Scanning in family photos

TA
Posted By
Timothy_Arends
May 24, 2005
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165
Replies
5
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Closed
I would like to scan in some family photographs to save to a CD. This is just for personal use and to share with family members and to preserve them in case the original pictures are lost. Are there any recommended guidelines for doing this? What resolution should I scan them at that will be a good trade-off between the capacities of today’s CD storage media and the resolution for family heirlooms that will be expected in the future? This is just for my own personal and family use, but I would like to do this "right."
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Colin Walls
May 24, 2005
Theer are no hard and fast rules. You are not really that limited by modern scanner resolution or storage capacity. It is the condition of the originals that matters most. There is little point in scanning at such high rez that you get a great image of the grains in the original film.

300-600spi is a good range to consider. Save in TIFF format, as that is non-lossy and widely usable.

This site may be of interest: <http://www.scantips.com/>
K
Ken._Cavaliere-Klick
May 25, 2005
Interesting question. There’s a few things to consider. High res scans can hold more detail than you care to have, such as flaws. High res scans also create big files and take quite a bit longer to do. I would scan at 300dpi, maybe as low as 150dpi. An average snapshot taken with a simple point and shoot of the period is not going to be any sharper than it is. Another thing to consider is how the cd is to be used. If the images are primarily going to be viewed on a televsion or computer monitor then high resolution and depth is probably a waste of time. The same would hold true for the average ink jet print.

In reality and in my own experience, I doubt the recipients of the cd’s will know or care what dpi and depth you used to create the image files. They’ll be amazed and happy to see the old photos restored.
LM
Lou_M
May 25, 2005
Timothy,

Colin and Ken gave good advice. You may want to go higher resolution if:

1. You’re scanning old B&W photos (generally much sharper than color photos)

2. You have the original negatives or slides. It’s tedious (very tedious!) to scan negatives and slides but the images will come out much nicer with a good scanner. Consider a refurbished Nikon negative/slide scanner with "Digital ICE"–it’s amazing what a time saver that is. It removes all the dust and minor scratches, almost miraculously.
TA
Timothy_Arends
May 27, 2005
Thanks for the replies. What about this "tagging" I’ve heard about? You can embed information into the photo file to describe the picture’s contents, such as date the picture was taken, subjects in the photo, where taken, etc. This is the up and coming way of organizing digital information, according to an article I read. Can Elements do this? What is expected to be the standard way of doing this for the future?
CW
Colin Walls
May 27, 2005
Can Elements do this?

PSE 3 on Windows can.

What is expected to be the standard way of doing this for the future?

Your guess is as good as mine. PSE Organizer does give the option of storing IPTC keywords which are somewhat interoperable with other programs.

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