Site Forum

Hi Fellow TCDBers,

I was looking through the card images waiting to be processed (in the things to do link under Quick Links) and I noticed that most of the cards that are not getting approved are because whoever scanned them got a little too aggressive on the cropping (cropped off part of the card). Admin has put together a wonderful guide about image submission (and cropping in particular) and can be found here: http://www.tradingcarddb.com/ImageGuidelines.cfm#3. I would add that if you are having trouble with cropping yourself and you need the members here to crop, please leave some extra around the card so that we have something to work with. Otherwise, the image gets rejected.

(I was looking primarily in baseball, but noticed it inthe other categories as well).

Thanks everyone - this site is only as great as it is because of everyone's involvement. This post isn't meant to stop anyone from participating - in fact, it's to encourage even more participation and getting more images on the site.

Well said, Dan. I've noticed that same thing.  I attribute it to scanners that have automatic cropping. They sometimes have trouble distinguishing white borders from the scanner's white cover surface and it gets cropped off. When my scanner does this I lay a piece of colored paper on top of the cards.

I hate having to reject scans. I wish I could add a note to my rejections and possibly help the submitter save time and energy.

I have done a lot of scanning and learned during this process.  For my automatic cropping scanners - Canon Lide 110 and Canon Lide 210, if you put 4 cards on at once the auto cropping is perfect.  If you put 3, 5, 6, 7 or 8 on at once, then the cropping is always off on 1, 2 or 3 of the cards, every time.  So for me, 4 on at once was the answer.

I've got a Cannon Lide scanner, but I don't use the auto crop at all.  I figure out the brightness/contrast settings that work for the set and then I just do all of the scans full page.  It saves time scanning the full page and cropping in Paint Shop as compared to preview scanning the whole page and then re-scanning just the cards.

-Tom

I have a Lexmark x5650 and I love the program that came with it. I can do everything exactly the way I want to and I can tell it to always scan the same way. I have it set to scan notecard-size (3.5 X 5.0). Then I crop the card myself. I also use a colored page over some cards, but usually only for die-cut cards (esp. with white around any edges). I don't worry about rectangular cards with white borders b/c my scanner actually shows a shadow on the left and right sides. I use that to crop to the right size.

All good about the scanners but just to advise, I recently scanned and entered every O Pee Chee card I had from 1965 to 1976 (from then on teh sets are pretty much in the gallery).  O Pee Chee was well known for their poor cutting jobs on their cards and I really saw this when I was cropping.  Many cards are not perfectly rectangular. And finding the same card off center no matter how many you have is normal. So considering how long this site has been up, the fact that only about 10% of the images of every set had ever been uploaded, I uploaded everythign I had that was presentable as the company had made it, off center or not quite rectangular as well.  Most of the sets are now close to 90% complete.  I do believe that if anyone finds a better card than the one presently loaded, you can replace the image.  I know; I did it for some of the cards that had the Topps issue instead of the "Printed in Canada" stamp.

I'm working on my scans now, I tend to scan 9 at a time in a page of pockets and then crop them myself, the only issue is that some cards look cut-off when they aren't, to that end it would be nice if there were away to leave a note on queued cards to let reviewers know that it isn't cut off