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It seems no good deed goes unpunished.
Last month my uncle died and at the funeral his late wife's family gave my mother a photo book of her family and a small stack of loose pictures. Last Sunday I took those home with my to digitize them so that everyone can have them. Scanning with my flatbed scanner isn't really an option because it's a thick photo book. So I've been using the Google Photoscan app on my phone. And honestly, the photos come out better than when I would scan them (colour wise especially). They're not perfect, some have a bit of glare and some I manually have to set the corners of the photos, but it's giving pretty good results. I plan on copying all the pictures to USB sticks for my parents, aunt and uncle and my cousin to give to them when we go visit later this month.
The photos range from the 1920s up until the early 1980s. A lot of photos of football (soccer) teams, church groups and friend groups, also a lot of them taken at social gatherings. And a bunch of professional/formal pictures. There's no real rhyme or reason how they're stuck in book. I think my grandmother just had a shoe box of pictures and each page grabbed one and then found other pictures that went well together. Most of them are black and white and a part of them are colour but have a yellow/orange cast over them.
I'm hoping to finish today but yesterday I shared the Google Photo album with my parents and sister and that's when trouble started. My father believes what he sees on TV and thinks I should magically be able to sharpen/edit/colour correct the pictures with one click. Sure Google Photos has suggested some improvements for part of the black and white pictures; make the white whiter, the darks darker and sharpen it. But to me it makes the images look unnatural and removes all the character from it. And most of them are a bit blurry, they're old snapshots. I tried a couple of things to colour correct the oranged photos without success.
I also don't want to edit them and provide the originals to everyone so they can decide what to do with them. If my father wants professional results he can go to a professional. Be glad I'm willing to spend hours digitizing them, because the rest of the family sure doesn't know how to do that or cares to do it.
It is nice to see all those photos. The sport/religious/friend groups doesn't mean much to me, although I think I have been able to pick out my grandfather in some of them, who died when I was 5. But having my grandparents' wedding pictures is really nice and I think in some of the photos of gatherings are my great grandparents (both sides).
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