Getting ready to scan family pictures

Hi all,

I am getting ready to scan a bunch of 4x6 family photos into digital files.

My question is what file format and dpi to use? I may be enlarging them in the future.

I was thinking about png @ 300dpi. What do you think?

I simply want them to be archival quality...so that in the future if I want to print them a bit bigger...I can.

Thanks

For true archive purposes you should use .Tiff without compression at the highest resolution possible, with the unfortunately large file sizes.

However,

for general family use PNG would be a good choice as it is a lossless compressed format - as for the resolution I would look at 600 or even 1200 dpi as this will allow for enlargement to 8x10 or 10x12 on normal home use equipment without making file sizes too large.

Why not try a couple of images at different resolutions and see what the resultant file sizes are and how they fit into your available space

Barman58 said:

For true archive purposes you should use .Tiff without compression at the highest resolution possible, with the unfortunately large file sizes.

However,

for general family use PNG would be a good choice as it is a lossless compressed format - as for the resolution I would look at 600 or even 1200 dpi as this will allow for enlargement to 8x10 or 10x12 on normal home use equipment without making file sizes too large.

Why not try a couple of images at different resolutions and see what the resultant file sizes are and how they fit into your available space

Click to expand...

Thanks man! I tried Tiff at 600dpi and png at 600dpi as well. They are huge files! LOL. I am using windows scan & fax program and the canoscan toolbox. are there any other free good programs for doing these scans? out of tiff and png which is generally the bigger file?

There are variations on both the TIFF and the PNG and dependent on the compression level and color depth used the sizes can vary enormously. I would say that TIFF are generally larger than PNG, all other things being equal.

Archiving photos is always going to be a disk space intensive task and thus will always be a compromise.

300 dpi JPGs at 80% quality will provide a basic backup for security purposes but will lose detail from the original.

I always use the scan function supplied with the scanner rather than the windows one as this will normally provide greater control

I ended up going with TIFF @ 300DPI due to the TIFF being more widely used than PNG and the fact that going up to 600DPI raised the file size ridiculously! They are mostly 4 X 6 disposable camera prints, so I won't loose much at 300DPI. They look a lot better with TIFF than JPEG.

Thanks for all the help!