There are several threads on CT where people show their coins. It is obvious that a lot of people have a lot of pictures. But comments frequent occur which state that the poster has coins which match the criteria but there is no image. So it occurred to me: what percentage of your coins are actually imaged? For me it is probably much less than 20%, maybe even 10%. I have recently started reimaging my coins to be much more presentable and for those I probably have less than 2% covered. So how about you? What percentage of your total collection has images?
Many of my early purchases were not pictured, but my more recent ones mostly are. I will also save some photos if the coin was bought via online auction.
Probably 1-2%. I estimate I have about 15,000 coins, and I can't even imagine how long it would take to image them all.
I have about 5000 I would want to image. My estimate is 10 a week, 500 a year. So about 10 years. That assumes that all new ones will be imaged as soon as they arrive - probably optimistic.
I think it's been fifteen years since a coin entered my household and wasn't imaged within 10 minutes of arrival. As in, since the birth of my current obsession with numismatics, not a single one hasn't been imaged. As a pessimistic estimate, that would take me about 400 hours, including a full-size archival set and a posting-size set. Five minutes per coin, including postprocessing, is probably conservative.
Probably just below 50%. I try to find time to knock out several at one sitting, but inevitably get interrupted. That, and my setup isn't great, so getting a good picture quick doesn't happen very often.
I'm a lot like @SuperDave. The moment I get home or at least within a couple of hours of getting a new coin home, I photograph it. It's really nice, because I have a lot that I have since sold, but I can still go back and look at it. Sometimes while looking at images of coins I've sold, I'll regret selling them, other times the images simply remind me of why I sold it.
Several years over a period of months I photographed around 2,000 circulated minor foreign coins. I planned to put the photographs on the Internet but decided that the world was not ready. The last one: Zanzibar 1 Pysa AH 1299 (AD 1882) As to the percentage, around 80%.
I keep improving my photography set up. Right now I am playing with high CRI lighting (color rendering index). Using 90+ CRI lights allows the true colors of the coin to be reproduced in the photo much better than generic lights. This really helps with bronze coins, not as important with silver, but still makes a difference. The problem with getting better at taking photos is you keep wanting to go back and reshoot your whole collection each time you make a major improvement. I think this round I may decide they are good enough. I'd like to find some software that can crop and combine the obverse and reserve images into one image automatically. Not sure there is such a thing. That is the really manual and time consuming part of the whole process. Here is a thread I started about high CRI lighting with some before and after examples. https://www.cointalk.com/threads/a-coin-just-cri-ing-for-a-reshoot.298806/ John
About six months ago I started a tracking spreadsheet to account for all my coins and right now I'm at about 50% documented and 10% photographed.
I used to do something similar to the spreadsheet when I was trying to collect every coin by date for certain countries, because it was the only way to keep track. I gave up on that eventually though and I'm a lot happier now. You do need a system to know what you have though. Even with the sheets I purchased duplicates unintentionally multiple times.
I image all of my coins when they come in -- not for art's sake (which is a good thing) -- but for insurance purposes. I'm planning to take a course in the fall to improve my photos.
I voted 99.9% because I am sure at least one coin in not imaged. I take photos almost as soon as I get the coins. Then most go off to the SDB. Photos are how I get to view whenever I want. I also do a lot of Coin Books and digital albums to showcase my collections.