marking fotos in order to organize scans

[karels]

I am new to this forum, and since i am from Holland my written german is not so good, but i do understand german pretty well, so i will post in the english language, but sorry for any inconvenience caused.
I have the following problem. I do have a about five hundred foto's, hardcopies, and plan to have them scanned. If i get the digital scans back, i will have to manually allocate which foto/print belongs to which file. I would like to have some secret code or another smart trick so that when i get the scans back, i know directly which file belongs to it. I thought of simply writing a number on the fotos - like a police foto of a convict , but that would cause extra work in removing the number from the scan. Any suggestions on how to deal with this better would be appreciated.

[Joe]

If I understand right: you will use a scan-service to do that for you? Or will you scan by yourself?

If using a service I see only a slight chance: you will get the scans in the order you send them. Then they will get an name like: image_0001, image_0002 etc.

If you scan by yourself: you can name the files as you like.

[Thomas]

I suggest to write the numbers from 1...n on the back of the photos and sort them into some folder. Then ask the scanner-guy to scan the fotos exactly in this order and to name the files according to the numbers, like Foto-001.jpg, Foto-002.jpg and so on.
Thomas

[karels]

Thanks for the tips, i do indeed plan to have the fotos scanned. So writing the numbers sounds like a good idea, but hopefully the scanning people are able to keep them all in the proper order. It sounds a bit like the old days of the punch cards: it was always very unwise to drop them all since you would have to organize them all again.

[Thomas]

As I wrote, it may be a good idea to put the fotos into some kind of folder. Possibly they fit into these transparent envelopes that you can file. This should make it easy for the scanner-people to keep the correct order.
Thomas