WPR Mac Help

Scanners are pretty neat and have dropped dramatically in price over the years. You can go to your typical electronics store and pick up a pretty good scanner for $100 or less, and they do a reasonably good job. You can scan in your old photos and documents and do all the wonderful things to them you can do with your digital photos.

The problem I’ve run into is the Mac software that comes with these scanners is usually really bad. Or, perhaps you have a very old scanner and the manufacturer won’t release an OS X driver. In this article, we’re going to discuss an alternative I’ve found that works much better, supports a wide number of scanners, and (to me, anyways) seems much more simple. Best of all, it uses Apple’s built in tool for the job that I’ve bet you’ve never heard of.

Somewhere in OS X’s history, Apple started including a program called “Image Capture”. It was Apple’s attempt to standardize the way you would get digital pictures onto your Mac. When iPhoto came along, Image Capture was quickly pushed to the wayside in favor of this much more sophisticated way of working with digital cameras.

But Image Capture has another use. It works really well for dealing with scanners too. The idea was that a scanner maker could just write a plug-in for Image Capture, rather than having to reinvent the entire wheel. Users would have a standardized interface for working with scanners.

Except that only some manufacturers picked up on this really great idea. And even then, it varies even between models. Some Canon scanners come with plug-ins for Image Capture, and I was simply amazed at how easy it was to work with them. Others use this awful “Cano-scan Toolbox” creature that might just win the award for the worst Mac application EVER! And HP scanners… Well, let’s not even go there.

Mac OS X shares a lot of it’s foundations with open source projects, such as Linux or BSD Unix. This makes it easier for software written for those platforms to be used on the Mac. And wouldn’t you know it, but those folks wrote a huge collection of scanner drivers that are available for free that integrate very nicely with Image Capture.

See if You’re a Lucky One

First thing to do, is check and see if the scanner you’ve bought all ready has the Image Capture plug-in. Install your scanner, per the instructions that came with it. When you’re finished, make sure your scanner is connected and turned on. Then fire up Image Capture and see if it recognizes your scanner.

If it does, do a little dance and start scanning away. Do NOT install the drivers below. They will probably conflict with the ones you have. And if it ain’t broke…

Or You’ve Got a Little Work to Do

If you see this:

Then you don’t have the drivers yet. But perhaps the open source world does.

Going SANE

There is an open source project called SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy) that has been working on making scanners work properly under Linux. Most manufacturers didn’t support Linux in any way, so enterprising folks took it upon themselves to do so. Isn’t it ironic that their software turns out to be more helpful than the manufacturer’s? Chalk one up for the global community.

Then, another very helpful gentleman by the name of Mattias Ellert took all that hard work and made it available for the Mac and Image Capture. So now we Mac folks can also make use of all these drivers too. It’s a project called TWAIN SANE. (TWAIN is the name for a standardized scanner interface, but doesn’t actually mean anything. Best one I’ve heard is “Technology Without An Interesting Name”.)

Supported Scanners

At the present time, SANE supports about 1,200 scanners (and growing). If you’d like to find out if a particular scanner is supported, take a look at this list. Keep in mind, USB scanners are probably the best bet under OS X.

http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html

What You Need

First, you’ll need to download three packages from Mattias’ web site:

http://www.ellert.se/twain-sane/

The three packages you need are:

1. libusb
2. SANE backends
3. TWAIN SANE Interface

There are a bunch of other things on his web page, but don’t be too worried about those. Just grab the three packages. They’re available for Mac OS X from 10.2 through 10.4.

Installing

Once you have the three packages downloaded, install them in the same order:

1. libusb
2. SANE backends
3. TWAIN SANE Interface

Configure and Test

This could be really easy. With your scanner turned on and connected, try opening up Image Capture and see if you get to do the happy dance yet. Not yet? Not to worry. You may have to do one more step.

From the “Devices” menu in Image Capture, pull down “Browse Devices”. In the window that opens, look for the part that says “TWAIN devices”. Click the little triangle next to it to see what’s below it. Hopefully you’ll have an entry that says “SANE”.

Click on it so it is highlighted. At the bottom of the window, you should see an option show up that says “Use TWAIN software”. Try clicking on that and hitting “Connect”. You may have to fiddle a little. Try quitting and re-launching Image Capture.

Using Image Capture

Image Capture, as a scanning interface, does a lot of things right. For starters, it saves pictures in your “Pictures” folder, although you can choose another folder. It also can name a series of pictures using the name you choose. So you can type “Joe” in the “Name” field, and get files called “Joe”, “Joe 1″, “Joe 2″, etc. The best place to find out just how to use Image Capture is the Help menu in Image Capture.

Uh-Oh!

Yes, things may go wrong. I found out that once I installed the SANE drivers, the drivers that came with my scanner stopped working. Oops! I found that I was able to re-install the original drivers from the CD and Image Capture and my scanner worked fine.

If you need to get rid of the SANE drivers for some reason, that’s not too hard either. Open up your hard drive and look in “Library”–>”Image Capture”–>”TWAIN Data Sources”. In there, you’ll see a file called “SANE.ds”. Toss that in the trash and restart your Mac.

Keep in mind that you’re using software that is not supported by the manufacturer of your scanner. It’s very unlikely to hurt the scanner, but the manufacturer won’t give you any help with software that isn’t their own.  (Although, I haven’t seen too many manufacturers that gave you good help, even with their own.)   If you run into a wall, the best you can do is delete the file I’ve mentioned and try re-installing the software that came with your scanner (even if it is really bad).