Having bought a new Canon scanner I am underwhelmed by the bundled software.
Good points - put a single photo of any size in the scanner and push the auto scan button and it quickly scans the picture and crops to the edges.
Bad points - despite the alleged high possible resolutions it doesn't seem to offer more than 600 dpi via the configuration utility and I can't even get it to auto scan at that resolution - obviously not understanding how the (undocumented) features work.
So I am contemplating using other software. I thought it came with Photoshop Elements but it turns out that was only the MK 1 version, not the MK 2 that I have.
So - bundled software apparently not much good, so use something else.
TWAIN compliant scanner, so a lot of software packages can use it. I have had acceptable results with Windows Paint - I can select the resolution beyond 300/600 DPI but this scans to a buffer and needs manually cropping and saving, so isn't good for bulk scanning loads of photos.
Given the above, there seem to be two routes to go:
(1) Free or paid scanner software - I know about Vuescan because I helped a friend get an old semi-professional SCSI scanner set up. Google doesn't really turn up much else. The Standard Edition is $39.95 (about £27) but doesn't support scanning of slides/negatives and the Pro Edition is $89.95 (about £61).
(2) Photo manipulation software such as Photoshop Elements 13 (about £65 from Amazon - 11 and 12 are about £10 more!). GIMP is free but previous experience suggests that it is possibly too powerful and complex for this simple application.
So, scanner users.
What software do you use to bulk scan prints?
I think the facilities I need are a one click operation to:
scan picture
crop automatically
generate file name
so the number of interactions is cut to a minimum.
It would be nice to load in several photos at once and have them automatically recognised as multiple pictures and saved to different files, but that would be icing on the cake.
Cheers
Dave R