I was digging through out media vault the other day and found a box of PhotoCDs from the 1990s. (The Media Vault is where we store all our media “assets”–negatives, slides, 16mm movie negative, etc.) From 1993 until about 2004 we used PhotoCD extensively to digitize transparencies.
The Kodak PhotoCD System is a system for scanning and storing photos on a CD. It was originally created by Eastman-Kodak in 1992 to allow consumers to display the pictures on a television set. The idea flopped with consumers who showed no interest in looking at the family photo album on TV. But professional photographers found PhotoCD a convenient way to get inexpensive high-resolution scans of their slides. Each CD could hold just over 100 images.
The box I found had close to 200 PhotoCDs on it. At 100 pictures per CD that is about 20,000 scanned photos I have to work with. As I recall we paid about one dollar per scan. Our primary vendor was Pacific Color in Seattle, Washington. I don’t know if they still do PhotoCD scanning.
Kodak PhotoCD is an Obsolete File Format
Unfortunately, it turns out that Kodak has stopped supporting the PhotoCD format effectively making it obsolete. Newer software like Adobe Photoshop CS4 no longer can open PhotoCD files, so older versions of software like Adobe Creative Suite CS2 are needed to use PhotoCD. And CS2 is not supported on the newer Intel-based Macs. Good thing we have an older PowerPC Macintosh still hanging around.
We are going to convert all the PhotoCD files to TIFF format which is still an industry-standard file format. The first step is copying all the CD disks onto a hard disk. This alone is taking several days to complete. Back in 1994 hard disks weren’t big enough to copy a 500MB disk. Today 500GB drives are cheap (under $150) and they should hold about 1000 PhotoCD disks.
