Pairing the scanned front and back of a photo?

[Undecided]

Hi. Many photos that I scan have something written on the back. Scanning the back too is easy enough. But as far as I know, no photo cataloging software (iPhoto, Aperture, etc.) has ever had a feature to pair the photo with the back of the photo.

I use Aperture. Anyone know if any way to cleverly way to get Aperture to accomplish that?

I suppose I could create an album for each pair (consisting of the front and back) but that's a lot of albums. Is there a better way? Maybe stacks?

 

[Prodo123]

First, start by resetting the naming scheme of your scanner (if it can do that).

Then you can scan all of the fronts in one go to create a continuously named stream of fronts. Import that into Aperture and move the masters somewhere else (if you have a managed library, you can delete the scans right away).

Then again, reset the naming scheme. And this time, scan all of the backs, regardless of whether your photos have something written on them.

By doing this, you're forcing the scanner to name the fronts and backs in the same naming scheme so that the front and back of each photo will have the same name!

Import them into Aperture and order the photos by version name. Your backs and fronts should match up. Now stack every 2 photos so that the photo stack has a front and back of each photograph.

Now that the long and hard part is over, you can go through your photos and delete the back scans without anything written on the back.

This is the only way I can think of at the moment. If you have a really fancy scanner, you can do a double-sided collated scan of your photos which will automate the aforementioned arduous scanning process for you. But you probably don't have that (most people don't).

 

[Undecided]

This is my first use of stacks - they're awesome!!