Choose a scanning resolution

The scanning resolution used is extremely important. You must first determine what the size of the digitized image should be in pixels, keeping in mind that:

• Many users have a screen resolution of 800 x 600 pixels. For these users, any image exceeding these dimensions will not be completely visible in the browser window.
  
  
• Images that are too large take a long time to download. Due to this, many visitors will leave before they even see the image displayed.
  
  

The lesson: limit the size of your images. Dimensions of 450 x 300 pixels should be the maximum for a photo gallery.

All that's left is to digitize the images at the correct size. Here, everything depends on the interface of your scanner.

• Some interfaces let you directly enter the size in pixels of the image to be scanned. In this case, use this function. You might need to change the default unit (which is generally inches or cm).
  
  

Figure 3: This scanner interface lets you directly enter the size of the image in pixels.

• If this is not the case, the size of the image is probably displayed somewhere in your interface. Modify the scanning resolution so that the dimensions that are displayed correspond to the dimensions you want. As an example, to obtain an image that is 450 pixels wide from a 10 x 15 cm photo, use a resolution of 75 dpi; from a 9 x 13 photo, use 79 dpi.
  
  

Figure 4: Modify the scanning resolution to obtain the desired image dimensions.

• If you do not have this display, the only thing you can do is display the rulers of the thumbnail window in pixels, then modify the scanning resolution by estimating.
  
  

Figure 5: If you cannot enter dimensions directly, use the rulers to estimate; make sure they display dimensions in pixels.