Suggestions: How to Digitize Old Magazines

[fashON]

Hey all! I guess this is a bit off-topic query, but can anyone brief me on how to digitize my vast collection of fashion mags, some of them dating almost 7-8 years back? They're starting to take up too much space and I've been planning to select my favorites and preserve those articles/pics on a hard drive.
I might have to get a scanner for this, I'm aware, but what about the software? For example, I'd love it if I could quickly "brand" the files (I suppose in PNG or PDF format) and set some general rules as to which files end up in which folder right after scanning (so that I could trace things a few steps back if need be). There must be a way to automate that, right? Anything that can make this as painless for me as possible, really not looking to spend a month on this or something...

Any type of advice is welcomed, thanks!

 

[kokobombon]

Way before digital mags were available, I used to scan my mags. Old to preserve, new to share editorials with this forum. It´s not really a painless process to do it properly... you´ll need a good brand scanner (at the time I was using Agfa), you´ll need photoshop to put halves together and to get rid of the "paper texture", the crappier the paper the harder to do it. Then you can save as jpg or other format. Scanners have their own software that you need to install, you can choose where and in which format to save once the scan is done.

 

[whatdoyoumean]

I've had a similar issue with football mags, they started to overflow into the living room lol. I remember we did some calculating as to which is the cheaper route - sending the boxes (and boxes!) of mags to a scanning service or just straight up buying a scanner. And due to how many there were, we almost went for the second option, but a friend of his came to our rescue and let us use one of the scanners that has been laying around in his office... So, I fear you might walk into similar issues soon, and yeah, be careful with how much you end up spending in the end.

Software-wise, I think most DMS apps (like Paperwise, FileCenter...) will do the trick and here's a good guide as to how to archive old paper documents headache-free. Above all, aim to organize them chronologically, or even by the name of the designer/model/magazine, whichever sounds more logical to you. Then, set rules as to how will the DMS arrange each of the incoming scans - for example, those with the keyword "elle" will go in that folder, those with the keyword "scarf' in that one, and so on. Once you scan a page, tag it with a short keyword based on that strategy and just add the next number in the line. Of course, you can envision this in plenty of other ways, the point is to stay on top of things at all times.

 

[ivano]

The worst part is you might cut them page by page, because if you scan it just like that, you can see the shadows between pages. And of course there's a lot of work of retouching your scans then. It's a hell of work to do it. So sad you can't keep your entire collection.

 

[aracic]

If you want to save time, get an automatic scanner that you can 'feed' multiple pages so it automatically scans them without you having to flip and change page by page. I believe that would be the most 'painless' option for your project, because manually scanning and preserving tear sheets takes a lot of time. If you want to avoid shadows around the magazine's spines, you'll have to tear out all the pages and the fastest way to do that is to cut them but I would advise against that. I personally detach pages by heating up the spine and then gently peeling off chunks of pages at the same time to avoid unwanted tearing.

However, if the oldest magazines you're interested in preserving are 7 to 8 years old I would advise checking pre-existing digital editions, since most magazines were already publishing digitally around that time. Zinio, Magzter and Pressreader have a vast collection of magazines that you have to pay for, but if you are persistent and look hard enough you can find a lot of the mainstream titles for free online.