Well, we moved a couple months ago, and still unpacking.lol We are going through all our family photos, organizing them in albums, and we wanted to scan them for safe-keeping and emailing to family members. I am using microsofts built in scan feature of XP. What DPI should I scan at? It has 150-200-300-and 1200. I am scanning into JPG files because thats what my digital camera saves as. Thanks!

 

Basically, the higher the DPI setting you use, the better quality it will scan and the longer it'll take and the bigger the file will be. Just depends on how much time you have on your hands and hard drive space you can spare.

I would personally use 300. That would be good for printing out some 5x7 or smaller copies.

 

I started doing them at 200, the jpg's dont take up much space, and the printouts are large enough. If you guys have any suggestions, I still have a lot more to go. Just thought that jpgs are smaller and easy to read everywhere.

 

You have to remember that JPGs are a form of what's called "lossy" compression. That means that when the files are converted to JPG, some of the detail will be lost. That's usually okay when you're talking about posting stuff on the web, but printing could be a different issue. Printing will require (and "be able to make use of") more detail than you can view on a standard PC.

If you're looking to keep an online _copy_ of the pics around, you'll be fine at 200dpi. If you're looking to scan the pics so that you can get rid of the paper, go higher.

 

What Mark said. If you have the option, scan into a .tiff file at highest resolution for most flexibility. Then you can convert those into .jpg for web use later while saving the .tiffs for printing. Most home printers accept .tiff files.

 

well Ill look into doing the rest into tiff at high dpi, but it just takes so long to scan and the files are hugh (upwards of 13mb EACH). That means that the 159 I have already done would take up 2gb verses the 20MB the jpgs take up. I have the diskspace, but just dont want to waste space. I am not throwing the originals away, just keeping them on cds too just in case something floods, or so I can email them to family.

 

Okay, then in that case, I think you're okay with what you're doing.

 

You will get a better image if you scan the negative or slide directly (with a dedicated slide/neg scanner) vs a flatbed scanner and the print.

I usually do 2000 dpi and 24bit color which (if I remember correctly), produces a 7-13MB file. Then just back it all up on a 4GB DVD.

If you want to print out a negative really big (like 8x10 +++), then you'd want to scan at 4000dpi and 42bit color, but that produced a 145MB file which kinda bogged down photoshop for me

 

I dont have any of the negatives or slides, have to do all of them the "old fashioned" way so to speak, lol