File Formats question

I'm a bit confused about the best choice of file format. I am in the process
of scanning a lot of 35mm slides and B/W negs from long ago. I want to keep
some on my HDD for viewing/e-mailing and also want to archive them to CD.
What would be the best combination of formats bearing in mind size
considerations? What's your system?


Regards and thanks in advance

Pat Macguire

 

What would be the best combination of formats bearing in mind size

To minimize file size and stay with a lossless format, PNG will do the job.
They may take a few seconds to open, because your CPU has to decompress them
when you click on the filenames.

Uncompressed TIF is probably the most popular storage format, but the file
size is bigger. With CDs being so cheap, I would think that you wouldn't be
too concerned about file size.

I's stay away from proprietary formats for long-term storage, as software in
the future may not support those formats. You probably have the greatest
long-term ability to read your stored files by sticking with TIF and PNG.

 

[posted and mailed]

Here is an excellent resource:

http://www.scantips.com/

For file formats read this section:

http://www.scantips.com/basics09.html

 

If you are not concerned with space considerations and may want to edit these
pictures in the future after having been archived, I would scan them as TIFF.
The sizes will be larger than JPG or PNG, but you can get a lot of pictures on
CD nonetheless.

 

Here is an article about digital archiving on Photography @ About.com


http://photography.about.com/library/weekly/aa011303a.htm

 

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RM: It pays to get various opinions of course. Mine is that if you are
going to spend a lot of time scanning your slides and negs, then you
may as well do it only once - and do it properly. This means saving
the files to TIFF and then preserving them as your master copies.
After this you could do what you want - which means making low quality
JPEGS or (for some jobs) GIFs for the web.

If you were concerned about the space required for archiving your
TIFFs, you could compress them with the *lossless* LZW facility.

Ray

 

Thanks everybody, for your responses.


Regards


Pat Macguire