Tag: negative

Are raw files the negatives of photos?

So as you may have seen, I bought a negative scanner which actually works on ubuntu. But it got me thinking, since I lost a ton of photos back when I screwed around with my server hard drives a while ago, its great that old photos came with negatives.

I didn’t even remember that photos came with negatives till a friend pointed it out to me one day while I was talking about how I use to take photos at school and sell them to friends (one of my long forgotten entrepreneur enterprises at school).

But now what happens?

You don’t get negatives with digital cameras of course.

Are raw files the negatives of digital cameras?

Are we all expected to be excellent digital archivists?

So now is a good time to learn how to install dropbox on x64 linux I think, although I’m also thinking about paying the money for Ubuntu One too.

At last a cheap Negative film scanner which works with Linux

negative film scanner

I’ve done the research and finally I found a negative film scanner which works with gnu/Linux (ubuntu). Its the Maplins Film and Slide Digital Scanner. It works exactly how I would expect it to. You scan the slides into the memory of the machine or even on to a SD card then you connect the whole device to a pc via usb port to transfer the images out of the device.

The only issue I’ve seen is, you can’t scan while the device is connected to a pc, which is a pain because it charges/powers over USB (even ejecting the device doesn’t help). The device has a total of 30meg of on board storage is pretty shocking specially when your scanning photos at 5 mega pixel. Of course adding the SD card (it doesn’t support SDHC either) you can get loads more space.

The device is great, it did cost £50 but you can pretty much do most of the scanning while sitting on the sofa. Now if only there was a quicker way to scan through my long history of camera negatives. I got about 60 negatives to go.