Before scanning your photographs the first thing you should do is carefully remove surface dust by gently brushing the photograph with a wide, soft artist brush. Do not use pressure, it is better to allow the fine bristles to do the work for you.

The following are just guidelines based on our experience. You should consult your scanners users guide for information specific to your scanner.

If you have multiple images to be scanned you can place as many as will fit on the bed of your scanner and scan them all together. This makes for far less work when uploading or storing files. Before uploading your image make sure you have cropped out all the surrounding area not occupied by the photographs.

Next you should determine the quality of the photo to be scanned. The most important consideration is the resolution of the original photo. If you can detect blur without resorting to magnification you should set your scanner to 300dpi and 100% magnification. On the other hand if the photo is very crisp to the naked eye you should increase the magnification  to 200%  or even 300%. Remember that the higher the magnification the longer it will take to scan and the larger the file will be and upload time will also be increased.

Black and white photographs can be scanned using either the halftone or color photo setting on your scanner. Obviously you should scan color photos using the color photo setting.

You should not scan slides or negatives on a flatbed scanner as the results will not be optimum. Instead use a slide/negative scanner. (Or send them to us for scanning)

Use your scanners preview mode. This will allow you to crop the photo(s) and reduce file size and scanning time considerably.

After your scan is complete we recommend saving in the .tif (tiff) or .jpg (jpeg) formats. Please do not save as .bmp or .gif as these formats remove important information from the data in the interest of saving file space. We need as much original information as possible to correctly restore your photographs.