Mankovich/Petrick A place to link to the published books about the family and to exchange information.

The following is a simple set of suggestions I created for folks who were scanning new oversize picture or graphical. Often this is a large group picture or a large graphic sheet (like a family tree or newspaper article) that is larger than the size of the computer image scanner. In all cases we want to scan the individual sections with a 10-20% overlap and the identical settings on the scanner (no “autoadjust”).

GUIDE TO SCANNING OVERSIZE MATERIALS (large sheets requiring multiple scans)

1. Set your scan to produce TIFF files. If the material is color or old and has a nice patina of age (yellow or other coloring), set to scan as full color. If you can’t select TIFF, BMP also retains full quality. If you have no other choice, JPEG can be used.
2. If available in your scanning software, select the output TIFF file to use compression (LZW or ZIP are the best options to choose as they maintain full image quality with no degradation, not JPEG – it degrades quality slightly). Often the LZW/ZIP option comes up only after you attempt to save your file as a TIFF format file.
3. Choose a section of the oversize that is “typical”. Set scanner to auto-adjust (brightness, contrast, color) mode with no other enhancement. Do a trial scan and note the settings that the scan uses for brightness, contrast, and any other settings (if available).
4. Turn off the auto-adjust mode (sometimes called “manual mode”) and, if possible, set all settings as noted above. If none of this seems possible, just turn off auto-adjust and do the scan of all sections with fixed settings.
5. Scan each section naming saved files something meaningful ending in 01, 02, etc. Be systematic, perhaps starting with lower left and marching right then up. Be sure to overlap your scans 15-20%, no less.
6. If you have been unable to use compression via LZW/ZIP, it is a good idea to use PKZIP or other utility to ZIP-compress the files. You can collect all the files into a single ZIP file if the file is not too large for your purposes (e.g., email).

This is a simple recipe for scanning oversize material. This is a bit technical but if you have any questions, contact me or leave a comment here and I will attempt to answer.