More on preserving digital memories

We have a two bedroom apartment. We use the extra room for my junk. I’ve been hauling this crap around for years and some of it is very dear to me. Most of it isn't physically valuable and can be digitized then thrown away. There are things like my high school diploma that I want the physical item but things like my senior picture that are more useful in digital format.

Vidya recently was out of town for three weeks. During those three weeks I destroyed the apartment. I had shit everywhere attempting to triage the stuff in our spare bedroom. Vidya’s mom stays there when she’s here and I want her to feel welcome and not like she’s staying in my locker.

During my three-weeks-oh-shit, I digitized over 5,500 items, mostly papers. There were some photographs, and some irregular items like electronic parts and some craft items that young kids and my life have given me. It was a very interesting three weeks. I calculated that the papers I scanned would make a stack about 6 feet high.

I think you’ll appreciate that one of the toughest challenges is being able to place either the camera or the lights at a 45 degree angle from themselves and/or the subject. I had particular problems with shiny documents that wouldn't lay flat. The curvature often caused glare on the curves that was subtle and hard to catch without checking each irregular object as I went.

This may be preaching to the choir, but I thought it worth mentioning the lessons I learned from my efforts. I hope you find something here useful:

CAPTURING

I abandoned the scanner in favor of my digital camera even though the scanner offered much better quality. I calculated that to scan my 5,500+ documents would take over 70 hours if all things went well with each item and I didn't have to do preview scans. I was able to digitize over 5,500 documents in a calculated duration of 7 hours because of the speed the camera offered.
I set my camera on a tripod and at a neutral zoom (around 52 mm).
I focused the camera perfectly, verifying with maximum zoom on my camera’s LCD, then I set the lens to manual focus to keep the camera from attempting to refocus with each shot. This ensured that pushing the shutter release takes the photo immediately and that you can capture at maximum speed. If you don’t go full manual, the camera will waste time (and battery) focusing each time and in batch mode it will get some percentage of photos wrong — you’ll have to find the blurry item and re-shoot it.
I used a shutter release cable to ensure that I didn't move the camera when taking the photo with the slow shutter speed.
I used a tripod so that I could use a relatively slow shutter and high F stop for a high depth of field. This was necessary to make sure that even thick documents were tack sharp. The extra depth of field is also needed for irregular items like framed photos or gadgets that you may want to digitize.
I marked off the borders on my surface with a dark marker on the surface I was using to ensure I placed papers within the frame.
I positioned a square edge along one of the borders so that documents with a straight edge could be quickly positioned (at least on one side). This is super important for cropping the images later. You now have at least one edge you can depend on no matter what. Better yet would be have two straight edges, but I had a lot of irregular items so I just drew a line where I wanted letter sized documents to sit and another for legal and A4. Good enough. For all other items I would peek through the viewfinder.
By using the tripod, the markings, and the cable release, I could shoot documents without looking at the camera. This meant that all my focus could be on swapping documents or flipping them over. Grab, position, click, flip, click, trash. Grab, position, click, flip, click, trash. Grab, position, click, flip, click, trash.
Get the white balance right in the camera whenever possible. It’s a pain in the ass adjustment to make and it’s hard to apply it across multiple items so let the camera get it right by spending the time to set it properly for your lights and environment — 1 time. This is not always possible because conditions might change or the camera may not have sufficient controls but if you care, this really matters and will save you a lot of time to get right in the camera.
When dealing with documents get and wear rubber / (non)latex gloves. This is a MUST. It’s so much easier to deal with paper using gloves. I buy the Blue Nitrile gloves and get large. This makes a BIG difference in your speed because you can separate and handle pages with confidence without wetting your fingers. I was able to use the same pair for many sessions before I tore them.
Remove all staples and binders before processing to really speed up document handling, especially for double sided originals. Trying to flip something with staples is just slow and laborious. I removed the staples and bindings from each batch before beginning to shoot any of them. When I did not, the context switching cost me lots of time.
Try to keep the lighting and exposure the same no matter what across each session — whether that session is 1 document or 50 documents. If you can keep it consistent then you can post process all documents at once. Which leads me to…
Do all similarly shaped documents together in batches. Don’t scan a large letter size document followed by an A4 document followed by a letter, or you won’t be able to select the group in post processing and crop them all identically and apply the same adjustments in mass.

POST PROCESSING

Consider separating capture from conversion / publish. I think it helps you move at a faster pace and offers better consistency. YMMV.
Don’t forget black/white. Some documents look much better in b/w, particularly things that were b/w to begin with such as old photos or monochromatic documents. [Do not convert to gray-scale as photos do not have a high enough resolution to tolerate the conversion.]
Because I was capturing by camera, I could use photo software to process the photos and document software to process the documents. This is a bit abstract to describe but fixing what needs to be fixed photographically is different that optimizing the PDF or publishing process. The photo aspects of post processing include: exposure, crop/rotation, color correction, saturation, tone, naming, quality. The aspects of document post processing include: grouping (which pages go in which documents), naming, quality, and multi-page document format (TIFF/PDF). I used Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to produce the photo aspects and PaperPort for processing documents. I have been using PaperPort for 20 years so for me that was an easy choice. It excels when you have lots of documents that require lots of organizing.
Another advantage of using photo software (such as Lightroom) is that you can actually fix photos. Lightroom (and other photo editing software) allow you to do things like remove scratches, fix tears, some water damage, and exposure problems. The photo software specializes in these tasks so it can often be quite simple to make dramatic improvements to photos. I don’t know what the quantity of your items is, but I fixed a ton of stuff in post processing.
Do all photo adjustments to all the documents BEFORE grouping and filing. This will allow for maximum sync’d edits. For example, in Lightroom, I can select 100 images and click “auto-sync” and then any change I make to the currently selected document gets applied to all 100 images. If I’ve scanned 100 letter sized documents, then I can crop all 100 perfectly by cropping the one I’m viewing. This feature saved me hours.