UKC

I am about to embark on the heady task of scanning all my photo albums, a task which I have put off for years.

I've got a scanner, and I've scanned images before, more in a muddled fashion with no great thought in the process.

This time I want to make a concerted effort to scan the images, not for re-printing but to be viewed on a screen or TV, and I don't want to start the process of the wrong way and waste my time doing the wrong thing, so I would appreciate any help, tips or advice on scanning several hundred 6x4 prints.

Cheers

In reply to The Lemming: Prints vary as to their effective DPI, there's not much point in scanning a print at 10 times the DPI of the print itself, so experiment a bit until you get something you like. It may be worth investing in some good scanner software, the stuff that comes with the scanner is not necessarily the best for it. What scanner do you have?

In reply to JDal:

My plan is that all my images will be shown on a TV or monitor and not be printed. And as modern TVs have a HD resolution of around 1080p would a good inage resolution be 1920x1080 pixels?

Going off the maths of a 6x4 print would my scanned resolution be 320 ppi for a HD TV?

Or is this a bad resolution and I've screwed my maths somewhere?

In reply to The Lemming: Is it not worth scanning at higher resolution so you can zoom in when you want to? Or is that nonsensical?

In reply to The Lemming: Do you not have the negatives? That would give you much better results than scanning the prints, not to mention that even a cheap negative scanner will do it ten times faster (trust me, I've tried) and to much better results. My £20 used negative scaner from fleabay gives much much better than a decent flat bed does with high quality prints.

The photos are usually printed at 300 DPI though you get better results if you scan at 600 PPI (different things). A single dot doesn't translate to a single pixel. If you scan negatives then 3600 PPI is nice but 1800 is realistically enough for viewing on a tv. I would aim to get them at as big as is handy to work with, in a couple of years the "4k" tvs will be much more main stream (3840x2160) and it'd be a bit annoying to rescan everything then just because you have a new tv. That resolution is about 8mp. Bear in mind you need a little bit extra as some minor cropping is inevitably needed if it is to look good in the end.

In reply to The Lemming:
That'd look OK IMHO, I'd just scan an image at different resolutions to see which one gives you the size you want.

The negative scanning suggestion is a good one, it eliminates the loss of quality due to printing the neg, and the deterioration of the prints over time.