Scanning Situations
Setting Scanner DPI Settings
Standard Photo Archiving With No Editing of My Photos
- Use the standard scanning recommendations as noted to the right and save to JPEG format with minimal compression settings.
Standard Photo Archiving With Some Editing of My Photos
- Use the standard scanning recommendations as noted to the right, but save to a TIFF format until your editing is completed.
Full Scrapbook Page Archiving With No Extraction of Photos
- Use the standard scanning recommendations as noted to the right and save to a JPEG format
Full Scrapbook Page Archiving But Need to Extract Photos As Well
- Measure the smallest size of a photo you want to crop out, then use the scanning guidelines to the right for your scanning resolution
- Scan the scrapbook page and save to a TIFF format. This is your original file to begin extracting your photos from. The file size of your scan will likely be around 50+ megabytes
- At this point you will need some type of photo editing software to extract or crop out each photograph
- Save the resulting separate photo crops to a JPEG format if NO editing is needed, or to a TIFF format if you need to do some editing on them
- Once you have completed the extraction process, save your large sized original file to a JPEG format for archiving
Flatbed scanners are the most common type of scanner. The photos are placed on a glass scanning bed where they are then converted into a digital image on the computer, and then stored to the computer hard drive.
There are non-flatbed scanners that come with what is called an ADF or automatic document feeder that will rapidly scan a stack of photos or papers. Scanning a multipage document into a PDF (Portable Document File) is best accomplished with this type of scanner.
Some scanners may be designed ONLY to scan photos and NOT paper documents, so be sure you are aware of the scanner characteristics. These scanners can scan up to 50 images/minute and a little slower if scanning both sides.
There are many different types of slide scanners. Some use a camera attached to a Kodak Carousel Slide Projector to scan each slide. Others may use a long slide tray. One of the newer slide scanners made by Kodak is the Scanza. It can quickly scan and produce good quality scans, although you manually (though quickly) push the slides through a small tray capturing the image. There are some flatbed scanners with lighted lids that can also scan slides.
