Marathon scanning heritage photos--UGH!

The sister that is visiting lives out of state and would like copies (on CD) to take with her when she goes home this week. My older sister that lives here is difficult to deal with, she is the one who we have to give the pics back to because she is the personal representative for our mom's estate and they are part of the estate. Mom died almost four years ago and the estate is STILL not fully settled. That's part of why I'm annoyed and just don't want to deal with her anymore. I am surprised she gave the pics to my middle sister at all, even for a week. She has been hoarding all the family photos for decades, and she's been a difficult PITA throughout this whole mess with the estate, probate, etc.

Several months ago her lawyer had everyone ask what they wanted from what's left of the estate (the tangible property is all that's left to divide), and one of my top things was the photos. I don't really care about too much else. I don't know who, if anyone, else has any interest in them but I suspect my older sister does if for no other reason than to spite me so I wouldn't get them. She wanted everyone to sign a release for the court stating that we've received everything we have coming, except she hasn't distributed the stuff yet. Sorry, but NO.

With my request to her lawyer I suggested that if I did receive the photos I'd be willing to scan them all, at my convenience, and give CD copies to any/all other siblings that wanted them. I really didn't want to do it this way. It was middle sister's idea to try to do it while she's in town visiting (nice thought because she wanted to help, but the timing was terrible for taking on something of that magnitude because I'm going out of town this week), and middle sister was willing to go get them and bring them back and deal with our nutbag older sister which I don't want to do unless/until it means getting my part of what's left from the estate for good.

If I suggested doing it piecemeal while she's still PR for the estate, I just know she would insist that I drop the ones I'm done with off in person just to make my life difficult and that's not going to happen. If they were mine to do with what I wanted, it wouldn't be an issue because I could take my time and just mail everyone the CDs. I'm not really doing it for them, I'm doing it for me but I'm just nice like that.

I've had the scanner for a long time so that particular one probably isn't available anymore, but it's an Epson 3170 Photo. It has a backlight inside the lid and several different sized trays that sit on the glass so if you have slides or negatives they can be scanned too. For photos or other regular printed media there is a white panel that slides in the lid. I bought that model expressly because of the ability to scan negatives and slides because DH's parents had mostly slides.

It's the first time I've really used it and it's working pretty well all things considered. I ended up being overwhelmed by how many slides his parents gave us, so I opted to just send them in and have them scanned and put on DVDs last year when Costco had a sale, but it's working great for those bigger negatives (bigger than 35mm from the olden days, LOL) that were in my mom's stuff that I doubt I'd be able to get printed or scanned anywhere now.

I'm not one for games either, but at this point I just SO want to be DONE with older sister. Period. She has bungled this whole estate mess since the very beginning and none of it had to be this way which is so sad. When the time comes and she finally does give me whatever I'm going to get of what's left, I doubt I will ever speak to her again and several of my brothers feel the same way.

I don't want to keep the photos here because she made my middle sister SIGN for them because they are listed as an asset of the estate. Which should have been distributed MONTHS ago. I don't want my middle sister to get in trouble or for my idiot sister to claim middle sister is in contempt of court since the probate still isn't settled. The whole situation is beyond ridiculous at this point.

And what's really, REALLY crazy is that there were several photos of mine that were in the box that were NEVER at my mom's house, one in particular that I had been looking for since we moved and I was puzzled because it never turned up when I unpacked my stuff. My older sister HAD to have taken those photos from my studio in my old house at some point without my knowing, it's the ONLY way they would have been mixed in with my mom's stuff. (Mom had Alzheimer's and pretty bad arthritis in her final years and there is no way she would have been in my upstairs studio for any reason at all. Mom wouldn't have been safe on the stairs with no railing, and I KNOW I didn't give her the pictures either. I had printed them to scrap them, they were on a work table in my studio and they went missing at some point. Now I know where they went, and honestly I'm not surprised.) To say I'm beyond frustrated would be an understatement.

I should be working on it right now, but DH took off by himself for the lake cabin yesterday and hasn't decided to come back yet, my sister and BIL that are staying with us had plans for today with his folks, I'm stuck here alone with my five year old, our 14 year old dog had a weird health related episode in the middle of the night so I'm exhausted and I have a MILLION things to do before I leave for the retreat on Wednesday. And I'm burned out on the project already and there's still so much more to do. Ugh.

Thanks for the info. It's good to know, I thought I remembered seeing something like that at one point but couldn't remember if it was in PSE or in the scanning software itself. I'll have to check it out when I have more time. I did try to leave at least a small margin between the photos whenever possible, but some of the "pages" were pretty tight.

We got most of it done before my sister left town early today. There were still some negatives I didn't get to, but many of them were duplicates so they weren't all that critical. I still need to burn the images onto CDs for her but I thought I would try to separate the ones she would want most to make it easier for her to print them out herself if she wants to later (she's not very tech savvy). It still was annoying to have to do it in such a hurry though, and especially since I knew I was leaving town myself and had a lot of other things I could have done with that time while my sister was in town.