Scanning/Archiving Old Photographs

[bluestrobe]

I will undertake a process to digitally archive old photographs I have ran across over the years. A lot but not all of the photos are black and white and from various news papers over the 20th century.

My question is what the best settings to scan these in are. I have tried 1200dpi but this makes the average photo about 50mb which is too large for my storage capabilities. So what are the best/recommended settings for saving history like this and what is the target file size I should shoot for. Never been big into scanning photographs to a digital format but I have to start somewhere. I have been told to knock the settings down (mainly dpi) until the size is about 10mb, which I can handle on the storage end.

I basically want to save them with enough to work with if someone wants to digitally enhance or clean them up in the future.

Any recommendations for doing this or tips/pointers?

 

[jpeyton]

300dpi is enough for most people. Most professional photo printers print between 300dpi-350dpi.

 

[TheChort]

Originally posted by: jpeyton
300dpi is enough for most people. Most professional photo printers print between 300dpi-350dpi.

I've sometimes wondered this myself...

But just because you print at 300dpi, should you scan at the same resolution as well. I feel like you would need to scan at least double that, so that if you manipulate the photos then print them, they don't come out pixelated.

 

[rudder]

If you scan at 600 dpi or higher.. make sure you clean your scanner or you will spend the day in photoshop cloning out the dust spots.

 

[ElFenix]

hard drives are down to $0.20 a GB. DVD-Rs are $0.06 per GB. my suggestion is scan at whatever your scanner can do and put the resulting images on DVD(s). make an extra copy or three so that if the house burns down or a DVD goes bad, you'll still have a copy in the safe deposit box or in grandma's basement. you can also group the DVDs by subject like 'disney vacation 2000' or 'paris 2004'

 

[TheChort]

Originally posted by: ElFenix
also group the DVDs by subject like 'parents' sex tapes 2000' or 'penis 2004'

:Q

 

[bluestrobe]

Originally posted by: rudder
If you scan at 600 dpi or higher.. make sure you clean your scanner or you will spend the day in photoshop cloning out the dust spots.

I noticed the things that the eye can't see when at 1200dpi. I just plan on scanning them for now at 400dpi and having whoever wanted to use them do their own "cleanup" when they want.

Originally posted by: ElFenix
hard drives are down to $0.20 a GB. DVD-Rs are $0.06 per GB. my suggestion is scan at whatever your scanner can do and put the resulting images on DVD(s).

I plan on burning them all to DVD's as well as keeping them on a HD somewhere. I decided to knock down the setting to 400dpi and save them as TIF files at the recommendation of some people I know then go from there. Test images showed 8-10MB a piece which isn't bad.