Hi all,
Not been here for a bit as had little time available for this hobby/obsession! Back in harness now though.
I use the latest edition of Legacy. Have always been a legacy fan but my question can probably be answered by users of other programs.
I like to link images to my files. e.g. if I have an image of the 1871 census with Uncle Norbert on it, then I like to couple this to his record so that when I am browsing I can call up the image and re read any details. At the moment I store these images and for example scanned pictures on my hard disc.
I am thinking about scanning in a lot more pictures than I have up till now and am trying to think ahead about capacity on my computer hard disc.
Can some kind soul give me the benefit of their experience in this department?
Advice re multimedia on my family history software
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searcher 52
- Posts: 34
- Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2007 7:46 pm
- Location: Paisley
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LesleyB
- Posts: 8184
- Joined: Fri Mar 18, 2005 12:18 am
- Location: Scotland
Hi Searcher
If you have a lot of images, you might think about investing in an external hard drive. These have come down in price a lot recently. That would save clogging up your internal HD with lots of image files. The external HD plugs in to a USB port on your PC and can provide a lot of space to store images and also perhaps somewhere to back up your family tree data to.
Best wishes
Lesley
If you have a lot of images, you might think about investing in an external hard drive. These have come down in price a lot recently. That would save clogging up your internal HD with lots of image files. The external HD plugs in to a USB port on your PC and can provide a lot of space to store images and also perhaps somewhere to back up your family tree data to.
Best wishes
Lesley
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searcher 52
- Posts: 34
- Joined: Tue Feb 27, 2007 7:46 pm
- Location: Paisley
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LesleyB
- Posts: 8184
- Joined: Fri Mar 18, 2005 12:18 am
- Location: Scotland
Hi Searcher,
Well, yes and no... It depends how many photos you are planning to store, what resolution you plan to scan them at etc.
8 - 16GB is not a great deal of storage space when you are dealing with images. You can buy a 500GB external HD for around £50 -£60 these days. The benefot of a pen drive is that you can take it with you out of the house, so if it is used for backup purposes, then the backup is not in the same building as the original, but some of the external HDs are made to be portable and are also quite small.
Best wishes
Lesley
Well, yes and no... It depends how many photos you are planning to store, what resolution you plan to scan them at etc.
8 - 16GB is not a great deal of storage space when you are dealing with images. You can buy a 500GB external HD for around £50 -£60 these days. The benefot of a pen drive is that you can take it with you out of the house, so if it is used for backup purposes, then the backup is not in the same building as the original, but some of the external HDs are made to be portable and are also quite small.
Best wishes
Lesley
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StewL
- Posts: 1396
- Joined: Sat Dec 11, 2004 12:59 am
- Location: Perth Western Australia
Hi Searcher
As Lesley said external HD's are now small and portable, mine is only a 150GB HD but small enough to slip into a pocket of my laptop bag, with power supplied by laptop through usb port.
USB sticks are handy, but again they would soon get full with a lot of pictures/images. They are more usefull for document transfers.
As Lesley said external HD's are now small and portable, mine is only a 150GB HD but small enough to slip into a pocket of my laptop bag, with power supplied by laptop through usb port.
USB sticks are handy, but again they would soon get full with a lot of pictures/images. They are more usefull for document transfers.
Stewie
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Currie
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Hello Searcher,
If you’re going to scan a whole lot of photographs and go to all that trouble then you may as well do high quality scans so that you have digital versions of all the pre digital photos. They would be useful for sharing around, printing extra copies or just as a backup of the paper version. There’s some useful scanning tips here http://www.scantips.com/
If you’re questioning whether your computer has the storage space to handle this operation then quite possibly you are already at a point where you need additional storage capacity even without the addition of these files. Storage of this type of data cannot be trusted to one type of media or storage location. Get an additional internal drive for your computer if practical and store them there but also an external hard drive for backup.
If that’s not practical store them on an external and backup onto DVDs. No form of computer storage is “set and forget” and all need careful handling and monitoring as all can fail. USB Thumbs drives are particularly prone to failure, some may work seemingly forever while others will fail at the least excuse. Using these as the sole source of valuable data is risky.
If your photos are all of the 6x4 variety scan them at a minimum of 300dpi and as tiffs. Scanning them at much more than that cannot usually improve photos taken with an average camera. This will produce fairly large file sizes but you never know what you will end up doing with these scans in the future and these issues will become increasingly irrelevant. If you plan to do any serious cropping or if the photos are of a particularly high quality you may want to scan at a higher resolution.
Don’t scan as jpegs if you can avoid it, because that format is compressed and any subsequent editing or cropping of the photo will entail further compression and possibly noticeable damage. (In theory all your jpegs, including those from your digital camera should be converted to tiffs and stored in that format but I don’t think too many people go down that route.)
If you can’t foresee there being any subsequent editing and if you must scan as jpegs set the scanner compression to minimum if there is such a setting. You’ll probably end up with not much more that the amount of compression applied by the average digital camera. You really don’t want to be unnecessarily cropping the images after they’re been scanned as this adds to the compression thing and the workload.
If you need versions of these photos of people and places for incorporation into a family history program and only for onscreen display or for the printing of reports etc you could probably settle for something much less in quality. You could convert the jpgs into a smaller version using the batch conversion in Irfanview or just email the larger jpgs to yourself and allow the normal email size reduction process to do the job. But that’s usually not suitable for documents that you need to read. If Scanning documents of A4 size only for display onscreen you could probably settle for something like 150 dpi.
I’ve set out these steps using my Canon Lide 20 with Scangear software and maybe they’ll translate in some way to what you have. This involves sorting all the photos into exact sizes and scanning each size group as a group and with the same scanner settings.
Firstly start your scanner software and in the settings select the image type you want, the dpi and the folder you want them to go to etc. then place a photo on the scanner bed tight against a nearby corner, click preview, draw a mask around the image so that it is within the borders of the photo, click preview again and the scanner will probably be set to that image size and position. Click scan then check the resultant image in the storage folder to make sure all is to plan.
Place another photo in the same position on the scanner, click the scanner button to reopen the software then the scan button and change the photo when the scanner is on its return journey ad infinitum as fast as you can manage it. When you’ve done that size group of photos reset the preview area to the size of the next group and start again, remember to keep the scan mask within the photo borders to avoid the need for later cropping, check the first couple of scans in each group and make sure the scanner glass stays free of dust.
There are probably more sophisticated ways your software can handle this process but that’s possibly the easiest explained and perhaps you’ve been there done that.
Hope there’s something useful there,
Alan
If you’re going to scan a whole lot of photographs and go to all that trouble then you may as well do high quality scans so that you have digital versions of all the pre digital photos. They would be useful for sharing around, printing extra copies or just as a backup of the paper version. There’s some useful scanning tips here http://www.scantips.com/
If you’re questioning whether your computer has the storage space to handle this operation then quite possibly you are already at a point where you need additional storage capacity even without the addition of these files. Storage of this type of data cannot be trusted to one type of media or storage location. Get an additional internal drive for your computer if practical and store them there but also an external hard drive for backup.
If that’s not practical store them on an external and backup onto DVDs. No form of computer storage is “set and forget” and all need careful handling and monitoring as all can fail. USB Thumbs drives are particularly prone to failure, some may work seemingly forever while others will fail at the least excuse. Using these as the sole source of valuable data is risky.
If your photos are all of the 6x4 variety scan them at a minimum of 300dpi and as tiffs. Scanning them at much more than that cannot usually improve photos taken with an average camera. This will produce fairly large file sizes but you never know what you will end up doing with these scans in the future and these issues will become increasingly irrelevant. If you plan to do any serious cropping or if the photos are of a particularly high quality you may want to scan at a higher resolution.
Don’t scan as jpegs if you can avoid it, because that format is compressed and any subsequent editing or cropping of the photo will entail further compression and possibly noticeable damage. (In theory all your jpegs, including those from your digital camera should be converted to tiffs and stored in that format but I don’t think too many people go down that route.)
If you can’t foresee there being any subsequent editing and if you must scan as jpegs set the scanner compression to minimum if there is such a setting. You’ll probably end up with not much more that the amount of compression applied by the average digital camera. You really don’t want to be unnecessarily cropping the images after they’re been scanned as this adds to the compression thing and the workload.
If you need versions of these photos of people and places for incorporation into a family history program and only for onscreen display or for the printing of reports etc you could probably settle for something much less in quality. You could convert the jpgs into a smaller version using the batch conversion in Irfanview or just email the larger jpgs to yourself and allow the normal email size reduction process to do the job. But that’s usually not suitable for documents that you need to read. If Scanning documents of A4 size only for display onscreen you could probably settle for something like 150 dpi.
I’ve set out these steps using my Canon Lide 20 with Scangear software and maybe they’ll translate in some way to what you have. This involves sorting all the photos into exact sizes and scanning each size group as a group and with the same scanner settings.
Firstly start your scanner software and in the settings select the image type you want, the dpi and the folder you want them to go to etc. then place a photo on the scanner bed tight against a nearby corner, click preview, draw a mask around the image so that it is within the borders of the photo, click preview again and the scanner will probably be set to that image size and position. Click scan then check the resultant image in the storage folder to make sure all is to plan.
Place another photo in the same position on the scanner, click the scanner button to reopen the software then the scan button and change the photo when the scanner is on its return journey ad infinitum as fast as you can manage it. When you’ve done that size group of photos reset the preview area to the size of the next group and start again, remember to keep the scan mask within the photo borders to avoid the need for later cropping, check the first couple of scans in each group and make sure the scanner glass stays free of dust.
There are probably more sophisticated ways your software can handle this process but that’s possibly the easiest explained and perhaps you’ve been there done that.
Hope there’s something useful there,
Alan