I used to digitize old family photographs with my mom about five years ago. We used a Canon LiDE 300 on Windows 10.
Since then, I have matured. 🤣
I switched to Linux about two years ago - Artix btw - and now I want to revive this cozy tradition of digitizing photos. I’m looking at the Canon LiDE 400, but that’s partially irrelevant. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SANE says it should be supported.
Question: do you have any experience with the frontends? Do you know if there is one that - like the proprietary Canon software for Windows - can pick out individual photographs from the scan surface? So that I don’t have to manually crop the file afterwards.
Thanks in advance! 😊


Gnome normally brings their simple GNOME Document Scanner (
simple-scan), KDE comes withskanliteorskanpage.xsaneis an older GTK-based frontend, there’s also the GIMP plugin usingxsane.NAPS2is an independent fully-featured frontend. And a lot of dedicated OCR software (including stuff likeOCRFeederorPaperwork) also supports sane.PS: even the basic tools support previews, then letting you select only the specific area you want to scan.