Ideas For Scanning Pictures

-- by Jon --

We have been scanning pictures at 300 DPI. This seems to be plenty good for displaying on the screen and does a pretty good job for printing also. Most common monitors and printers can't seem to handle any more than that anyway. Meaning, higher DPI would print and view just fine but may not look much better than the lower DPI on the screen or printer. We have even done them at 200 DPI and they still seem pretty good. We decided that in case we want to use the pictures from the CD at a later date for enlarging or for other purposes, that we would go at least 300 DPI.

The more dots per inch the larger the file. Some of the files we scanned at a higher resolution were 2 or 3 megabytes in size and some were much larger. This would fill up the disk quickly and would be slower to load into memory when viewing. So with the bigger files there would be a longer pause to load the picture for viewing than the smaller file. We tried to get a 'happy medium': Load and view quickly and still have a good quality picture.

One reason you may wish to scan at a higher density is if you are going to crop out a small portion of the picture and enlarge it. For example, if you had a picture of a group of people and scanned at a higher density, say 600 DPI or more, then cut out one persons face from the group and enlarged it then you should have a higher quality picture when you are done than if you did it at 300.

We like to save them all as "JPEG" files with the .jpg extension.

Doing the scanning at 300 DPI, we were able to make CD's with over 1,000 pictures, and put a few video clips and documents and still had a lot of room on the CD.

Let us know about your ideas and experience on our Forum page.