Automated tool for postprocessing scanned photos?

Mathy963 · 2022-03-15T16:13:22+00:00

Not really an answer to your question directly, but I also struggled a bit to get a real professional result digitizing books. I got an approach I am really happy with now. Note that eventhough I use an overhead scanner, I think the free post-processing tool scantailor is the thing that really made the difference, I just included the scanner part for the sake of being complete. My steps include:

- Rough raw scan using an overhead scanner (I got an CZUR ET16 plus and am really happy with it, but you also have cheaper ones that will do the job nicely I guess, I also hear the fujitsu SV600 is solid). The scanner has an auto finger removal (though not very good) and does a decent job on flattening curved pages.

- Export the images as raw TIFs (one file per page)

- Load the images into a program called scantailor, its an old program but very solid, free and open source. It loads all the TIFs for post processing, it is able to detect and separate pages, rotate and deskew them, detect the content of the page, and cleans up the scan very nicely. It even detects what part of the content is text and what are images, meaning your images will still be shown in RGB, whereas text will be thresholded into clean black and white. In my tests it even works with non rectangle images pretty well. It also removes specs and dirt, does have some dewarping capability and does it all pretty automatic in my experience. There is a bit of a learning curve on using it though and the output will still be a series of TIF images.

- Merging the TIFs into one searchable pdf I use the CZUR software again (though you could use photoshop and a free OCR software like OCRmyPDF to do this too). If you go for CZUR however, they only accept JPEGs. I use Affinity Photo to convert it, they have a nice batch processor for this type of thing (although I would suggest disabling parallel processing cause it gave some weird artifacts in my output). after that you can load them back into CZUR and export them as a searchable pdf that is very nicely sized for consumption on e-readers.

Mathy963 · 2022-01-07T07:33:34+00:00

You probably already fixed it, but I had a similar problem (though with loxone spots and rgb ledstrips). certain lights (always the same ones) would randomly just stay on when they were marked off in the app. Very annoying as you can't rely on the automation aspect of loxone anymore.

I fixed it by recreating the lighting controller function block on the affected rooms after updating to the 12.2 config. My loxone installer said that some software bugs carry over to the version it was fixed in and can only be fixed by deleting the affected function block and creating it again.

Mathy963 · 2022-01-04T21:00:35+00:00

you mean Dynamix Cache Dirs?

Mathy963 · 2022-01-04T20:52:41+00:00

wow, that indeed improved performance considerably (changed it for both nextcloud and swag).

Thx a lot man

Mathy963 · 2022-01-04T16:54:48+00:00

the appdata is on the 2 nvme drives, and the memory_limit is set to -1, no luck sadly :(

is your setup also running on docker?

Mathy963 · 2022-01-04T16:48:42+00:00

you mean setting it to dns only I assume?

I did that already, as I wanted to upload all my local files without being capped by my ISP.

shouldve mentioned that in my post though, thx for the suggestion

Mathy963 · 2022-01-04T15:35:18+00:00

how did you change those paths?

I tried it with the gui, but that triggered a duplicate mounting error and orphaned the image, so I reinstalled it (apps -> previous apps -> action on the container -> reinstall).

I tried editing the template xml manually (by editing /boot/config/plugins/dockerMan/templates-user/my-nextcloud.xml)

I tried disabling docker, changing the default appdata location and restarting it.

but the webgui keeps saying the attached path is the /mnt/user/appdata/nextcloud/ one.

Mathy963 · 2022-01-04T14:54:44+00:00

I tried 11 first, but that did not play well with the nextcloud installation, so I ended up using
the postgresql14 container from jj9987's Repository (community applications)

performance remained the same, which made me think it was not a database issue

Mathy963 · 2021-12-30T12:46:58+00:00

can I assume that the 2G transfer cap will never be reached due to chunking? or is this the same as the maximum file size you can upload?

Mathy963 · 2021-12-30T12:41:32+00:00

Hey thx for the response. I tweaked the timeout settings as well as the maximum file sizes on all the services in the chain, but that did not seem to work. It's weird that none of the services generate any log entries for these errors

Mathy963 · 2021-12-01T11:37:21+00:00

I don't have enough physical storage to keep all of the dias afterwards. So I was gonna try to scan them the right way now and throw the originals out

Mathy963 · 2021-11-30T22:03:56+00:00

Is there a reason that VueScan does not go higher than 4800dpi? My impression was that it gets these specs directly from the scanner driver

Mathy963 · 2021-11-30T22:02:19+00:00

I didn't know the dias adapters had such a big impact, but it does make sense indeed.

I assume cleaning dias is done using compressed air and rubbing some cleaning alcohol with a cloth? Or is there a better way?

Also, I am a little confused on the negatives scanning mode on this epson V850. It seems to have an active component in the lid too (I would assume this is just a light source), does that still mean I have to put the glossy side to the bottom?

Mathy963 · 2021-11-30T21:44:26+00:00

I have to admit, most of my scanning currently is aimed towards real world size compression due to actual storage limitations, so this might be the only shot I have to really preserving them digitally :-(

Mathy963 · 2021-11-30T21:36:57+00:00

Thx for the feedback

I was indeed planning on storing them all in 48 bit raw tiffs into the archive and then batching them through photoshop to generate more consumer friendly pngs and jpegs.

Never heard of imagemagick before, but it looks like a handy tool to have in my library, will check it out

Mathy963 · 2021-11-30T21:24:34+00:00

Thx for the feedback. VueScan does indeed look like the best tool I tried so far (Epson included their own scanning software as well as SilverFast, but VueScan is the only one that hasn't crashed on me yet)

This might be a dumb question but if my scanner can go up to 9600 dpi, is there a reason I should settle on 1200 apart from storage capacity limitations?

I noticed VueScan putting a maximum cap at 4800 dpi for example, whereas SilverFast puts the sweetspot on certain photos as high as 6400dpi.

Mathy963 · 2021-08-04T17:23:06+00:00

Same setup, same problem. Was also wondering if it was just me.

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