I have thousands of old pictures which were sitting in a photo album. Unfortunately, instead of the photo album protecting the pictures, the plastic coverings yellowed, and the pictures themselves had to be carefully extracted from the books. There is also quite a bit of powdered paper (the backings on the books pretty much fell apart while we extracted the pictures), and the fronts of the images are still a bit sticky.

These pictures are 30+ years old, are often extremely faded, and were originally taken on (what I think is) "110 film" -- they are approximately 2.5" squares.

Anyway, I need to scan all these images in to preserve them from further decay. Unfortunately, it's taking forever -- going through less than 100 images took an entire day, even if one discounts any time spent in Photoshop trying to remove some of the photo album's artifacts on the images.

What I really need is some method of scanning the images in faster. Most automated solutions aren't going to work because they accept 4x6s as their smallest image size, and even if that was not the case, the adhesives still stuck to the prints would probably ruin any such device in 5 seconds flat.

Is there a better way of doing this (i.e. fast scanner?) that wouldn't take so much time?


Question: XLConnect loadWorkbook error - POIXMLException (Java)
Answer: It turns out that the root of this error was the JVM running out of memory (even with options(java.parameters = "-Xmx1024m")). 

I tried to increase the memory, but couldn't get the JVM to take more than -Xmx2048m, which still wasn't enough to load the workbook. 

So I upgraded the JRE from 32 bit to 64 bit and ran 64 bit R.

I was then able to set -Xmx4096m and successfully load my 30mb workbook.