Photographing Documents

Recently I thought it'd be a good idea to start digitizing my documents, things I have around the house, business papers, scraps of trivia, whatever.

But I've picked through it somewhat, because some of the trivia on scraps of paper is the sort of thing I'll never need forever. But some of it, hey, I don't know if I'll ever need someone's phone number again. So what the hey. Except to do it, then to give it all file names, then to categorize it, blah blah, it gets complicated and time consuming.

I haven't got a great way to photograph these things. Scanning takes too long with my old scanner. So I got it set up with the camera on top of some books, aimed the best I can do it in a consistent way, at the papers before me. Then click it and move on to the next one. I literally did over 1400 pages over the weekend, term papers, college notes, all kinds of crap.

As for all my college and other term papers, I've had the stack of them setting in the basement for years and really didn't want to throw them away. Not that they're any good, really, or likely to be something I'll want to read again. But it just seems bad to lose them forever. Yet I don't want the stack around forever. So I photographed them, put them on the computer, and shredded the whole thing. Over 1000 pages of stuff shredded!

Now I need to go through and label them, or maybe not. Maybe I'll just put them in a big folder that is called term papers -- for this school and this school -- and if I ever want to see them, it wouldn't take endless browsing to find them.

I worked on this project some today, trying to rotate files, brighten them, etc. I did a bunch manually till I figured out a way to batch process them, and obviously that saved a lot of time.