How to send scanned photo to print out to smaller than screen size

Lynell,

It sounds like your daughter might be printing it out at a resolution of 72, the same resolution it probably arrived in if you sent a jpg. This would account for the huge physically different print size (though the quality of her print must have been quite bad). You haven’t told us an important piece of information however…what resolution did you scan the wallet size photo at?

But in any case, assuming she has an image editing program (like Photoshop Elements or one of the others) if she just assigns the same resolution that you scanned it in at the print size on her end will be the same size as the original. If she doesn’t have an image editor she could insert it into a word processing program like Word Perfect or Word and use that program’s tools to scale (resize) it down to whatever smaller size she wants and then print it out.

Nancy

"Lynell Ackerman" wrote in message

I am trying to scan a wallet size photo and e-mail it to my daughter for use in a college project. When she opens the e-mail it prints out as an 8×10. How do you get the attachment to be the same physical size as the original photo

Well, it all depends on what software is involved and at what step things are going wrong.

Most image files contain two pieces of information: the width and height in pixels; and the width and height in some predefined physical measurement (e.g. inches). To further complicate things, with respect to the physical size of the image, it’s not really the width and height that are stored, but the "resolution", which says how many pixels per unit measurement there are (you can divide the total width and height in pixels by this resolution to determine actual physical size).

When you scan a photo, the scanner software should report the correct resolution, thus providing accurate size information in the image file. When you print a photo, the software used to print the photo should take into account the resolution information stored in the image file.

Obviously in your case, something somewhere is getting screwed up. However, without knowing exactly what you’re doing, it’s hard to say what. Some possibilities include:

* Scanner is not setting the resolution correctly. This could happen either due to a bug, or due to setting scaling on the scanner. * The resolution data in the image file is getting removed or changed. This could happen if the image is opened and resaved at some point. * Printing using a program that does not look at the resolution information. For example, I’m pretty sure that if you open a picture in Internet Explorer, it doesn’t bother to check the resolution stored with the image. It will use some arbitrary resolution (probably 72 or 96 dpi) to decide how large to print the image.
* Printing using a program that does look at the resolution information but not setting the print settings correctly. For example, many programs that do look at the resolution information will also allow you to just stretch an image to fit an entire page. Doing so while printing to a standard letter-sized sheet of paper would produce a printout about 8×10 in size.

What the exact problem is may not even matter though. If your daughter is using a program like Elements to print the image, then fixing the problem is as simple as, when she goes to print, setting the program to print whatever specific size she wants. If she wants a wallet size printout, all she needs to do is enter wallet size measurements for the width and height settings in the print settings (what’s that, about 1.5"x2"? I don’t recall).

Pete

Lynell,

PS…most people would use a resolution of 300ppi in the scanner if the intended purpose is to produce a printout. If one wanted a printout twice as large as the original, one would scan at 600ppi.

Nancy

I’ve watched your daughter do this! Well, I haven’t really, but a friend of my husband’s used to have the same complaint about pictures he received, and it was because he was just simply "printing." My guess is that either she doesn’t have an editing program or doesn’t know it if she does, so she can’t resize the attachment you send. What you’re sending is undoubtedly OK when it goes out.

Nancy’s option of using another program like Word to rescale is undoubtedly the simplest and fastest. The quality won’t be as good as the original you created in Elements, but your daughter probably doesn’t have a great printer and photo paper, either, so she might get something that satisfies her nicely.

Another option is for you to scale the image waaaay down, and send it at 72ppi, with the physical dimensions already set for the way you want it to print. But, as you’ve learned, this will be a very poor quality.

If quality is important, the best option would be for your daughter to just load a program on her computer that will let her resize the image after she gets it from you. You don’t say what platform she’s using, but there are a number of freeware/shareware apps available. She might even have something loaded already if she’s got a digital camera or scanner. Or maybe you have an "extra" you could send her. You’ve got a scanner, so maybe it came with something besides Elements?

Successful e-mailing of photos so the guy on the other end gets what you want them to have sounds easier than it sometimes is. A person can only control what goes out. The one on the other end has to know what to do with it once it gets there!

And there’s always the U. S. Mail. 🙂

Thanks for all the information. My daughter ended importing the picture into Print Shop, which she had on her comnputer ,and was able to print out the size she needed. I hadn’t thought about being able to resize in Word. It was great to have this forum to ask the question – I knew shomeone would be able to help.

Lynell,

You are very welcome.

Nancy