A backup strategy for the images you edit in Lightroom Creative Cloud

My big 2025 photography project was to move all my pictures out of my hardware dependent local storage, and migrate them to Adobe’s Creative Cloud. I knew I would not convert my Lightroom 6 catalogs (theoretically possible, but too cumbersome), but the folders on the Network Attached Storage device (NAS) where the originals were stored had always been carefully organized. I thought I would not lose much by not converting the catalogs. I subscribed to Adobe’s Lightroom Creative Cloud (first through the Apple Store, later directly on the Adobe Store), and uploaded all the original images, folder by folder, to Lightroom. The process was described in detail is a series of blog entries dedicated to Lightroom.

Which means I’m now trusting Adobe for preserving 28 years of scanned negatives and digital images in their cloud. What can possibly go wrong?

A recent post by Jim Grey (about “the lost photos era”) and interactions I’ve had with cloud service providers in a professional context brought back to my attention that storing my images in a cloud was a good first step but not enough.

*Rome – Fontana de Nettuno – Piazza Navona. Nikon D80 – Jan 2010*

The “shared responsibility model”

All cloud service providers (CSPs) operate under a shared responsibility model. It’s the CSP’s job to ensure that their technical platform remains available and secure, and that the data entrusted to them can be recovered in case of a disaster in their data centers. As the client, it’s your responsibility to “govern your content”: manage the uploads, the regular cleanups, and configure how the data is accessed and shared.

The grey area is of course backup – CSPs generally commit to recovering your data at Day Minus One if something really bad happens to their infrastructure, but they won’t be obligated to do anything if you deleted a folder by mistake, or if you wanted to recover a group of files as they were at a specific point in time. CSPs generally consider that backups and restores are the responsibility of the client.

Although Adobe is a reliable company, I know I have to protect my images from a catastrophic error on their part, and from a major mistake (fat finger?) on mine.

A reminder – the differences between Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Lightroom Classic

Adobe Lightroom Classic is the current iteration of Adobe’s original image edit and management software, launched in 2007 as Lightroom 1.0.

It’s a “fat client” application designed to work on Windows or MacOS workstations (desktop or laptop), which stores your images locally (on the hard drive of your workstation or on some form of higher capacity local storage, DAS or NAS). Lightroom maintains at least one local catalog of your images, which contains all the ratings, flags, titles, captions you have entered, as well as a log of all the edits and setting changes (crops, exposure, color balance, sharpening,…) performed on the images.

The system is totally self contained – but as everything (catalog, images and edits) is kept locally, it’s your responsibility to manage the storage, the backup and the disaster recovery of your images.

Under the same Lightroom brand, Adobe is selling a totally different range of cloud based products simply named Lightroom or Lightroom CC, whose lightweight clients run on a smartphone (iOS or Android), a tablet (iPadOS or Android) and on a desktop or laptop (Windows or MacOS). All those products share the same on-line library (hosted on Adobe’s Creative Cloud).

Contrarily to Lightroom Classic, the Creative Cloud versions of Lightroom (smartphone, tablet, PC or Mac) don’t keep any image or catalog on your device – just a cache to reduce the response time. The whole system works very well: I can upload images from my camera through a smartphone while traveling, perform light edits on a tablet at the hotel the same day, and spend more time perfecting the images on a laptop when I’m back home – it’s seamless. As long as I keep paying for the subscription, of course. And bar a catastrophic event in Creative Cloud.

Backup workflows don’t live forever

Even if the image formats themselves (jPEG and DNG) have been remarkably stable over the last 20 years, the hardware, the software and the cloud services offerings have not stopped evolving – and what used to work reliably ten years ago does not work any more. Which means that every now and then, we need to take a hard look at our workflow and re-engineer it.

When I put it in place in 2018, my image preservation workflow made sense – I was using Adobe Lightroom 6 running on a Mac to edit my photos and manage my libraries. Lightroom 6 was keeping the catalog on the local hard drive of my Macbook and was pointing to a volume on the Netgear NAS to store the images themselves. I was also running a backup application named Arq on the Macbook, and using it to keep a backup of the NAS in Amazon’s long term storage, AWS Glacier.

Along the years, this finely tuned workflow crumbled.

First, the OS of my old MacBook stopped being supported, and I saw its capabilities decline progressively as it could not access the services that Apple (and others) kept on making more secure with more refined security protocols and longer encryption keys.

To make the matter worse, Netgear decided to get out of the network storage business – my RN214 NAS still works, but is not supported and (of course) its OS and its built-in backup apps are not updated anymore.

Last but not least, AWS has now sunset Glacier as I was using it – it’s not a stand alone product anymore, just a storage class in the S3 product portfolio, using different APIs.

My storage and backup strategy was crumbling and I had to act. That’s why I migrated the libraries themselves to Adobe’s Creative Cloud last year, and why I’m now implementing a new backup and restore workflow now.

My new workflow – saving the “digital negatives“

As often nowadays, I called ChatGPT for help. The workflow it recommended, and that I implemented, is still based on Adobe Creative Cloud being my primary image store, the “source of truth”. Lightroom (the PC/Mac edition of Lightroom) on my MacBook will act as a sort of gateway to the NAS, and the NAS volume will store my local replica of the originals stored in Creative Cloud.

It’s important to remember that for Lightroom, a local storage volume is nothing more than the place where it stores a local cache. What is being replicated to the local volume is the source image – the original JPEG or raw files exactly as they were originally uploaded from the camera – before any transformation, optimization or edit was performed. The images are grouped on the SAN by date (one folder per year, one subfolder per day) and the album structure you defined in Lightroom is not respected. Again, it’s a cache that we use as a way to backup our source images, not a backup of the final images after Lightroom has processed them.

The local cache on the SAN shows the original files grouped by date of capture – the Lightroom Album structure and the edits are not preserved, only the original image itself (compare with the structure of April 2016 in Lightroom, as shown below).

*Lightroom CC – the folder/album structure (here, April 2016)*. *In Lightroom the images are grouped in user defined folders and albums*.

How to setup Adobe Lightroom

Once the Mac is logged in the Network Attached Storage volume, simply click on the “Adobe Lightroom” option at the top left of the screen, select “Cache”, and under Performance, check the “Store a copy of all originals option”, and point to the folder of the NAS where the original images will be dropped.

The sync process is managed automatically by Lightroom. Every time you add new pictures to Lightroom, it will start replicating them to the SAN.

If you’re working with Lightroom away from your home network, no problem. Adobe will consider that the cache is not available, and will download the images from the cloud.

*In Lightroom CC – check the “Store a copy of all originals” option and point to the NAS as a the local storage*

Creating an off-site backup of the Network Attached Storage volume

The primary storage location of my images is Adobe Creative Cloud. I keep a replica of the originals on a network attached storage device (NAS) at home. It’s a pretty solid data protection system, but it’s only keeping one replica of Creative Cloud’s originals – and a replica is not a backup (because it only keeps the most recent version of a file). It is not very complicated or expensive to make it even more robust, and create an off site backup of the original images.

*Duplicati – the backup job (it took it 12 hours to backup 110 Gbytes of pictures – not bad at all).*

That’s what I used to do with Amazon Glacier – and having an off site backup of my photo library was a saving grace when my first Netgear NAS device gave up the ghost. Restoring the images from Glacier took a week, but it’s better than losing everything.

*The target Google Drive after the backup – the data is grouped in blocks of 50 Mbytes*.

This time, I tried different options (Arq, Backblaze) which for various reasons (performance, cost, no support of network attached devices) did not work for me. My current setup is based on an open source software named Duplicati, which is pushing the Lightroom replica on the NAS to a Google Drive. It works, backups are reasonably fast (around 2.5 Mbytes/sec), and it’s flexible enough: I can recover a specific image in a few minutes if I need to.

Validating that the setup works

Backup and restore workflows are fragile, and they can fail for all sorts of reasons (expired passwords or keys, OS or software upgrade, hardware or network related issues, human error). And it’s not because the backup is successful that the restore will be.

*Restoring the data – selecting the document to restore is easy and the restore takes no more than a few minutes.*

I had to validate that, with the Mac and Lightroom CC up and running, and the NAS volume mounted, that:

any new image added to the Lightroom CC library was replicated to the SAN, in its original state,
the backup software would catch the new image and back it up to the Google drive,
and that I could restore any image or any group of images as needed.

The tests were successful.

Saving the final images

You may also want to preserve a copy of the final state of your images, after Lightroom has applied all of its edits.

The challenge of course is that in Lightroom, the images don’t really have a final state. Adobe keeps your original photo and a sort of log of the transformations you performed, and dynamically creates a file containing the image you want after you have requested an export. You pick the quality, the dimensions, and the file format (small JPEG, large JPEG, PNG, TIFF, DNG, …) with or without sharpening – depending on what you intend to do with the image (email attachment, social media, photo gallery, photo album, print, …). And the image you need is created on the fly.

*Lightroom – so many ways to export a photo*

I understand that a professional photographer delivering images to many clients may want to keep a trace of what was delivered, and have an archival system specifically tuned to preserve them. (And pros may prefer working Adobe Lightroom Classic, anyway).

I’m not in this situation and I’ve never really given much thought about it. I simply export the images I need to the same shared folder in Apple’s iCloud, that all my Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, MacBook) can access.

Final words

In the days of film, it was not easy (or cheap) for amateur photographers to create duplicates of their color slides or their negatives, and store them in a second location as a backup. Photographers were at the mercy of fire, floods and burglaries, and could lose the images of a lifetime in a few minutes.

Digital images can be easily duplicated, and the duplicates stored in totally different locations, on totally different media. The setup described here is very easy to implement: a NAS is not even needed (the local SSD of a PC or a Mac would work as well), and many of our subscriptions (Microsoft Office Family for instance) already include 1 TB of storage and could be used as backup target.

More about Lightroom and fifty five camera reviews:

All the images of this series were shot in Rome, in April 2009 and in January 2010, with a Nikon D80. They were saved as originals on multiple generations of storage, recovered from a catastrophic NAS failure, and imported in Adobe’s Creative Cloud last year. I just adjusted a few sliders before exporting them to WordPress.

Catalog, Print or Delete? What to do with your pictures after you’ve shared them on social media?

I’m afraid most people rush to share the pictures they take, attaching them to emails, text messages, or publishing them on various forms of social media. Images – or more precisely the interest of their family, friends and followers for those images – tend to be ephemeral. Shot, shared, forgotten.

If you visit these blog pages, I’ll assume that you’re interested in photography. And I will bet that when you shoot pictures, they’re important to you, and you take time to reference and archive them. If you still shoot film, you probably store the negatives and slides in binders with their contact sheet, and if you shoot digital, you certainly rely – at a minimum, on Apple or Google’s photo management services – or, more likely, use more specialized software to catalog, process and archive your images.

Of course, beyond the few Gigabytes of free storage you get with your smartphone (5 GB with Apple, 15 GB with Google), you need to pay a monthly suscription fee – $3.00 /month for 200 GB with Apple, $2.00 for 100 GB with Google. It’s not much to store 10,000 to 20,000 images (assuming 10 Mbytes /image) – but I’m surprised by the number of people I know who go regularly through their Photo apps and delete images they like (and might be happy to look at again five years from now) just for the sake of saving two or three dollars a month.

*Sunset at the beach. Near St Anne, Guadeloupe*

And when, for an happy event (wedding, graduation, big life milestone …) they’re being asked to send a few of their images to contribute to a family slide show or to a shared photo-album, they can’t find any – or so few.

At the risk of being provocative, I’ll say that in photography, Archival and Retrieval are at least as important as taking the pictures in the first place. So, what are the options?

The Photo Management Service provided by the OS vendor of your phone, tablet or personal computer.

We’re talking of Apple Photos, Google Photos, and Microsoft… Photos, of course. The “App” is the front end of a set of cloud based services, that provide photo storage, editing, cataloging and sharing capabilities, increasingly with the help of AI.

*Apple Photos on iPad – search for “sunrise”* *– “sunset” returns almost identical results*

Even without being passionate about photography, it’s easy to accumulate a few tens of thousands of pictures in a few years. The challenge is to organize them, and to retrieve the one you need without having to spend hours browsing galleries.

The photo management apps try and organize your photo library by date (easy), by theme, by trip, but what’s particularly impressive are the search capabilities – the app is using information it reads in the images (like the name tag of a dog), combining that with what it knows for sure (like the date and the GPS coordinates stored in the picture file) and what it has learned about you and your entourage to help you retrieve images. Without requiring you have entered captions or keywords to identify your subject. If Jules is a dog, it will answer questions such as “Jules in Chattanooga in 2014”. It even works with objects: “My Jeep in Destin” returns pictures of my Jeep in Destin, FL, “pictures of a ball pen” returns… ball pens, and searching for the word “dawn” will return all the pictures taken at sunrise (and sunset – the search algorithm is not perfect).

*Searching for “Jules in Smyrna” – Apple Photos has read the name tag of the dog.*

If the picture has been taken with a smartphone, it will be managed “natively” by the app. If it has been taken with a dedicated camera, the image will first need to be imported – most cameras vendors provide their own app that will transfer selected images from the camera to the Photo app of the device over a WiFi connection.

For Apple and Google, what matters the most is their ability to retain their client in their eco-system in the long run, from phone to phone to phone (they call that the stickiness). Once you’ve stored 10,000 photos in their Photo app, you’ve put yourself in a very sticky situation, and you will think twice before switching to the other side. Of course, transferring your images from Apple to Google or Google to Apple is always possible, but it won’t be immediate or straightforward and you may lose some information in the process (some metadata, and proprietary features like Apple’s Live Photos and RAW files, for instance).

Photo cataloging / photo editing tools from specialized software vendors

If Apple or Google’s photo apps don’t give you enough, or if you don’t want your images to be stored in a cloud, or you don’t want to pay a monthly subscription fee and would rather buy conventional perpetual licenses, there is certainly a specialized photo management software that meets your needs.

Generally speaking, dedicated photo management software will offer more options for tagging the pictures, and more powerful photo editing tools, but, if the example of Adobe is representative of the industry, will not be as good as Apple and Google at automatically organizing and easily retrieving your images: they still rely predominantly on captions and keywords to identify an image.

*Specialized photo management tools offer more image editing options*…

If you opt for local storage, you will have to invest in physical storage (directly attached drives or NAS) and you will need to protect your images with a good backup system (preferably off site, if you want it to protect your images from disasters). And off site backup plans have a cost.

*… but the search is still heavily based on keywords and captions that have to be entered when the image is uploaded.*

Cloud storage options are very broad – going from general purpose storage services like iDrive or Dropbox to more specialized offerings like Adobe’s Lightroom “Photography Plan” – but once you’ve exhausted the limited time promotional offers, the prices are relatively similar – around $10.00 /month for 2TB for most of them. iDrive seems to be the cheapest, Dropbox is in the same ballpark as Apple and Google ($9.99 /mo for up to 2TB). As of this morning, Adobe’s “Photography Plan” includes 1TB of storage for $11.99 /month, but in all fairness the cost also includes the Lightroom Mobile, Web and Classic subscription fees, so it’s not that bad of a deal.

What are the alternatives? Placing prints in a photo album?

A physical photo album is not a substitute for an electronic catalog, but it’s a mostly forgotten way to keep the images you love together, and return to them when you feel like it. You can even scan the prints if you can’t find the negatives or the original digital files (I’ve done it, shame on me), so it’s also a form of backup.

*I lost the negatives a long time ago – but I had a photo album and scanned the print*

The ability to create photo books used to be integrated in the photo cataloging apps: the option existed in Apple’s iPhoto – you picked the images, worked the layout and (of course) paid a hefty fee, and Apple would send you a printed photo album with a little Apple logo on the back. I’ve not used a recent version of Adobe Lightroom Classic but I believe the option to create photo books still exists (in conjunction with the Blurb photo book printing service). It does not exist on the “non-classic” versions of Lightroom.

*Photo albums of all types and sizes (printed by Mixbook, ifolor, Apple, and self printed Fujifilm Instax)*

Maybe the combination of Lightroom Classic and Blurb is still the reference to beat – but I’ve not been impressed with the alternatives – I tested Mixbook – and while the quality of the printed books was satisfactory, I found the solution difficult to use and also very expensive.

If you need multiple copies of a photo album, creating a photo book with one of those services makes sense, although it will cost you, but if you only need one copy, it may be simpler, faster and cheaper to print the pictures at home, and place them in a good old (physical) photo album.

Fujifilm’s Instax film is available in three sizes, so are the Instax Printers.

Last by not least, Canon, Fujifilm, HP, Kodak and Polaroid (in alphabetical order) all propose easy to use ultra-portable printers, that will let you print images from a smartphone or a tablet – and place them in small photo albums that they can also provide. Fujifilm and Polaroid printers use instant film packs, Canon, HP and Kodak use a technology named “zero ink” (a sophisticated thermal paper). In my personal experience, assembling a mini photo album of 20 pictures is quick, easy, and ultimately cheaper than configuring a photo book from Blurb, Mixbook and dozens of their competitors.

More about Lightroom Mobile and Instant Film printers:

More sunsets…

Replacement options for mercury batteries

Cameras designed and manufactured before 1975 very often use coin shaped Mercury Oxide batteries to power the CdS cell in charge of metering – the most common being the PX625 aka PX625 / PX13 / MR9 Mercury Cell.

mercury_batt-8289 — Three substitutes for the PX625 battery – Wein Zinc-Air (left), Exell Zinc-Air (right), Alcaline (center)

The chemistry of those 1.35 V. batteries is based on mercury oxide. The sale of mercury batteries was banned in 1996 because of their toxicity and environmental unfriendliness, and, unfortunately for the owners of camera of the early 70s, there is no perfect substitute. For all of their drawbacks, mercury oxide batteries had two big advantages – they delivered a constant 1.35v tension across their lifespan, and if not used, they kept their charge for a very long time (at least 10 years).

mercury_batt-8290 — Three substitutes for the PX625 battery – alcaline (top), Wein Zinc-Air (right), Exell Zinc-Air (right) – Note the little vents on the two Zinc-Air batteries

The most common cameras using the PX625 battery were launched between 1970 and 1975: Pentax Spotmatic F, Olympus OM-1, Leica CL, Leica M5, Nikkormat FTn, Canon FTb and Canonet GIII QL, … . The battery looks like 3 coins of different diameters stacked above one another, and is rather large and thick (Diameter: 15.6 mm. Height: 5.95 mm).

mercury_batt-8291 — The dimensions of the two Zinc-Air batteries are not exactly similar to the alcaline (or to the original PX625). The Exell in particular can’t be inserted in the Leica CL

Older cameras (like the original Pentax Spotmatic, for instance) use a smaller button (or pill) shaped Mercury Oxide battery, and more recent models (practically any camera designed and launched after 1975) use silver oxide or lithium batteries in many shapes and forms.

Possible Replacement:

alcaline – (LR9 or V625U) – this battery has one big advantage – it’s the same shape and dimensions as the PX625 – but it has two limitations – its nominal voltage is higher at 1.5v; and it loses voltage progressively, which makes it unfit to provide power to the meter of a camera, unless some voltage compensation circuit is built into the camera. The meter of some cameras will not work at all (Leica CL), and for most other cameras the metering will be unreliable.
Silver oxide – it delivers a constant voltage across its lifespan, and can last for a few years when not in use. But unfortunately, its voltage is significantly higher at 1.55v, which again will promise unreliable metering results unless the camera or the battery container itself is designed with a voltage compensation circuit. There are three options:
- the S625PX – I believe it’s been discontinued – it had the same shape as the mercury PX625 battery, but delivered 1.55v – it will only work as a substitute for a PX625 if the camera has a built-in voltage compensation circuit,
- a silver oxide “386” battery (a “button” cell), inserted into a adapter with its miniaturized voltage reduction circuit – the adapter is rather expensive ($35 to $40.00). It would be an ideal solution for photographers willing to use the camera regularly- but there are fakes on Amazon (products without the voltage reduction circuit presented has products with). Only buy from a seller you trust.
- a Silver oxide 386 battery (a “button” cell), inserted into a adapter without any voltage reduction circuit – some of the “adapters” are as simple as a rubber gasket – again, it will only work if the camera has a built in voltage compensation circuit.

mercury_batt-8288 — Three substitutes for the PX625 battery – alcaline (left), Wein Zinc-Air (right), Exell Zinc-Air (center). The Exell does not seem to be manufactured as carefully as the Wein.

Zinc-Air batteries have three big advantages – they’re used for hearing aids and are sold in every drugstore/pharmacy in the US, they release the same voltage as mercury batteries; and the voltage remains constant over the life of the battery;
You can buy a Zinc-Air button cell and insert it in the battery compartment of the camera (it may work with some cameras). A more reliable solution is to buy a PX625 substitute assembled by a few vendors who integrate third party zinc-air cells in a container shaped as the original PX625. The best know product is the so called “WEIN Cell” but there are alternatives available on Amazon.WEIN cells are packaged in individual blisters, and are cleanly assembled. They fit physically in all the cameras I tested. When the WEIN cells were more expensive than they are now, I had bought “compatible” cells from Exell on Amazon – they worked, but didn’t look as nicely finished and assembled as the WEIN cells – and could not fit in the battery compartment of a Leica CL. Currently, the “compatible” cells are more expensive than the original WEIN. So why bother?A Zinc-Air batteries are powered by oxidizing zinc with oxygen from the air. Therefore, the shell of the battery has small vents that let the air enter the battery. Batteries are stored and shipped with a removable membrane that “seals” the vents and deprive the battery from the air’s oxygen. To activate the battery, you remove the membrane – but once the zinc-air reaction has started, the life of battery is limited to a few weeks at best. Some people remove the battery from the camera after each photo shoot and reseal them, but I’m not convinced that it really helps extend the life of the battery.
(source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc%E2%80%93air_battery)

As a conclusion…

The WEIN cell worked on every camera I tested. It’s a relatively expensive solution if you want to use cameras designed for Mercury Batteries on a daily basis: because of the short life of the battery once you’ve activated it, you will have consumed a significant quantity of batteries by the end of the year.

If you’re absolutely determined to use a Leica CL or a Leica M5, I’m afraid there is no real substitute to WEIN cells. That being said you could also shoot with a Minolta CLE or a Leica M6, the experience would not be very different, and those cameras rely on Silver Oxide batteries (*). Up to you.

2009-12-Paris-019 — Paris – A school visit at Le Louvre – Leica CL – 40mm lens.

(*) – I did not find a more modern substitute to the Canonet using silver oxide battery. The models that immediately followed (the Canon A35F and A35 Datelux) were sold well into the eighties, and still used a mercury battery. Cameras launched after the A35 are motorized autofocus compact cameras – a totally different experience. If you like cameras in the style of the Canonet, Zinc-air cells are in your future.

Storage – Netgear ReadyNAS RN 214

I’m not a professional tester of IT equipment. And this blog is primarily about film photography. But I can’t avoid addressing the issue of digital image storage: unless you develop your film in a dark room, use an enlarger and get large prints the good old way, the images on your film will be digitized at some point, will be consumed digitally, and will have to be stored and archived on digital media. Because Adobe Lightroom is more flexible than the proverbial cardboard shoebox.

Over the years, I’ve been using consumer grade storage systems from brands like Buffalo and LaCie, until I settled on a Network Attached Storage system (a NAS) from Netgear. The RN104, that I purchased in 2014, fulfilled his duties honorably until last year, when it started to misbehave: the disks got corrupted (probably because of an unstable supply of power) and I had to restore the data from a backup on Amazon Glacier. More recently a power spike (probably due to a bad connection between the external power brick and the NAS enclosure itself) fried the motherboard and gave me an opportunity to reconsider my allegiance to Netgear, and to consumer grade NAS in general.

netgear system page — Netgear – the system admin page (overview)

netgear_readynas_214 — Netgear ReadyNas 214

What I’m asking is pretty simple: I don’t want to store Terabytes of images on a single laptop equipped with a single drive – I want to store my pictures (RAW and jPEG) on a device accessible by the computers (PC, Mac, iPad) connected to my wireless LAN. That device has to be local – I’m using Lightroom to catalog, upload, edit and print my images, and a broadband connection would be far too slow if I used some form of cloud storage as the primary location of my pictures. That perfect device should also act as a Time Machine target for the backup of my Macs. And of course, because hard drives are inherently fragile, I want the device to offer some form of disk redundancy – ideally, it should be also be able to backup its data on a low cost, on-line archival service.

Most of the recent NAS devices (from Netgear and from competitors) meet those basic requirements. They can also stream video (they take care of decoding) and, because their OS is generally based on some Linux distribution, they can be used as multi-purpose servers (not only as file servers, but also as application servers to run Drupal, Joomla, php, or Python applications, for instance). I have no use for those features and they’ve not been part of my evaluation criteria.

netgear_apps — Netgear – some of the applications that can run on the system

So, what I’m looking for?
- a NAS,
- solidly built (case, power supply, connector)
- with removable drives – that can be moved to a SAN enclosure of the same family, without losing configuration or data (in case the original enclosure dies, or a capacity upgrade is necessary)
- with good data protection (RAID 5 or better)

The Netgear RN104 met the requirements for the most part:

most of the issues I have encountered with my old RN104 have been power supply and power supply connector related – with dreadful consequences for the data on the disks and ultimately for the chassis itself.
until the big crash last year, the NAS was configured with RAID-X, the proprietary implementation of RAID in Netgear’s devices. With RAID-X one disk is reserved for parity, the other disks store data (it’s more or less equivalent to RAID 4). With Raid-X, volumes are easy to expand, but if you lose more than one disk, you’re dead in the water.
the Western Digital RED 1TB disks that I bought separately for it (the Netgear chassis can be purchased diskless) proved flawless

When the RN104 chassis finally died, I considered buying a Sinology or Qnap enclosure, but I would have had to reformat the drives and restore everything from the Amazon Glacier backup, again. Sinology and Qnap are well considered on the marketplace, but seem to use the same type of external power supply brick as the Netgear, and maybe even the same dreaded power connector. Unfortunately, chassis with a built in power supply are much more expensive.

netgear volumes page — Netgear – all 4 disks healthy – it’s configured with Raid 6 (too many drawbacks with X-RAID in comparison)

Ultimately, buying a new Netgear NAS device appeared to be the lesser evil. The RN214 unit I bought accepted my old Western Digital drives and recovered its configuration automatically from them. It was on line in less than 15 min after I had received it. Performance seems to have massively improved during the last 5 years. The new units have a quad core ARM processor at 1.4 GHZ and 2GB RAM, as opposed to a single core processor at 1.2 GHz and 512 MB RAM for old model. The power brick and the connector are the same, but being new, everything clicks reassuringly and I hope they will age better than their predecessor.

netgear services — Netgear – services enabled on my system

The operating system is the same as before (Netgear 6.10), the unit accepts the same additional applications (plus a video streaming app that could not have worked on the old unit). As before, the unit can connect to a few external cloud storage services to backup its data (but not to Amazon Glacier, unfortunately) and the Web user interface is reasonably pleasant to use. I did not have to configure this unit (the config information is stored on the disks and moves to a new enclosure when you swap the drives) but my recommendation would be to read the manual carefully if you want to configure a unit from scratch (the factory defaults are not always the best, in my opinion).

I paid $250.00 for the diskless unit (it’s discounted at the moment). Netgear also offers models pre-populated with disks. There is a good warranty on the hardware, but tech support is only available as an extra-cost subscription (storage issues can be vexing, hard to diagnose and time consuming to fix, and I understand Netgear can’t offer free support on a device sold for a few hundred dollars). But Tech Support won’t get your data back if your disks are too badly corrupted, so a good backup is your best friend.

Back to photography, now…

PA14161144816 — One of the oldest pictures on the Netgear – Shot in 2002 – scanned and copied from system to system ever since – Pornic – France – Minolta Vectis S1

Amazon Glacier – an archival solution for your digital memories

One of the biggest challenges of digital photography is the long term archival of the images. And because slides and negatives are generally scanned, and end up in the same post-processing chain as “native” digital images, they’re subject to more or less the same issues (I guess that you could still go back to the original negative or the slide and re-scan it, but you would have to locate it first).

lightroom — This early digital picture was taken in 2002 with a Samsung digicam and stored in iPhoto. But it was imported in Lightroom at a later date and is still accessible.

There are three big obstacles to the long term preservation of pictures in a digital world:

the long term availability of the digital asset management software,
the evolving file format standards
the inherent fragility of the medium used for storage

Users of the original version of Apple iPhoto, of Apple Aperture, of Microsoft Expression Media and of plenty of other discontinued products have not lost the original images stored in their photo libraries, but they have lost an easy way to access them – and in some case, of all the changes and adjustments (crops, exposure, contrast and curves) they had performed. Of course, it’s always possible to port the images to … the standard of the moment: Adobe Lightroom, but it may require a serious effort.

Adobe Lightroom is not about to disappear (on the contrary, it has become a de facto monopoly), but Adobe may progressively price it out of the reach of amateurs: they have already transitioned to a subscription-only licensing model, which may make sense for professionals, but is costly for amateurs who used to perform an upgrade every 5 years or so…

Surprisingly, evolving standards have not been too much of an issue so far – after early challenges by patent trolls were defeated, JPEG has led a quiet life. Evolutions of JPEG are being discussed in the international standardization bodies, but they promise to maintain backwards compatibility. At this stage, jpeg is still jpeg, tiff is still tiff, and we can still read files saved 15 years ago.

The proliferation of RAW file formats (how many for Nikon or Canon already? ) is also a potential issue, but computer Operating Systems and RAW converters still keep up – and support most of the old RAW formats, even though it’s probably wise to keep a JPEG or a DNG version of your images, just in case.

readynas_working — A NAS in working order (here, a Netgear Readynas with 4 1TB drives, all up) and Raid 6 configured.

Which brings us to the worst issue by far – the medium (tape, CD, DVD, hard drive, cloud blob) used for storage.

the storage needs have exploded (24 Mpixel is the new normal, and I know amateurs who refuse to shoot with anything less than a 40 Mpixel camera, like the Pros) – shooting 10 Gigabytes worth of images per day has nothing exceptional anymore,
At the same time, the capacity of WORM devices (CD, DVD, …) has stagnated,
solid state media is still expensive,
spinning hard drives have capacity but are fragile,
in spite of all the promises, consumer grade Network Attached Storage (NAS) is far from 100% reliable,
on line backup/archival services and cloud hosting services come and go (many vendors have decided to leave the consumer market, while some services are tied to a specific brand of computer or smartphone hardware), and some free photo sharing services may sell your secrets to advertisers (“if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product”).

corruped_pict — Images can also get corrupted – without a good backup, the image would be lost forever (Lightroom does not store the images in its catalog, just the metadata and the “development” instructions, the issue is with the NAS or with the file sharing protocol).

For long term storage at home, hard drives are currently the best option, but at least in my case, they’ve been quite unreliable: over the last 10 years,

I lost two hard drives on my personal laptop, before I upgraded to a SSD – which has less capacity but seems to fare much better when it comes to reliability,
I lost a hard drive on the Apple Time Capsule I was using for backups (Green Seagate Barracuda)
I lost a LaCie network attached hard drive (a Barracuda also, I’m afraid)
Files got corrupted (see above),
the Netgear ReadyNAS RN104 (with four 1 TB drives arranged in a so-called X-RAID) lost its file allocation tables (even if the Western Digital Red disks were still OK) and had to be reinstalled from scratch – without using X-RAID this time, but under a proper RAID 6 scheme instead.

Netgear issue — The dreaded Netgear error message – search “ReadyNAS – Remove inactive volumes to use the disk. Disk #1,2” on Google to see other examples (source: Netgear Communities Forum)

Fortunately, I’ve always had relatively good backups (not 100% success at recovery – there’s always something that falls thru the cracks, but close enough)

Here is how my pictures are processed and protected, currently:

if I’m using a modern digital camera:
- while traveling – I upload the files to my iPhone over Wi-fi at least once a day – then Apple syncs it to my Photo library in iCloud. It’s not a full backup – my Fujifilm XT-1 camera only uploads JPEG files via Wi-Fi, it does not upload the RAW files, and with a resolution limited to 1776×1184 (a bit above 2 Mpixels) – but it’s convenient, good enough for social network updates, and better than nothing if the SD card fails or the camera is stolen,
- the “exposed” SD or CF card are copied as soon as possible to the SSD of a laptop;
- and I store the SDs for up to 6 month before reformating and reusing them.
if I’m shooting with film:
- I don’t have any form of backup until the film has been sent to the lab, processed and scanned (it’s the rule of the game with film – but it always makes me uneasy when a drop an envelope with a few irreplaceable rolls of film in a USPS mailbox, even if they have a 100% reliability record with me so far).
- when the scans are available, I download them to the SSD of the laptop, and when I receive the negatives from the lab, I keep them in the proverbial shoebox.
once the JPEGs, the RAWs and the scans are on the laptop,
- there is an automatic backup process to an external HDD drive (using Apple TimeMachine), to the NAS (TimeMachine again), and to Amazon Glacier (using the ARQ backup application)
- I upload the pictures to the Netgear NAS for Lightroom processing and archival,
- and the Netgear NAS is backed up to Amazon Glacier using the ARQ client of the Mac.

arq restore — ARQ backup – the restore request is being processed by Glacier. In the background, Lightroom with the folders already restored on the ReadyNAS.

Amazon Glacier

Amazon Glacier is the long term archival service of AWS (the Amazon Cloud). Storage is extremely cheap ($0.004 per GB per month) and Amazon keeps multiple encrypted copies of the data in multiple AWS data centers.
There are all sorts of interesting features for Enterprise clients. But it’s not the exclusive domain of IT departments and the man in the street can also store files on Amazon Glacier.
Now there’s a catch: data retrieval is not instantaneous (Amazon needs 3 to 5 hours to start processing the request in the standard retrieval mode) and it’s not free either ($0.01 per Gbyte in the standard mode) – which is perfectly fine if you remember that Glacier is about long term storage. Consider the typical use cases for an amateur photographer:
- you lost the pictures of that fantastic trip you made 10 years ago – it’s not going to be an issue for you if Glacier starts retrieving the pictures 5 hours from now,
- you lost a hard drive and its local backup with 1 TB of pictures (to a flood, a fire, a burglary, a massive power surge) – again, you’re not going to complain if the data retrieval actually starts a few hours after you requested it: you’ll be happy to retrieve your files, even if it takes time (assuming 1TB, that would be 44 hours on a 50 Mbits broadband circuit continuously operating at that speed, which means much more time in reality) and you will have to pay a few dozens of dollars for the service.

Arq

Arq is a backup solution for Mac OS and for Windows, leveraging the storage and archival services provided by a large selection of public cloud services. I’ve been using it in conjunction with Glacier for a few years, and it’s proved its worth a few times already.

It may seem like overkill – but massive hardware failures, catastrophic events and user errors happen, sooner or later. If you don’t want to lose your pictures eventually, do something, now.

Definitions, Buzzwords and Acronyms:

Archive: collection of records kept for long term retention. Typically, archives are not actively used.

Backup: “process of making extra copies of data, that will be used to restore the original in case it is lost or corrupted”

AWS: Amazon Web Services – the on-demand cloud computing platform of Amazon.com

Cloud (cloud computing): Cloud computing is shared pools of configurable computer system resources and higher-level services that can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort, often over the Internet. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale, similar to a public utility. (Wikipedia)

HDD: hard disk drive – they’re called hard disk drives because there are made of a few hard, metallic disks spinning at high speed, with tiny mechanical arms moving a magnetic head a few microns above the disks. The technology has been here forever, hard drives are cheap, offer a large capacity, but are somehow unreliable over the long run. (see Backup, above)

NAS (NAS Drive): Network Attached Storage – appliance containing one or more hard drives, connected to a LAN, that provides file level data storage to PC or Mac clients. Practically, a NAS is a small file server, generally running a version of Linux, with an easy to use Web based configuration interface. For the user of a PC or a Mac, the NAS just presents itself as another storage volume in Windows Explorer or in the finder. Models supporting two or more disk drives generally offer redundancy mechanisms (mirroring, RAID) to minimize the consequences of a hard drive failure.

RAID: (Redundant Array of Independent Disks): a technology that provides data redundancy and performance improvements in storage systems using multiple physical disk drives. Having a NAS configured with RAID is not the panacea and does not dispense from running regular backups: RAID usually protects the data if one disk fails, but it does not protect against a massive failure (two or more disks fail, a disk controller corrupts the data) or against human error (files erased by mistake).

SSD: solid state drives. With a SSD, information is stored on microchips. There is no moving part. SSDs are both faster and more expensive than Hard Drives, that’s why they are used in laptops, but not in long term storage systems.

69320016 — An image restored from a backup – Atlanta – Nikon FM – Nikon 24mm AF

Having film processed and scanned in 2017

You’re shooting film. Assuming you don’t have access to a dark room for film processing, and don’t want to invest time and money in your own scanning equipment, you will have to rely on photo processors to develop and scan your film. Most labs propose the choice between 2 or 3 scan qualities. What should you order?

Our perception of the “minimum acceptable quality” has changed over time:

In the old pre-smartphone days (12 years ago), the conventional wisdom was that an image was displayed on a monitor at 72 dpi, and that most amateurs seldom printed anything larger than 5 x 7. A 1500 x 2100 scan was good enough.
we now visualize and share most of our images on high pixel density screens (the “Retina displays” of Apple’s products, but also the 4k or 5k screens of recent monitors and TV sets, for instance) which have 3 to 4 times the pixel density of the displays and monitors we used 10 years ago.
far fewer of our images are printed (I don’t know anybody who still asks systematically for 4×6 prints) – we only print the best of our pictures, and when we do it, we tend to print LARGE (coffee table books, 11 x 14 posters). A 2400 x 3600 scan constitutes the new normal.

Resolution of the scan of 24×36 film needed for a print or to fill a screen:

In theory, it’s pure math. Photoshop will prepare images for printing at 300 or 600 dots per inch (DPI). If you want to fill a 10×8 page at 300 dpi, you’ll need an image dimension of W=300 x 8 and L= 300 x 10 that is 2400 x 3000.

Photo processors generally offer scans in three levels of resolution:

low res image: 1200 x 1800 – good for 6×4 prints at 300 dpi at best, a standard laptop screen at 100 ppi, or an iPhone with Retina screen (at 366 points per inch). An image size significantly below 1200 x 1800 will only be good for proofs or vignettes.
medium resolution image : (2048 x 3072 ) : good for 7 x 10 prints or a Macbook Retina or iPad Pro display at 250 points per inch.
high resolution image: ( 4492 x 6777): 15 x 22 print or a large 5 k monitor (24in or more).

Let’s compare two images taken in the Atlanta High Museum of Art with the same type of film and the same camera, and scanned at different resolutions:

Ferrari 250 GT Tour de France. Original Scan: 3088 x 2048 (Costco)

BMW Gina Concept (2008) - Original Scan 1544 x 1024 (the Darkroom) — BMW Gina Concept (2008) – Dream Cars Exhibit. Atlanta (Kodak CN400) – Original Scan 1544 x 1024 (the Darkroom)

The lower resolution picture is visibly less detailed (look at the hardwood floor, look at the grain in the shadows). A resolution of 1024 x 1544 is very limited, even for a WordPress blog.

However, the image size alone is not enough to determine the quality of a scanning service.

First, an image with 1200 x 1800 pixels has not always been scanned with a scanner resolution of 1270 Dots per Inch (36mm = 1.42in; 1800 pixels for 1.42 in = 1270 dpi) – it could have been scanned at a lower resolution and enhanced with interpolation.

Secondly, even with the same scanning equipment and the same resolution, images can be massively different, depending on the settings of the scanner and the skill of the operator: as an example, let’s use two pictures taken on the same type of color film and processed and scanned by two different Wolf Camera in-store labs in Atlanta:

Rialto Bridge, Venice. Original scan: 1800 x 1215 (Wolf Minilab) — Rialto Bridge, Venice. Original scan: 1800 x 1215 (Wolf Camera In Store Lab, 2012)

The second picture looks much more grainy than the first one, even if the JPG files delivered by the minilab contain the same number of pixels in both cases.

Canon A1 - 35-105 zoom - Fujicolor film — Atlanta – Piedmont Park – Original scan: 1818 x 1228 (Wolf Camera In Store Lab, Dec. 2016)

I had noticed the same phenomenon with Costco a few years ago – in the same store, you could get very different results from one day to another one, depending on the experience and skills of the operator on duty that day.

The labs, the services, and the cost

Almost nobody operates in-store minilabs anymore. Pharmacy chains or large retailers that used to process film in-store are now contracting the work to a few centralized labs. They target the amateurs using disposable cameras and 35mm color film.

The enthusiast photographer crowd will be better served by a few large mail to order processing labs such as The Dark Room, The Old School Photo Lab , or North Coast Photo Services (NCPS). They offer a wider range of services and also process color slide and “true” black and white film (such as Kodak’s Tri-X Pan or Ilford’s HP5), in many formats.

I’ve been using The DarkRoom and the Old School Photo Lab a few times. Their prices are roughly in the same ballpark. They develop and scan a 135 film cartridge for $11.00 (the base price includes postage, and The Dark Room provides low resolution scans for free). Medium and High resolution scans are available at extra cost ($4 to $5 extra for 2048 x 3084 scans, $ 9 for 4492 x 6774 scans). The scans are posted on a Web Gallery (no need to wait for a CD to come back through the Postal Service) and can be downloaded to a PC or a Mac as jPEGs (TIFFs are available at extra cost). A free app is also made available to visualize the images on a smartphone.

The differentiator between those services is what happens to the film after it’s been processed:

Pharmacy chains and big retailers typically DON’T return the processed film to the customer (one can assume it is destroyed after scanning). They generally simply return a CD.
Services like The Darkroom or Old School Photo Lab return the processed negatives, with or without a CD, but may charge extra fees to cover the shipping cost (The Darkroom) or the cost of the CD itself (Old School).

Other vendors package their offer differently but the prices are roughly in the same ballpark.

A general issue with all those services is the lead time. You seldom get your scans on line in less than 10 calendar days (135 film, negative color film). Speciality items (slide film, black and white, medium format) may take a few days longer. But we don’t have much choice anymore, do we?

As a conclusion, if your pictures are important to you, learn to know your lab

if they publish a mission statement, read it,
if they describe their process and how their staff is trained, pay attention.
and before you send a large order, test them with a single roll of film – you don’t want to discover after it’s too late that they scanned your negatives at the lowest resolution before destroying them.

London: The O2 – Nikon F3 – Nikkor 24mm F:2.8 AF –

A photo scanner for $12?

ION iPCS2GO - the iPhone 4 and the 4x6 drawer are in place — ION iPCS2GO – the iPhone 4 and the 4×6 drawer are in place

$12.00, really?

I was at Barnes and Noble’s the other day, when I saw this ION iPICS2GO pseudo-scanner in the bargains bin. Not really a scanner, though. It’s a sort of light box. There is no lens or imager inside. It’s just a stand where the iPhone actually taking and processing the pictures will be set.

Coupled with an iPhone, it can scan 3×5 and 4×6 prints, and, more interestingly, 24×36 negatives or slides.

The iPICS2GO was boxed, so I could not see it. But it was only $12. And even if it was a piece a junk, it was worth trying.

Unboxing

The whole thing is rather bulky (the size of a toaster), but it looks solid and well built. The negative holder and the 4×6 print holders are made of plastics of good quality and will not damage the originals, and the iPICS2GO will just needs four AA batteries to work. The print or the negative being scanned is lit by LEDs, which seem efficiently color corrected.

There is an iPICS2GO app on Apple’s app store, that you can download for free and use to control the camera of the iPhone. Although Apple’s built in Camera and Photos applications will give the same results if you “scan” a 4×6 print, you will need the ION application to enlarge and invert the 24×36 negatives. You could do it with Photoshop, but if you had a laptop and Photoshop, you would probably also own a real scanner and would not be interested in this product.

The core audience

As mentioned earlier, the iPICS23GO is not a scanner on its own. But paired with an iPhone 4, it forms a cheap and portable scanner, and its bundled application makes it easy to edit and share the scanned images, via e-mail or through Facebook. I can imagine a situation where you visit old friends or relatives, and they end up opening the proverbial shoe box where their favorite Kodak prints are stored. You scan a few pictures for immediate consumption on the iPhone, or share them around via email or on Facebook.

In this situation, the results are pretty good. IN order to benchmark the iPICS2GO, I scanned a 4×6 color print (the picture had been taken by a good 24×36 camera 10 years ago) with the ION box and with the real scanner of an all-in-one photo printer from Canon. Both images were transferred to a Mac, uploaded in Photoshop, and printed again. The Canon scan is a bit better (wider tonal range), but not that much. If the goal is just to casually look at old pictures on a smartphone, share them on Facebook or even print them again (4×6 prints, please, nothing larger), the ION iPICS2GO fits the bill.

4x6 color print scanned by an iPhone 4 on the iPICS2GO "scanner" — 4×6 color print scanned by an iPhone 4 on the iPICS2GO “scanner”

Scanning negatives, on the other hand, is a much more difficult challenge.

The app does a good job at converting the negative into a positive image, whose quality is acceptable as long as you look at it on the iPhone (the original 24x36mm negative has a diagonal of 43mm; the screen of the iPhone has a diagonal of 3.5in, or 88mm – Th enlargement ratio is roughly 2:1). But don’t try to export it to a PC, or even worse, to print it. As soon as you enlarge it, the quality becomes unacceptable, as can be seen on close-up (below, on the right).

Screen capture of the ION app scanning a negative

Screen Copy of the ION iPICS2GO app (here, processing a negative)

Close up of the image created by the ION app (size: 376x240 points at 128ppi on an iPhone) — Moderate enlargement of the central part of the negative

I have to admit that the ION iPICS2GO is much better gadget than I expected. If your goal is to take snapshots of your favorite prints every now and then in order to have them always with you on your iPhone, it’s perfect. You can also email your images or post them in Facebook directly from the ION app.

On the other hand, if the only source document you have is a negative, don’t expect miracles. In the best case, the resulting image will be somehow acceptable as long as you look at it on your iPhone. Beyond that, it’s hopeless. If you love the picture, bring the negative to a minilab.

But in any case, an old picture reborn on an iPhone is better than any image forgotten in a shoe box.

Bridge over the Verdon river (Provence). Scanned from a 4x6 print on a flatbed scanner — Bridge over the Verdon river (Provence). Scanned from a 4×6 print on a flatbed scanner

The original images were shot in France in “les Gorges du Verdon”, a small scale version of the Grand Canyon, in 2001. I don’t remember which camera I was using.

Browsing CamerAgX from the iPhone

No. I did not write an iPhone app.

I’m just suggesting that you take advantage of a great function of WordPress, the blog engine behind this site.

The “appearance” of a WordPress blog is controlled by “themes“. WordPress developed a “theme” for small form factor devices like the iPhone, and automatically translates blog entries designed for full size devices into pages adapted to a small screen. Just launch the iPhone browser (Safari) and enter Cameragx.com in the address bar. The most recent posts of this blog will be displayed. If you want to see one page in particular, select it with a touch of a finger, and you will get it. Cool!

Now even better.

Let’s say you’re a fanatic supporter of CamerAgX. You can ask the iPhone OS to create a new icon, which will link directly to the CamerAgX web site. Press the + sign at the bottom of the browser screen, and select the “Add to Home Screen” option. A new icon will magically show up on the Home Screen.

By default, the stylized W of WordPress will be displayed – as is the case for www.techandsimple.com (shown in the third screen shot)

If the administrator of the blog created a logo for his/her site and uploaded it on the WordPress server, the Home Screen’s icon will be the site’s logo, as is the case for CamerAgX on the third screen capture.

Tools anyone?

Interestingly, no weird tool or utility was needed to create this blog entry. The screen copies published in this blog entry were captured directly on a regular (non jailbroken) iPhone, using a function of the iOS: to capture a screen copy, you just have to press the Home button, then press briefly the on/off switch at the top of the phone. The screen copy will be saved as a PNG file, and will be presented in the Photo Roll of the Photo application. From there it can be emailed to a PC, or transferred through iTunes.

WordPress also publishes an iPhone app for blog administrators, who will compose new entries, moderate comments and perform edits from their iPhone or iPad, but it is not necessary to download it to visit a WordPress blog (a similar application has also been published by WordPress for Android phones).

One last thing…The CamerAgx logo is a close-up of the top plate of a nice camera. If you’re a regular visitor of this site, you will have recognized it.

Cameragx iphone page — a Cameragx blog entry rendered on an iPhone

Wordpress home screens — The home screen of the iPhone - how WordPress sites are represented

Cameragx icon — The icon of CamerAgX in WordPress

More about WordPress at www.wordpress.org

More about the iPhone at www.apple.com

There are thousands of books about the iPhone, and probably hundreds of thousands of blogs about the same subject. “iPhone 4 Portable Genius” from Paul McFedries is a good book, and I check The iPhone Blog regularly for updates about the iPhone and the iPad.

An update about film scanners: the Plustek Optic Film 7600i

Somebody in the PR department of Plustek must have done a good job: three leading publications, the paper magazine Shutterbug (in the September 2010 issue) and the on-line magazines Luminous Landscape and Imaging-Resource just published detailed reviews of the Plustek Opic Film 7600i scanner.

Now that Minolta (a few years ago) and Nikon (very recently) lost interest in 35mm film scanners, the Plustek 7600i and Epson Perfection V750-M are two of the few remaining options for amateur photographers looking for quality results in the $500 to $1,000 price range. Simpler and cheaper models are more gadgets than photographic tools, and the Nikon Coolscan 9000 ED currently sells for more than $2,000.

I’m not going to paraphrase the reviews. The best is to click on the links and read what the testers thought about the Plustek scanner and its software dotation:

Luminous Landscape: a review by Mark Segal. Mark published a short summary of his review in Luminous Landscape, and made a much more detailed review available as a downloadable PDF file. In his detailed analysis, he included a very interesting comparison of the Plustek with the Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 ED and the Epson V750-M Pro. A must read if you’re looking for a scanner right now.

Imaging-Resource offers a detailed review of the scanner, and also includes a comparison of two scanning applications, Vuescan and Silverlight.

Shutterbug is primarily a paper magazine, available in kiosks and in libraries such as Barnes and Nobles or Borders, but the guys at Shutterbug also make their archives available on line. They regularly publish reviews of scanners and tutorials about scanning. I recommend a very interesting article on how to scan Black and White film, published two years ago. As recommended by the author, I’m using chromogenic film (Kodak CN400) when I shoot in Black and White, and I’ve never regretted it. Interestingly the scanner used by the author, David B. Brooks, was a older Plustek model, the 7200.

It’s getting harder to have film processed around here

Ferrari 250 GT Comp./61 SWB (1961) - The Allure of the Automobile - Atlanta (Olympus OM-2s - Processed and scanned at Costco, in May 2010)

So far, I was lucky. My local Costco warehouse was still processing film: I could drop a 35mm cartridge and have it processed, scanned and transferred to a CD in less than 60 minutes, for less than $5.00. The scanning was done on a good Noritsu machine, correctly tuned, which produced 3000 x 2000 digital images, equivalent to what a 6 Mpixel sensor would capture. The color balance was right, the accentuation minimal, and the saturation was kept within reasonable limits.

Last week, the Noritsu was gone. The employee at the counter directed me to another Costco warehouse, in another part of town. They could develop the film, they could scan it, but could not transfer it to a CD because the CD burner was out of service. I had to come back two days later to get my CD, on which the pictures happened to be over saturated with a rather narrow dynamic range. Not encouraging.

I’m afraid I will have to find another solution. I will try different options (other local minilabs, mail to order, pro labs), and I will report on my findings.

If you can recommend a good lab in the Atlanta area or a good mail to order service, please feel free to do so.

Thank you