I’m really sorry that this is probably out of place, as it’s not strictly LLAMA, but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to post it where people may be able to help.

**Sadly, my grandma passed away yesterday. **It prompted me to retrieve some old photos that my parents stashed in the loft over a decade ago, and they are just incredible! I’ve found so many pictures of her, going back to when she was really young, to a point where I’ll have to check if they are all definitely her! But there’s amazing ones of my dad and uncles when they were little, even my nan with my dad and me when I’d literally just been born!

There’s lots of really wonderful family moments and slice-of-life history captured there, and I don’t think anyone knows they exist.

Mostly, I have enough funny photos to have birthday cards sorted for the several lifetimes!

I want to get these ALL scanned and digitised. But for now, I’m separating out ones with my nan in them to be top priority. Most of the services available have long turnarounds and, while the prices are far from extortionate, I’m looking for something which prices by the KG. Seriously, there must be over 20Kg of photo in here. They’re mostly 6x4, so you’d want to have them done at a high DPI, the cost would be astronomical, especially as I already plan to spend a lot on printing.

So, I’d like to do this myself. I’ve dabbled with some LLM stuff, but I don’t really know where to start with image manipulation, and I don’t really have time to figure it out, so I’m asking for some guidance.

The rough idea is:

1. Scan photos on high DPI flatbed scanner. Fill up the bed each time with multiple photos for highest speed

2. ‘Parse’ the scan into multiple image files by identifying where the bounds are and cropping. This should be pretty simple. I think this may be possible in OpenCV? I’ve never tried before. Otherwise, it has to be one of the simpler jobs for a ML tool. I understand how object recognition works in principle, but not practice.

3. Run select images through an upscaler. Some we may want to display or print larger, and if it’s not unreasonable, if we’re going to digitise them, may as well make them as high res as we can (I’ll keep the originals). I know the usualy ‘zoomify’ caveats, but obviously when I’m starting with 6x4 images, I’ll take all the help I can get.

4. Ideally attempt to ‘clean up’ the images. I don’t think I’d want to colourise anything, but it would be nice to remove obvious stains, creases and such from the print.

5. The plan is to have some albums for people to go through at the wake, print off plenty of extra 6x4 copies so people can just grab them and take them away, but I’ll also stick them all on a google drive or something and make the link available so people can download them in higher res, and more people will be able to see and preserve them

My main concern is 2 and 3. 4 would be a bonus. I suspect the shortlist will be 100-200 photos, but processing everything will be an ongoing process. I just want the shortlist done before the funeral.

I’d really rather run locally if viable. I have a two machines that may be able to contribute:

Workstation

• RTX 3090 -32Gb DDR4 --> 64GB DDR5
• 5600x. --> 7900x

I’m actually planning an upgrade very soon, which I can push through fast if it will help.

R720XD

• 128GB DDR3 RAM
• 2x E5-2630 v2.

Probably not super useful, but has lots of RAM, and can be used as a slow workhorse. My workstation is on CAD for 8 hours a day, and is used for gaming in the evening. I can obviously cut out the gaming, but not the CAD, so there could be some utility in handing off some things to the server, if the workload doesn’t require GPU.

If you can point me in the right direction to get set up, that would be awesome. I’m new at this and learning fast, but I don’t want to under-deliver. I’m very capable of learning the details, but I don’t have enough experience to determine the ‘best way’ of doing something like this.

Any help would be incredible!