PowerUp SIG

Power-Up SIG Notes: Digitizing Photos

Preparation, organizing, editing, publishing and more!

  • Before scanning
    • Clean dust off photos using soft brush or cloth
    • Clean dust off scanner glass (don’t squirt directly with cleaner!)
  • Do you need to scan them all? Most of us do most, but not obvious duplicates
  • What about photos in albums?
    • Black page albums, with nothing covering the pictures? Maybe just scan album pages
    • 1970’s era magnetic albums? Take photos out, scan, put in a better album or box
    • Archival safe albums? Test scanning both leaving it in the page and taking it out
    • Consider getting a shot or scan of the full page at a lower resolution for context, in addition to high quality scans of the individual pictures
  • Specifics
    • DPI (more is better. For photos up to 8×10, 600 dpi.  For tiny photos, do more if your scanner can.)
    • File Format
      • TIF – loss-less file format, universally recognized. Use for the original master file.
      • JPG – lossy file format, meaning some data is lost every time the file is saved. Use for uploading to the web, such as Facebook.
      • PNG – smaller and more efficient than TIF, but not as commonly used. Can be used for your master file.
    • Metadata
      • Filename – Most scanners assign names like FILE001; rename using the file naming system you set up for organizing
      • Metadata – You can add title, caption, keywords and other information into the properties that are saved in the file. This means the info travels with the file.  You can edit this metadata using Windows Explorer, or most photo editing programs.
    • Editing
    • Storage & Backup – be sure your files are safe!
  • Should you use a scanning service?
    • Pros – may have better equipment, you don’t have to learn how to do it
    • Cons – may be expensive, your photos leave your possession, you still probably have to learn how to edit and work with metadata
    • Local: Douglas Photo, Lawrence Photo, Moler’s, Snappy Photo
    • Distant: Wolfe’s Camera, Larsen Digital (Thomas MacEntee’s choice)
  • Using your digital files
    • Facebook, etc – social media sites strip a lot of data, especially metadata, and reduce the quality level of photos you upload. This is good for working fast on the web, and displays just fine on computer screens, but may mean that photos shared thru social media sites won’t have important identifying information and won’t be high enough quality to print.
    • Printing
    • Genealogy Software
  • What do you do with the originals after scanning? Store in archival safe albums or boxes.  Boxes might be more space efficient – you don’t need ready access to your photos because you have the digital versions!