my photos online and I’m not eager to run and maintain a photo gallery. I only peruse my photos time to time and then it’s nice having the meta tags and such to find things.

      What other tools/apps do people use? I’m lowkey avoiding anything with subscription pricing, especially with photos and online hosting.

      • @Zachariah
        2•5 days ago

        It’s a one-time payment for VueScan (https://www.hamrick.com/). It’s been around a long time but still actively developed. It’s Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

        Aw, man, I see now it’s no longer a lifetime-payment option. I have a license from ages ago, so I guess I was grandfathered in.

        It does say you don’t need a subscription. Your one-time payment covers one year of updates. So I guess if you’re happy with the features at the end of the year, you can just stick with that. Maybe do another year if some killer feature is added.