Photo digitisation workshop

 A successful workshop was held in the Heritage Centre on Tuesday 12th July. Participants had each booked in for a half hour session to learn effective use of the scanners in order to digitise old photos, slides, negatives and even a glass slide.

Claudia provided excellent instruction on slides, old photos, negatives and more with clear tips on how to use the tools embedded in the scanner driver's software. Pleasing results were shared using colour correction, saturation settings and more.

Di provided guidance to those with old photos on the Canon 300 LIDE scanner and demonstrated first with one photo then had participants scan their photos under her expert guidance making cropping and colour alterations along the way.

Some minimal instruction was provided by Carmel on how to use the free online tool Photopea to eliminate scratches on scanned photos. She used the Spot Healing brush found under the Bandaid icon on the left side of the screen.

Spot healing via Photopea

She also showed how to make the brush larger using the Dropdown arrow that appears at the top of the screen once the brush has been selected.

Brush size

A reference was made to the free Office app for phones which is one of the many apps that can be used for scanning documents and photos. A further write up on use of that app is available here.

A second workshop will be held later in the year for those who would like to perfect their scanning skills. Thanks to the workshop leaders who shared their skills.

Coming up - Zoom session at 7.30pm on July 27th is all about Photos. 

Find out about programs, apps and more for sharing family photos. What will you do with all those digitised photos to make sure they are still available for others after you have gone? We look forward to you joining us. 

Photo digitisation project

What is happening on Tuesday afternoons?

Each Tuesday at 1 pm a band of five volunteers works on digitising the photo collections held in the Heritage Centre. The long term aim is to have all the print photos stored in archival safe paper and boxes.

The current collections being scanned are the Margaret Chinn collection which was previously housed in plastic sleeves in an old filing cabinet and headstone photographs from local cemeteries that were housed in plastic pocket albums. The Margaret Chinn collection is comprised of photos published in the Cooroy Rag newspaper and was donated from her estate.

Peggy, Margaret and Carmel  label each photo with an individual number, with number  details recorded on the outside of the archival envelopes. Matching descriptions and text are added into databases for easy retrieval. Photos are then scanned at high resolution by Claudia and Heather and added to the correct envelope. These envelopes are then stored in labelled archival boxes.

All data and scans are backed up at the end of each session to an external hard drive and the digital copies of the photos will soon start to appear in the Digital Library accessible only in the Heritage Centre on the internal network. 

Margaret accepting the
cheque on behalf of the group.

The Cooroy Rag Grant

Tuesday night, the 17th August was a big night at the Saw and Mill restaurant when the Cooroy Rag newspaper presented 21 Grants to local community groups ranging from sporting and family history, to schools and pony clubs. Nearly 100 people enjoyed the night and the Cooroy-Noosa Genealogy group  was successful in receiving a grant of $1000 to assist in its digitisation project of over 10,000 local photos.

The Rag is unique in the newspaper world as it is owned by the Cooroy and hinterland community and all profits are returned back to the community.

Once our grant money was received we purchased additional archival storage boxes and envelopes to store both the photos and the Cooroy Rag newspapers.

A second scanner was also purchased for the project. Two articles have appeared in the Cooroy Rag about this project and this week there is an an article on page 8 about Margaret Chinn the former owner of the Cooroy Rag. Our thanks are extended to the Cooroy Rag for supporting this digitisation project

If you would like to be involved come along one Tuesday afternoon or ask one of the team how you can help. We'd be delighted to have you on board.