On the Epson Perfection v500, how does one scan half-frame negatives efficiently?

Question

I have 2 rolls of half-frame film to scan this evening, which amounts to over 144 photos. Most of the manual labor is selecting each photo with the Marquee Tool by hand in the Epson Scan application.

Another alternative is using the "Automatically locates the images" feature (when you untick "Thumbnail" in the main window), which selects automatically two images at the same time. This option is a problem, because Auto Exposure is not working very well when I do it, and file numbering becomes a very complex process to retain the order of the photos:

In the 4th image of this Epson Support link, there seems to be a way to use the Automatically locate the image even outside of Thumbnail mode.

Is there a way to allow the scanner to detect each one of the 22 half-frame photos present in the film holder without the software jamming them together?

Answer 1

Based the support link you provide, it seems there may be no way to do what you want.

Depending on the materials you want to scan, EPSON scan may not be able to automatically locate the target images, or preview the images as thumbnails. In this case, preview the images in the full-size preview window.

Some third-party scanner software, such as SilverFast or VueScan, might be able to do it. I haven't used either, so you will have to research them or try demo versions to see if they fit your needs.

You may consider scanning with 16-bit/channel color and using ImageMagick to split the image. In bash, on Mac or Linux, you can loop through the images in a directory with the following command:

for f in *.tif ; do
   convert -crop 50%x100% +repage "$i" "${i%.tif}-%d.tif"
done

I don't know the equivalent loop construct for Windows. Anyone who knows, feel free to edit to include it.