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photo scanners

What is the best flat bed photograph scanner compatible with MacBook Air / Big Sur 11.2.3 ?

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 11.2

Posted on Mar 23, 2021 2:46 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Mar 23, 2021 3:10 AM

I, like a lot of others, took these many months of lockdown/pandemic to visit my old family photos and commit them to digital format. I found that the actual scanner used is not as important as the software that I used to scan and process the scans. Mac provides both Preview and Image Capture as part of the OS for image capture. You'll find that Image Capture is the more flexible of the 2. But both can adequately capture the scanned photos to files.


And then there is the post-scan processing of the captured photos. At the top end is Photoshop, which costs $$. I used Gimp myself, which is free, but not as full-featured as Photoshop.


A for actual scanners, I'd say that any inkjet printer with a scanner will work perfectly fine for most photos. Only if you have some very technical size/format/color issue would I say you'd need to look at a specialist scanner. If it's just family photos and such, then almost any of the HP or Epsom inkjet printers with scanners will work. FWIW - I used a very old HP PSC-1410 to scan in all 3,000+ of my photos.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 23, 2021 3:10 AM in response to misterbebo

I, like a lot of others, took these many months of lockdown/pandemic to visit my old family photos and commit them to digital format. I found that the actual scanner used is not as important as the software that I used to scan and process the scans. Mac provides both Preview and Image Capture as part of the OS for image capture. You'll find that Image Capture is the more flexible of the 2. But both can adequately capture the scanned photos to files.


And then there is the post-scan processing of the captured photos. At the top end is Photoshop, which costs $$. I used Gimp myself, which is free, but not as full-featured as Photoshop.


A for actual scanners, I'd say that any inkjet printer with a scanner will work perfectly fine for most photos. Only if you have some very technical size/format/color issue would I say you'd need to look at a specialist scanner. If it's just family photos and such, then almost any of the HP or Epsom inkjet printers with scanners will work. FWIW - I used a very old HP PSC-1410 to scan in all 3,000+ of my photos.

Mar 23, 2021 10:50 PM in response to ksaro1

thanks much for sending the info above, its very helpful. So now I have a better understanding of what to look for. I'll look into Gimp since I don't want to spend too much money. What's more important is that I can edit the photographs to remove scratches or fill in places where the photo is damaged.


thank you again, very helpful!

photo scanners

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