How big should family photos be?

[presto]

Over time I've scanned many family photos into my computer and have also recieved them through email from family. Some photos are 17 kbs some are 6000kbs and everything inbetween.

I need a rule-of-thumb for this. When I scan in a new photo what should be my target size? If I want to save some room on my hard drive how do I know how much I can reduce these really large pics that I allready have. The only reason they are so large is because over time it has been completely arbitrarty what setting I use when scanning.

I know, of course that this is subjective. I don't believe it is sufficient to just say "well look at the photos and decide for yourself which ones are good enough". I'm not the only one who is going to see these photos. They are for posterity. What if I scan thousands of photos over the years and then find out that with a little more resolution they could have been much much better. What if my monitor is off, or my eyes are not good, or I'm just not good at judging photos?

What I'm hoping is that there is some kind of standard that is used in archiving photos. I mean if you had a business doing this you wouldn't say to your employees: "Just scan it at whatever resolution you want and then look at the resulting picture and decide wether or not to rescan it".

Even if there is no accepted standard I would be interested in other people thoughts.

At this time I am going on the idea that pics should be "around" 100 kb.

[lordsmurf]

I save images as PSD files. So mine are often 100MB or more. If I use TIFF, often around 6MB or more. Even JPEG is looking at minimum 1MB, if not more.

Just burn them off to DVD-R (good media!) and store on a spindle in a safe place. I use a safe.

[presto]

Do you think I am making a mistake using jpg format? I've just been a one format man and have found jpg works for everything. What are the advantages of the formats you mentioned?

Do you know of sites similar to videohelp.com but discussing photo archiving instead?

Thanks

[Conquest10]

PSD are photoshop files. JPEG applies compression thus is a lossy format. PSD files are what I would call lossless (not totally sure, someone will correct me if I'm wrong).

I too save all mine to PSD. There's nothing wrong with JPEG. Just don't keep opening up that same file and edit it and keep saving.

[lordsmurf]

JPEG is a bad idea.

Use uncompressed TIFF. Or LZH compressed TIFF.

LARGE RESOLUTION/SIZE FOR PRINTING. At least 200-300dpi image. Save it as 8x10 inch size file. You can always shrink to print, but you can never enlarge it once the data is lost!

I use PSD because I add layers for corrections.

[funkguy4]

you guys might wanna check out png...not as lossy as jpeg and very comparable filesize. also very portable, every webbrowser u run into can open it.

[JamieBecks23]

my cam saves pics as jpg

[lordsmurf]

PNG, GIF, JPG.... all lossy formats.

[makntraks]

Your "family" pics should be no larger than the family you KNOW you have....


Oh, my bad... you were talking file size...

Either way, you can copy a shit load of pics on CD-R and loads more on a DVD.. probably enough that you'll need an index of some sort...

makntraks

[lordsmurf]

Just use a lot of folders and take advantage of long file names. That's my suggestion.

[vitualis]

I generally fully digital now but I still on occassion have film / prints that I scan.

For scanning printed photos, I recommend that you scan at least 300 dpi. Depending on what you want to do will dictate how you store the photo. If you are planning on possibly editing your photos at a later stage or do clever projects, then I recommend saving the scanned image as a 16-bit per channel TIFF and archiving it. Then batch convert your pictures as good quality JPEG for handing out to other people on CD or for view on the PC / TV.

If you want to e-mail a photo to someone, then I usually will downsize the image to 640x480 and send it as a JPEG with moderate amount of compression.

Regards.

[vitualis]

I actually really like Picasa as a photo organisational tool. And it's free! For "indexes" of your prints, just use Picasa to create a "contact sheet" of your photos. Brilliant!

Regards.

[Gritz]

In the final analysis it depends on what you plan on doing with the pictures, so there can't really be a standard. If you plan on printing them at the ORIGINAL SIZE then probably 200 dpi will be the max resolution that you'll need, and possibly a little overkill. If you plan on blowing them up then you'll need to increase the resolution in order not to lose quality. If your scanner does Tiff or bmp that's good .... but takes a lot more space. If you want to edit the picture you can convert a copy to jpg, edit ONCE, and not look too bad ... and you've saved the original in case you screw the picture up during editing. Each edit is going to lose more quality with jpg, and the reason for retaining the original. My camera takes jpg, my old old scanner did Tiff, my next scanner did bmp, and the one I now have gives me a choice, and if I'm not going to do much editing I scan to jpg. I print pics for friends and they can't tell if they came from a photo shop, or my printer ... and they don't really care anyway.

If you plan on viewing them on TV you just scan to fit the TV screen, you don't need much resolution (with most of todays TVs). I scan for 720 x 534 because Premiere seems to like this size. If the IMPORTANT part of my picture is horizontal (like a family portrait so I get all the people in) then I take the width of my picture (or the part that's important) into 720 to get a dpi size. If my picture is 6" wide then I use 120 dpi .... if my picture is 1" wide then use 720 dpi. This way I'm assured of filling the TV screen when the picture is show with excess black bars on the sides. You have to experiment because not all programs seem to work with the same sizes ... but the principal is the same. I used to scan for 800 x 600, and that worked well until Premiere ... and then I would lose the top of a head, or a person at the side .... as I said, not all programs work the same way. If you plan on filling a disc as for a slide show convert all the bmp pics to jpg to save space. ACDSee does a 2 click batch conversion nicely, reducing a bmp to 1/10 the size it was originally ... and looks fine on the monitor or TV.

[thecoalman]

JPG is fine it is a lossy format but is nearly identical to the original. With large images the visual difference between a JPG@ 90% compression and a BMP is negligible, you'll never notice it. Use good software, either Photoshop, Photoimapct or Paint Shop.

Selecting the correct DPI is dependant on the size of the photo your scanning. Smaller photos (4x6) require more if you want to get all you can out of it, I usually use 600dpi for a 4x6. You really can't get more out of it than that anyway.

Once scanned I store them in there own folder and mark them as read only, I usually copy them to another then do a batch resize on all of them to reduce filesize if I'm going to e-mail them. As suggested above leave the original scans as is and don't keep resaving them.

my cam saves pics as jpg

Most use JPG, if not some other compressed format. They have too unless you would want to consider lugging around a HD to store them.

[Capmaster]

I would also stick with uncompressed TIFF format. JPEG gets worse and worse every time you open it, edit, and then re-save. With the first class photos I used JPEG and they became horrible after a few edits.

I would stick with a file size of about 10MB per picture. With an uncompressed format that should cover most of the small to medium printing demands nicely If you must go to JPEG, stick with about 2MB file size. That's 1600x1200 (2Megapixel) using minimal compression and I've found the artifacts are manageable provided you don't edit and recompress more than once

[bazooka]

I agree with the smurf on this one.

Go with Tiff files.

[energy80s]

Why use .tiff files, when bitmaps are the Windows/PC standard. I agree, don't use JPEG for master files, it's the MP3 of the image world.

[vitualis]

Because the Windows "bitmap" is not a recognised standard in the imaging world.

Few things:
TIFF supports colour profiles
TIFF supports EXIF data in a standardised way
TIFF supports 16-bit per channel colour modes

Quite simply for imaging, TIFF and JPEGs are the two standards. If you want an uncompressed image, your choice is TIFF. Most imaging programs of any quality in Windows (i.e., supports colour profiles) handle TIFF files equally if not better than BMP.

Regards.

[thecoalman]

With the first class photos I used JPEG and they became horrible after a few edits.

Using a jpeg in that manner is like using a mpeg then constantly renecoding. :P For editing an image with mutiple objects use a format that supports objects, usually propietary to the app. Save your final output as jpeg.... You can edit it a million times. I think it's psd for photoshop but I'm not sure. It'a UFO for Photoimpact..... Ulead File for Objects

BTW here's a BMP to JPG comparison.... hardly any difference. It's not an absolutley perfect comparison since the image is jpeg but you can see what I mean.

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1127274#1127274

[Gritz]

One of the best sites I've seen for understanding the differences in scanning for print, and scanning for video is at http://www.scantips.com/
Lots of good free information on the site, and if you need a reference book from time to time (like I do) then the hardcopy is well worth the money.

[presto]

You guys are great and have all been very helpful. I am definitely going to use tiff instead of jpg and in general scan at larger sizes.

Virualis - I really like Picasa. Are you sure it is free? My download says "Free Trial". It also says it is now part of Google whatever that means.

Gritz - That site is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks

[vitualis]

Where are you downloading if from??

Picasa v1.6 is definitely freeware since Google bought the software from them.

http://www.picasa.com

Regards.

[presto]

You're right. It's free. One of the download links still says "Free Trial" but that must be left over from before. The file itself is correct.