With the popularity of digital photography and digital image processing, consumers have increasingly desired to transfer photographic images stored on conventional film negatives into electronically stored digital images. Typically, this is accomplished by loading a sheet of processed film into a scanner and scanning the film to produce the digital image. Processed film is normally cut into sheets containing one to six images. Thus, if a user has a large number of negatives to scan, the process of loading each individual sheet of film into the scanner can become overly time-consuming. Accordingly, there is a desire for improved systems and methods for automate the loading and scanning of multiple sheets of film.
Conventional systems for handling the feeding of paper or film documents, such as those used in photocopiers, printing presses, printers and scanners, are not well suited for the handling of film. In particular, the rollers used for feeding individual sheets from a stack of paper or film may damage the image on sheets of film. In addition, these loading mechanisms are configured to load a large number of identically-sized sheets of paper in standard sizes such as 8.5″×11″ or 8.5″×14″. In contrast, photographic film negatives are often manually cut, resulting in sheets of film of varying lengths that are difficult to accurately load on a bulk basis. In addition, photographic film can change its shape over time or during operation, such as when the film curls around unpredictable angles.