Q: How should I archive pictures?
A: Many people have digital cameras and lots of pictures on their home computers. Some families have professional pictures taken at a studio which often provide digital copies on CD. Most people though, still have stacks of photo albums (if not shoe boxes) full of old photographs.

 Take heart, making the transition to digital archiving is not as insurmountable as it may first appear. There are many good home scanners and combination printer/scanners available and if time allows, the pictures can be easily scanned and archived (cropping and fixing color/damage is another matter).

 When choosing a scanning resolution, consider whether the photograph will need editing, such as cropping. If so, scanning it at 300 dpi should be adequate. If a lot of the original picture needs to be removed then you may need to scan at 600 dpi. High dpi scanning can result in large files (the pictures they generate may even be larger than what you can see on your screen or print on a page). If you would like to e-mail these documents, you may need to find a more reasonable file size. I archive most pictures at 300 dpi (a few important photographs at 600). When I do video editing, my finished pictures (after cropping and retouching) are generally 200 dpi, which looks great on a TV screen. Whatever dpi you choose keep in mind two things: What is a reasonable file size? and Scan at an integer divisor of the scanner's optical resolution. (Now what the heck does that mean?) Simply put - if your scanner has an optical (not interpolated) resolution of 300 dpi, pick a resolution that evenly divides into 300 (such as 300, 150, 100, or 50) to get a better quality scan. If your scanner has an optical resolution of 600 dpi you can use 600, 300, 200, 150, 100, or 75). I've found that scan resolution such as 72 dpi, 96 dpi, or 175 dpi do not look as good.

 There are also commercial resources available to simplify the digitizing process that many people find worth the small expense involved. These range from local print shops to online services to nationwide retail chains. Regardless of the route taken, it is a good idea to have CDs of your treasured memories in a safe place to back up you hard copies.

 There are many good software programs designed to simplify transferring your pictures to CD and Windows has a simple built in program to put data on CDs as well.  Inserting a blank CD into your writable drive will open a dialogue box with the option to burn files to data disc.  Clicking on the burn files to data disc option will take you to the burn a disc dialogue box. Click next and an empty disc folder will open.  Simply drag and drop your pictures from their existing folder into the empty disc folder and follow the prompts to create an archive CD.

 With a little experimenting and some inexpensive software you can even make your own slideshow presentations with professional looking effects and transitions. These can be converted to DVD and played in most DVD players.

 Ultimately, taking the effort to make digital copies of you photographs is worth the time and money. The memories can be readily shared and in the event of a disaster, all may not be lost (photo album-wise). Digital copies can, and will, be passed down from generation to generation. Family memories will live on in this digital age.