Photographic Memory : Photo Scanning – The Best Way to Preserve Your Prized Photographs!

Article by Henrich Rault

You go looking for your old photographs stored in a shoebox in the attic and what do you find? Prized photos glued together. Prying them apart will destroy the images and you’d have lost your photographic memories for good.

So how do you prevent your photos from curling with mold and bonding together from damp? You could do photo scanning! You could convert your photos to a digital format, which you could save and view on your computer screen. In this format you could upload them to the web and share them with your Aunt Maggie down in Oz.

Using a Scanner

The easiest way to do photo scanning is to use a flatbed scanner. You just lift the lid of the scanner and place your photo on the glass panel. Then you preview your image on your screen and crop the photo to the size you want. Next, you just press the scan button and your photo will be scanned.

Scan Photo Formats

The best format to save your scanned photo in is a jpg format. The scanned photo is compressed so that the file size becomes smaller. By compressing the file, jpg format photo scans are slightly lower in quality because some bits of information are lost during the compression process. If you were to enlarge the photo onscreen you’ll observe that the quality of the image becomes poorer. However, the jpg format is ideal for most of your photo scanning requirements as its easy to work with and quick to download.

Scanning Slides and Negatives

You shouldn’t just stop at photo scanning. You should also scan your slides and negatives to make sure you’ve got a copy of you personal history in digital format. As slides and negatives will deteriorate over time, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to view your slides and develop photos from negatives after several years of neglect. So your best bet to maintain an accurate photographic record of your family history is to have your slides and negatives scanned to digital format.

Scanning Services

If you can’t scan your photos yourself, use scanning services which charge a fee. Don’t scan at a higher resolution than 300dpi. You don’t need much higher than that unless your require very high quality print images of your photos. Generally, 300 dpi is the best choice for photo scanning. You’ll have to pay a higher rate for 600 – 1200 dpi and the file sizes will also be larger. That means you’re going to use up quite a bit of hard drive if you’ve got plenty of photos to scan. They will also load slower when you upload them to your web photo folder or send them to your friends as an email attachment.

Photo scanning is the ideal method to preserve your prized photographs from deteriorating. You don’t have to worry about your photos fading, gluing together or getting burnt to a crisp and lost forever if you’ve got a scanned copy. Get down to scanning your photos and share a piece of your history online!

Important

It a good idea to preserve your photographic legacy though photo scanning and share them online with your far flung family members. You can save a lot of hassle by having your photos scanned professionally!