Scanning and Photo Storage Tips

 January 2002

When scanning treasured photos, scan at a resolution of 300 dpi. Typical color photographs will not yield more detail when scanned at higher than 300 dpi. If you want more detail, get a film (negative) scanner. But don't scan any lower either, even if you only plan to use the images at low resolutions now, you may need the detail of the higher resolution at a later day.

Save your scan as a high resolution, uncompressed TIFF (.tif) file. Do not resize it or touch it up in any fashion. Why? Because just when you think you know what you are doing, you will discover a better way - and if you modified your original scan, you will have to rescan in order to use the better methods! Consider this scanned image to be an "archive", much like the Library of Congress. You can always copy a file and work on the copy all you want, but do not modify the original!

When naming your photos, whether from scans or from a digital camera, put some thought into it - don't just leave them as "dsc000045.jpg". This naming convention will have no meaning for you in the future when you want to retrieve one particular image - in a hurry! Begin your image name with the date, so they will always be in chronological order. Begin the date with the year, even if you keep your images in separate folders for year or even month. If you include this information on all images, then no matter where you move them to in the future, you will always have the date.

The second part of the filename should be a brief but meaningful description of the image. With today's computers, you can be fairly descriptive, but you should still try to keep it short - don't write a sentence!

The third part of the filename should be the number. Numbering is handy when you have several images of the same subject, but each is only slightly different.This may not be necessary on all images, but is not a bad idea even when there is only one. Always use a two digit number, such as 01, in case you have more than 10, that way they will list in sequence.Use underscoores _ to separate the parts of the filename. Here is an example of one that I might use:

20030202_MattPlayingInSand_01.tif

Notice how I used capitalization to separate the words within the filename, not spaces. While many computers will accept spaces in the filename, there may come a time when you need to use this file on a system that will not accept the spaces. While it is true that other computers can easily modify the name so it will work properly for them, if you then receive that file back on to your computer, the filename will not match up with the rest of your files. Eliminate this issue by not using spaces.

Once you've started collecting images, it's time to learn how to modify them - remove red eyes, improve contrast and lighting, fade out the background, and even combine images from various photos. The possibilities are endless!

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