A couple years ago I scanned a few hundred old family photos while visiting my sister. I wasn't familiar with her scanner so I scanned everything at high quality. Well, the scanned images are HUGE. Like gigantor. For example, a 2"x3" photo scanned to 6616 x 10729 pixels. Yeah. I need to reduce the image sizes, but I haven't a clue as to a good guide for what would be satisfactory and still give good resolution. I've been doing some down to 25% of the original, but that's still huge. Any thoughts?
In a nutshell, it depends on what you want to do with the photos. The aspect ratio is what dictates what how the photo shows up. 1:1 - square, think instagram. 3:2 - you see in a lot of film photos. 4:3 - common for digtal photos, and televisions. The pixels help you with print size. And for that I'm going to refer you to Adobe for more information because I think they break it down really well! It's a UK link, but you should be able to open it anyway. https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/photography/discover/standard-photo-sizes.html Unless you have something that also scales the pixels and helps make them look better for printing, you may need to stay at the original scan size. I find that a lot of my 3x4 photos usually scale okay for me to 4x6. But it depends on if it was inside or outside and a good photo to start with or not. And it depends on your preference.
Most of these are just to have to make into family history albums and to share with other family members. So I don’t need them to be huge. I’ll check out that link to see what they say. I’d probably just be happy with them in their normal size. But I can’t believe how big they were!
@bestcee I just read that article and WOW! There is so much good info there! At least now I have some idea of what I need to save these images at. It’s going to take me a while to complete but at least they won’t be taking up so much space in my computer. Next time I’m at my sister’s scanning at least I’ll k ow what setting not to use anymore!
One thing to remember @QuiltyMom is what you want to do with the picture once you've resized it... if you are only ever going to view it on a screen then you can work with a dpi of 72 as that's what most screens display as... this will make your file size very small... downside those is the quality diminishes so these don't print well. If you are wanting to print your photos, like on a scrapbook layout or in a book, then you need to work with a dpi of 300. So when resizing your large images, you can work on the ratio that works best but set the dpi at 300 and you will be fine....so if you want a 4x6" size image then you take 300 x 4 = 1200 and 300 x 6 = 1800 so your image should not be smaller than 1200x1800 pixels. Modern cameras and cellphones now can take photos in much higher dpi than in the past, and setting your scanner to 300dpi should be ample for scanning photos. Usually anything bigger than that is unnecessary and just results in large file sizes. another thought... if you scan a 2x3 photo ... don't store it as 600x900 but rather double that if you can... this will give you better options if you want to scrap your photo in say a 4x6 size.... give yourself options but don't limit yourself to just a set size. Scanning from physical to digital is a lot of work... so give yourself the best result with options to downscale as you can't upscale once the image is too small..... hope this makes sense.
@CathQuillScrap WOW! That info was perfect! Thank you so much. I’m still mind blown by how large some of the photos and documents scanned. lol. Will be putting them into a digi scrapbook sometime soon so I want them at least the original sizes for that, but I do agree that saving them larger in case someone wants to print them down the road is definitely a smart idea. I’ll be visiting my other sister next month, so I’ll be sure to check the scanned sizes before doing all her photos.
I agree with Cathy that 300 PPI/DPI (pixels/dots per square inch) is considered standard print quality and not going smaller than 3000 px on the long edge (to support up to an 8x10). It's all about how big you think you'll ever print something and how much storage space you have. Programs like Photoshop can resample images to fill in some of the data from smaller pixel dimensions (if you accidentally save too small), but there is a limit to what it can do, that's why increasing the dimensions of things makes them fuzzier. If you have the space for the files, I'd probably just leave them as-is. Good luck - I hope you've found a happy medium!
