Scan and Crop Old Photos from Albums using Linux Tools

We now live in this world of instant socializing by sharing our photos and tweets on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  Sometimes, you want to relive your past memories from long ago (before the age of smartphones) and share these treasured photos on Facebook, Instagram or Flickr.  I've got great news if you're Linux user.  It's possible.  Just follow my instructions and you'll be on your way to digitizing photos from your old albums back when Kodak was the main player in capturing and processing photos.

1.  Hook up your scanner to your Linux PC.  (I'm using Linux Mint 14.)

2.  Scan the photos with Simple Scan.



3.  Save and rename the scanned image.





4.  Open Gimp Editor.



5.  Open the scanned image.



6.  Go to Tools and choose Select | Rectangular Select.



7.  Move the mouse pointer to upper left corner of scanned image and hold down left mouse button



and drag the pointer to the lower right hand corner of scanned image until it is completely outlined.  Release left mouse button.



8.  Go to Edit | Cut.



9.  Go to File | Close.  (Closes new Gimp session.)







10.  Go to Edit | Paste.  (Saves scanned image over first Gimp session.)



11.  Go to File | Export.



12.  Type name of file



13.  Select PNG format.



14.  Click on Export.





15.  After you close out of Gimp, the finished product looks like this!



Here's a video tutorial I did on this topic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Website Undergoing Changes

Dear Readers,

For those of you using the Android app version of this site, please note that it has changed in terms of how you view the site.

The Categories, Using this Site, Videos sections which were at the bottom of the viewing frame are no longer there when you first load the site on your phone.

On the upper right hand corner of your mobile device you will see a circular icon with three white lines.  Click on this icon, and you will see a window pop up that says "WiziApp Desktop site".  Click on "Desktop site" and you will get the Categories section when you scroll down.

If you have any further questions, you can leave a comment in the Forum section of the site or fill out the Contact form.

Sincerely,

Editor

 

How to Handle Linux System Updates

So you decided to migrate to Linux from Windows or MAC either out of necessity or curiosity.  You got a Linux OS installed up and running on your latest hardware.  Are you all done?  No.

One of the first things you need to do, is change the mirror to a local server.  This should speed up the receipt of your updates.

The next thing you should do is clone your Linux OS in its current state.  That way, if you install any future updates that break functionality that worked before, you at least have a backup of the OS when everything was working fine.

So far, I've been successful using Clonezilla.  Although, going through the process may not seem very user friendly or graphically pretty, it's worth learning to spare you any future anxiety.  I will walk you through tutorials and write a special piece on it to relieve your anxiety for attempting something foreign looking to an average user.  Keep in mind, that your distro may have their own backup tools, which you may want to try out but not completely rely on at first.  I have used the backup tools for some distros with mixed results.  The data backups seem to work fine but the backups of the entire operating system and software packages weren't always clean.  That is why I recommend using Clonezilla.

When you go through the process of accepting updates, you can select which packages you want to accept.  It also helps to review each package description and what other packages they depend on, in case you experience an issue from accepting the package.  For a more tech savvy user, you want to note these things so that you can give as much detail for a bug report to be sent to your Linux distro and the package maintainer of the third party package you installed.  For example, the Cheese Webcam software I downloaded on my Linux Mint 14 and Ubuntu 12.04 distros were working fine until I accepted some updates a few months ago.  The Cheese Webcam was unable to record video.  When I accepted Ubuntu updates recently, it fixed my Cheese webcam issues.  However, I am still unable to get it working on Linux Mint 14.

So, what I've learned from this situation is to run tests on newly installed distros to make sure everything is functioning properly.  Then clone that environment to get a good backup to restore to in the event that future updates break previously working functionality.