Scanning old pics to computer?

Question

I have old pictures that I want to scan into my computer -

1. Will it take up a lot of memory?

2. If so, what other methods have you used to store/save pics?

I welcome any other useful tips you want to add. Thanks.

Answer 1

Normal scanning usually takes a few megabytes at the most (not alot).

Answer 2

Generally speaking, the more megapixels a digital image contains, the more kilobytes (KB) or megabytes (MB) it will consume on a hard drive or a Web site. However, the file format you choose to save the image as will also affect its size.

Answering your first question - will it take up alot of memory.  It will take up disk space depending on the resolution and compression method used for the image.

For example, a 3.1-megapixel digital photo saved in the JPEG format with slight image compression would consume around 600 KB of hard drive space. By contrast, that exact same image saved as an uncompressed TIFF file would consume about 9 MB of hard drive space.

The website below can be helpful in understand different image file formats.  You would generally want to use .JPG for storing your images however this page lists all more familiar formats:

http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/s...

Answer 3

It won't take up any memory at all to store pictures. You will only need enough memory to hold each picture as it is scanned. It will take up space on your hard disk however. Depending on what quality settings you use each picture could take up 1MB of space depending on what size they are. For most standard snapshots at medium quality settings you should be looking at maybe 500K (roughly half a megabyte) per picture. This will be more than suitable for viewing on a computer screen.

This would let you store roughly 2000 pictures in a Gigabyte of hard-disk space.

If you have lots (hundreds of thousands) of pictures to scan and store. You could either buy an external hard-disk to store them on, or archive them onto CD/DVD.