I've decided to get serious about an electronic logging of my collection of about 3500 chips. My plan is to attend Terry Shaffer's seminar on Friday at the convention and probably purchase his software. While Terry's software comes with a large number of chip scans I want to use scans of my actual chips. High quality scans would also be useful for insurance and theft recovery.
So step one was the purchase of a Epsom V500 scanner which arrived today ($161 w/free shipping from B&H Photo.) What I'd like is a "Scanning Chips For Dummies" lesson. This project will be a lot of work (at least for me) so I'd really like to get it right and not want to redo anything.
My chips are stored in 20 chip plastic pages. I'm thinking that I'll take a page at a time and remove the chips from their plastic flips and put the 20 chips directly on the scanner bed then take a scan then flip each chip and take another scan. Then I'll use the software that comes with the scanner to separate each chip image so that when I'm done I'll have 40 image files corresponding to the front and back of 20 chips. Then on to the next page of 20 chips.
So I'm looking for advice on the entire process. Is 20 chips per scan about right? What settings should I use (150 dpi?) Any other adjustments of the scanner settings? After the scan then what? Do you first orient the scanned chip and then reduce the scanned area of each chip to a small rectangle? What sort of label do I give each image file? Am I making jpegs or something else? Is there any advantage to holding off on the scanning until I install the collecting assistant software? Any help or tips are appreciated. Extra credit for keeping it as idiot-proof as possible.
Thanks.