Automating my 35mm film scanning pipeline
8 hours ago
- Author loves film photography but found manual scanning and editing (4 hours per roll) too time-consuming.
- Attempted full automation with Claude and SANE driver, but it broke the scanner's gear mechanism.
- Kept VueScan for scanning, then built a custom pipeline for negative conversion using numpy for consistent color across frames.
- Dust removal uses image analysis and LaMa inpainting, with context-based filtering to avoid false positives (e.g., sun glints).
- Metadata tagging automated with Qwen3-VL running locally in Ollama for easy search.
- Created a web gallery with a 3js interactive roll display, hosting images on Cloudflare R2.
- Project completed in 11 days with 64 commits, yielding 22 rolls and 314 photos from 2020 onward.