Ad Hoc Artwork Scanning Station

If you're a parent, you may also have struggled to keep up with all the artwork your child brings home. At first, I saved everything. But I quickly ran out of filing cabinets!

I tried a scanner for a while. It produced good results, but took more than a minute of processing per document.

Instead, I decided to set up an ad hoc scanning platform. I dusted off an old digital camera and got out my trusty Sony VCT-R100 Lightweight Compact Tripod. Then, I went to the hardware store and bought a 6-inch long 1/4"-20 headless bolt (also sometimes called a threaded rod) and a 1/4"-20 x W3/8" x L7/8" Coarse Thread Coupling Nut.

I put the coupler over the screw on top of the tripod, where a camera would normally go. Once I'd installed the coupler, I screwed the headless bolt into it. Then I screwed the camera onto the bolt, using the camera's threaded mounting port.

I put a large piece of white poster board down on a table, to serve as a neutral background, and set down the tripod and camera adjoining it.

When the room I'm working in is poorly-lit, I supplement with an LED desk light.

I cut down on output storage footprint by using JPEG image encoding, which is the default on most digital cameras.

To save time and trouble, it helps to minimize the amount of necessary post-processing. When I photograph small items or items with lots of detail, I avoid the need to crop by brining them closer to my camera. To accomplish this, I built a raised platform out of wood slats. I swap it in and out as needed.

Sometimes, post-processing is unavoidable. Although JPEG is a lossy image format, there are utilities to perform simple JPEG image transformations without additional information loss. On Windows, there's jpegcrop and JPEGCrops. On macOS, the Photos app performs lossy transformations, but always preserves the original file to apply them against, which reduces loss.