Years ago, when I scanned in 6,000 photos to my Mac, I did it in batches of about six photos at a time on my flatbed scanner. It took at least two minutes to both scan in those six photos, and then separate, crop and orient them using Picasa. So, doing this for all 6,000 photos took 2,000 minutes, or 33 hours.

This week, I could have scanned in those 6,000 photos in about four hours.

In my effort to “go paperless,” I just scanned in 6000 documents in the last three days. That effort created about ten 13-gallon garbage bags of no-longer-needed papers.

My new Fujitsu iX500 scanner scans in 25 documents a minute, and it also orients the documents, crops them, and removes blanks pages. It can scan one side or both sides of a document, from 150 to 600 dpi. It can handle documents as small as a business card, as long as 34 inches, and as wide as 17 inches by folding the document in half.

It can scan in JPEG or PDF mode. The scanner’s document holder accommodates up to 50 pages of 20 lb. paper, or 25 photos. This allows you to assemble the next stack of documents while the first stack is scanning.

What will I do with the scanner once all my papers are gone? I will scan in new bills and receipts. I will scan in some books I no longer want to keep in book form.

Since I enjoy electronically searching for words and phrases in my documents, I look forward to scanning in several of my Interesting Facts books in PDF form. This will enable me to search for key words in any or all of my scanned-in pages.

For example, if I search for the word elephant in, say, 25 scanned-in books, I will be able to locate all references to elephants within a matter of seconds.

I should find references that are not searchable through ordinary Table of Contents, or Index searches.

I must be having lots of fun scanning, because I just asked my sister if there were any documents or photos I could scan for her.

Maybe some day there will be a way to scan in objects to the computer. Wouldn’t that be wonderful: a paper and object-free house? Just one keystroke can bring back your stapler. How about a people scanner? Hmmm.

Mr. Ebsen may be contacted at robertebsen51@gmail.com