Scan multiple photos with a single pass

From time to time, the thought crosses many a shutterbug's mind that it might be a good idea to dig through the old pre-digital archives and turn some antique snapshots into bits and bytes. That brain nugget soon loses its luster, though, after the tedium sets in of scanning photos one at a time with a flatbed scanner. If your images are small enough, however, Ransen Software has a way to speed up your workflow. It's a program released today called RansenScan ($29.95, free demo available).

What you do is place several snaps on your scanner. There must be space between the images so the software can distinguish them. When you scan the multiple photos, RansenScan will turn them into individual image files. The interface displays the actual scan and the individual "subscans" side-by-side. You can also correct from within the software elements like size, color, contrast, brightness and saturation, as well as crop and rotate the images. In addition, snaps can be printed directly from the application should you want fresh prints of the photos.

The software also has a feature for extracting individual portraits from group shots and creating composite prints from them.

If you've been balking about digitizing your photo archives, RansenScan just might be the spur you need to overcome your procrastination.