APG-L Archives

Archiver > APG > 2009-08 > 1250120188


From: "EILEEN SOUZA" <>
Subject: Re: [APG] Photographs
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:36:28 -0400
References: <85F0C53ECE88412186866DFF370AFE2B@acer511eba12df><370764.97203.qm@web31602.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
In-Reply-To: <370764.97203.qm@web31602.mail.mud.yahoo.com>


In the late nineties, I began scanning my photos into digital images. I
used formats that were popular at the time like, GIF, BMP, PNG, etc. Now I
cannot view most of them. I was lucky with the PNG to find a program that
will still read it and allow me to save it as JPEG (the best I can do).
The GIF and BMP images, while still viewable are so low a resolution that
today's viewers render them unreadable. Yet I remember being able to read
them very well at the time. I imported some into my FTM program of the
moment but reached a point where they were no longer readable. The programs
do open them but all you see are some fuzzy dots.

Today, I use TIF and PDF. I scan at 600 dpi minimum. I had to do some
research for work. The TIF standard is not open. It is owned by Adobe and
has not been updated since 1993. That is good and bad. The good is that it
has not changed so old TIFs will work as well as new TIFs. The bad is
trying to obtain viewers for it in the future. I believe that if you store
the TIF uncompressed it is lossless. There is a relatively recent
compression format that is supposed to be lossless but it is the only one.
TIF does have scalability
Limitations compared to PDF. The recent PDF-A format (equivalent to Adobe's
PDF-4 version) is open source. Since the publication of this standard,
there have been numerous third party releases of PDF create and view
software. Some freeware.

I do not compress the original of any of my document or photo scans. JPEG
does not have an uncompressed format but you can minimize the compression.
I purchased a 1TB USB drive (under $150) to store media. I do not touch
the original electronic document or image but make a copy of it to modify,
print, email, etc. I can than compress the copy however I wish.

This is the challenge of technology. As scanners, cameras and other
recording hardware improve their resolutions and new levels of resolution
become popular, software products (the viewers), TVs, monitors, etc., stop
supporting the lower levels of resolution. I remember when I purchased a
new TV and my VHS tapes no longer looked as good as they used to. That was
when I switched to DVD but I had to repurchase all my VHS movies.

I had to rescan all my early stuff from the original photos and now I am
seriously thinking of switching to 1200 dpi for images and documents, which
would mean doing it again. To my knowledge there is no way to add pixels to
an existing image. I would not throw away any thing that you would hate to
lose because you may need it again in the future.

Eileen Souza
Eldersburg, MD 21784







-----Original Message-----
From: [mailto:] On Behalf
Of Ray Beere Johnson II
Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2009 4:47 PM
To: LBoswell; APG Posting
Subject: Re: [APG] Photographs

Larry;

--- On Tue, 8/11/09, LBoswell <> wrote:

> great info. What format would you recommend saving them in. The high
> res tip is something I hadn't thought of, but it makes sense.

I usually use TIF / TIFF format for images I want to preserve, but it
is not ideal and I've got to spend some time researching formats. Open
standards and lossless encoding are important, of course, but I need to find
out more about how well the various formats hold up - that is, how easily is
a file in that format damaged beyond recovery? (Although IceECC does take a
lot of the worry out of that issue.)
(For those wondering about my issue with the TIFF format, there are
varying implementations. A few are _not_ lossless, and the file header in
many implementations is easily damaged, preventing the file from being
successfully opened. There's software for recovering many such damaged
files, of course, but that raises issues of its own.)
Ray Beere Johnson II


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