Low Res pics from External Hard Drive

I put my photos on an external hard drive. Now I want to put them back on my Mac. When I do so, all of the pics have too low res. I'm trying to make prints & photos books. All pics say 72 dpi. What did I do wrong?

If you simply copied them over, then nothing happened. They were 72 DPI to begin with (which is fairly common). You may be confusing the DPI with the canvas size. Here... read this:

Why are my images only 72 dpi? - Fotolia US

jranson said:

I put my photos on an external hard drive. Now I want to put them back on my Mac. When I do so, all of the pics have too low res. I'm trying to make prints & photos books. All pics say 72 dpi. What did I do wrong?

Click to expand...

Hi Jranson - welcome to the forum!

As already posted, your pics are likely only 72 ppi (pixels per inch) on your external drive? You need to provide us more details about the images on the external drive - did you re-size these from their originals (e.g. for web posting)? If so, do you still have the originals?

If you want to print these images, then the usual resolution for a sharp image is 300 dpi (dots per inch) - see the attached pic, a nice 5"x7" pic @ that resolution would require a 3 MP (megapixel) image file, so you may want to check the actual size of those files on your external drive; if you are well under 1 MP then your images have been greatly down-sized and cannot be enlarged w/o degradation of the image; thus, you'll need originals at a much larger pixel size. Dave