Download: Vuescan

Vuescan is a useful program if you want to scan more than the odd individual page as it will remember the settings of the last scan, making it much faster than Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Installation is straightforward and Windows willl prompt whether or not to install the drivers. You should allow the installation to make sure that it works later on.

Vuescan uses a wizard based interface. There is an Advanced mode but this will include a watermark on images in this free version. To use the Advanced mode, you will need to buy a full copy from the Vuescan website here. This costs US$40.

The first task that will appear is the scan to file although you can select to send the scan to the printer, useful if you want to make a quick copy. Next you have to choose what sort of material you are scanning to use the various presets including photos and text.

The next step is to choose the quality of the final scan. At this point it is useful to keep an eye on the status bar at the bottom as this shows a summary of the current settings including the dots per inch.

A quick scan is then performed and Vuescan will crop the scan to only show what you have on the scanner. Not scanning the full area of a scanner will save a significant amount of storage space if you are just scanning six by four inch photos.

The buttons at the bottom right of the window are used to rotate the image if required.

Clik on Next and the scan is captured. Vuescan will tell you the name and location of the file and offer the choice between editing the image and creating another scan.

We were very pleased to see that Vuescan remembers the settings when you start another scan so it was easy to quickly scan several images of the same size.

The full version of Vuescan is even faster as the settings are shown on one tab and a Scan button appears. If you have a large collection of photos this can save plenty of time.