How to keep dust-free when digitizing photos

Question

I recently purchased a photo digitizer which looks like this:

Under the cover there was a clear plastic surface upon which the photos are placed so that they can be digitized. (Unit takes a picture of the photo with an internal high res digital camera and writes it to an SD card). The plastic surface was very hard to deal with because it was very static prone and it was hard to place and remove the photos. So I have replaced the original surface with a piece of glass cut to the proper shape and sanded smooth on the edges and rounded the corners.

The glass works great except for one problem (that was the same in the plastic surface). Any dust that may be on photos that one wants to scan get onto the glass and is very, very hard to wipe away. I am looking for the following:

• Easy method or technique to remove accumulated dust from the glass surface where it will stay off. Presently it just seems to smear around and is very hard to get totally clean.
• A surface conditioner that could be applied to the glass to make it much less able to act like a dust magnet.
• A way to pre-wipe old photos that may be dusty before placing them on the scanner.

Answer 1

Since you used real glass, you can really clean it. I used acetone to clean the scanner glass when it had fogged from outgassing of plastics inside the scanner.

So when you get something onnthe glass that doesn't wipe off easily, remove the glass and clean it in the dishwasher or with acetone or whatever. It is not limited to a dainty little damp rag!

For material to be scanned, use compressed air to blow off dust. Use a microfiber cloth to wipe away finger oils: typical microfiber cleaning cloths have both oil-loving a d watar-loving fibers, which is why they can just wipe smudges off your touch screen without any liquids. It will work the same for the photo prints.

Use cotton gloves. They are sold for specifically for photography/concervation/archiving.

Answer 2

If you have a turntable and/or vinyl record collection, you may already own a record brush:

The bristles are specially designed to remove dust from the surface, not just brush it off to the side.

Answer 3

The last time I encountered this, I used an open source graphics editor and followed a tutorial to fix the dust. I find that dust on people's faces are the most noticeable so I only spent time on those.