February 19, 2007

Scanning the past

I bought Mom a multi-function scanner/printer/copier (here) for Christmas, and I finally got around to setting it up today. That was easy enough, I have to say.

I wanted a scanner because we have at least 30 photo albums, all full. If we had a fire, trying to grab them all would be purt near impossible, so we thought "if we scan the contents and burn them to CD, we could put the CDs into the safe deposit box and know they're safe."

To test it, I scanned one 3x5 photo at 300dpi. Wow. At that resolution, the single picture became a 404kb .jpg file.

Has anyone embarked on a project like this? If so, what's the ideal scanning resolution for basic 3x5 family snapshots?

Posted by Linkmeister at February 19, 2007 02:41 PM | TrackBack
Comments

300 is pretty much the minimum resolution, I think.

Posted by: Serge at February 20, 2007 12:08 AM

Yeah, 300 at a minimum, higher if you ever plan to enlarge any of them. It depends upon the amount of space you have to archive them in (which gets cheaper by the second).

Some good resources:

http://www.scantips.com/

http://home.att.net/~cthames/index.htm

There are some especially helpful tips on these sites for dealing with photos on which the colors have yellowed or faded.

Posted by: DXMachina at February 20, 2007 04:50 AM

For the past couple of years when I made the 500 mile trip home I have lugged the laptop and the Epson scanner in order to archive a lot of the old photographs I have found that I never knew existed. I always scan at 300 ppi, but I always make the long dimension 10 inches in case I want to print something out larger. I have found that 8x10 photographs make great christmas presents.

Posted by: fred at February 21, 2007 05:42 AM