As a genealogist or family historian, you are a detective of time. You hunt for clues in census records, track down distant cousins, and piece together the story of your ancestors. Among the most precious artifacts you can find are old family photographs. That stoic portrait of your great-great-grandfather, a faded photo of a family reunion from a hundred years ago, or a candid snapshot of your grandparents' wedding—these images are priceless windows into the past.
To protect these fragile treasures and share them with your family, digitizing them by scanning is an essential step. But this creates a new challenge. Scanned photos, especially when scanned at a high resolution to capture every detail, result in enormous digital files. These massive files can be difficult to store, impossible to email to relatives, and can make any family tree website you're building incredibly slow to load.
The key to managing your digital archive is learning how to properly resize and compress these scanned images. It’s a process that allows you to create versatile, shareable copies while ensuring your high-quality master scan remains safely archived. This guide will walk you through the thoughtful process of preparing your historical photos for the digital age.
The Historian's Dilemma: Detail vs. Accessibility
When you scan an old photo, you face a dilemma. You want to scan at a high resolution (like 600 DPI or more) to capture every crack, texture, and faint detail for archival purposes. But this archival-quality scan can be 20 to 50 megabytes (MB) or even larger.
- The Archival Master File: This huge file is your "digital negative." You should save it in a safe place (like an external hard drive and a cloud service) and never edit it. It’s for preservation.
- The "Working" Copy: For everything else—emailing to a cousin, posting on a genealogy forum, adding to your Ancestry.com family tree, or displaying on your family history blog—you need a much smaller, more manageable "working" copy.
This is where resizing and compressing your copies becomes a crucial part of your workflow.
A Genealogist's Workflow for Digitizing Old Photos
Let's treat these precious images with the care they deserve. We'll use a simple, free online tool, https://imageresizeronline.net/, to create our working copies.
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Step 1: Scan at High Resolution
Scan your original photograph using a flatbed scanner. For archival purposes, a resolution of at least 600 DPI is recommended. Save this file as an uncompressed TIFF file if possible, or a maximum-quality JPG. Name it carefully (e.g., "JohnSmith_1895_Portrait_MASTER.tiff") and back it up.
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Step 2: Make a Copy to Work With
Before you do anything else, make a copy of your master file. Rename the copy to something like "JohnSmith_1895_Portrait_web.jpg." It is this copy that we will be working with, to ensure we never risk altering the original scan.
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Step 3: Upload Your Working Copy to the Online Tool
Open your web browser and navigate to the resizer. Upload the "working" copy of your scanned photo.
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Step 4: Resize for Online Viewing
The scanned photo might be 5000x7000 pixels, which is far too large for a screen. A good size for online viewing is to make the longest side around 1600 to 2000 pixels. In the tool's resize options, find the longer of the two dimensions (width or height) and change it to "2000." The other dimension will adjust automatically, preserving the photo's original shape.
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Step 5: Apply Gentle Compression
The goal here is to reduce the file size without harming the visible detail of the historical image. For old photos, especially black and white ones, you can often get excellent results with a quality setting of 85-90%. This will maintain the subtle tones and textures while making the file size dramatically smaller—perfect for fast loading on a website or for sending via email.
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Step 6: Download Your Shareable Historic Photo
Download your newly resized and compressed file. This "working" copy is now perfect for a wide range of uses:
- Emailing to Relatives: Now small enough to attach without issue.
- Uploading to Family Tree Websites: It will upload quickly to sites like Ancestry or MyHeritage.
- Posting on a Family History Blog: Your pages will load quickly for all your readers.
- Sharing on Genealogy Forums: You can now easily share your findings with other researchers.
Your work as a family historian is a gift to future generations. By learning this simple digital skill, you ensure that the visual treasures you uncover can be easily shared, celebrated, and preserved as part of your family’s ongoing story, making your research more accessible and impactful for everyone.