Family Photo Project Suggestions

Apologies to my fellow mods. If this is in the wrong place I'll move it.

I'm starting a photo project which collects photos from family members, edits them if necessary, then puts them into a final formal (probably slideshow). There will be several of these with the initial photos mostly the same and then diverging as the timeline moves forward. For now they would be played back on digital photo frames / dvd though I am open to other suggestions.

Given the nature of the project I thought I would ask for some input on the following issues:

1. For photos that need to be scanned can someone suggest an appropriate resolution. I was thinking the final projects would be similar to high definition TV. The scans might need to be at a different resolution though for use in other undetermined projects.

2. Some files such as photos on smartphones can be sent by e-mail but I was thinking of using an online area for scanned files to be uploaded to. In the old days I would have set up a public folder in MobileMe and sent them an appropriate link. What's the best alternative? SkyDrive?

Obviously the users will be using multiple platforms and probably have varying degrees of familiarity with tech. Thoughts anyone?

Not sure about the scanning resolution. But, for photo sharing, you could set up an iCloud folder in iPhoto and send invites to everyone that will be contributing photos and then they can just add to the folder that way. That's one suggestion, I'm sure there are other methods.

Scanning of photos is going to vary especially if some of them are very old. The quality of a scanned photo will be degraded if the photo was taken at a low resolution to begin with. If possible, advise those folks who are sending scanned photos to use a commercial scanning service if one is available. I believe Staples, Office Depot, and local UPS stores offer that service at a reasonable fee.

As far as setting up a public folder, you can do that with SkyDrive, DropBox, and others that offer free storage. Just be careful not to go over the amount of free space that is offered.

Thanks guys. I was thinking about SkyDrive as an option. Ideally AI would like to set things so that one family member cannot accidentally delete something from the folder.

I was not sure it has a little more capacity than DropBox though I don't see that as a major issue. My plan is to grab the photos probably within 24 hours of the upload. That way there won't be gobs of pictures sitting there.

I went into iCloud earlier this morning with the thought of setting up an alias account so it would be easy to differentiate those files from all the junk that comes into my normal iCloud account. For some reason I could click on Preferences but then not select any of the tabs to make changes.

Copy.com has a great deal more capacity than SkyDrive for free: 15GB

(or 20GB if you use my referral link)

Another option is Flickr. If your contributors aren't on Flickr and don't want to join (costs nothing), then the Copy option is best. If you have most or all of your contributors on Flickr, however, I can recommend starting a photo group that is limited to your contributors, and there's plenty of space for pictures.

As to scanning, I would think 300ppi would be a good start. If that scans the photo in good time, bump it up to 600ppi. The higher the better. Im always changing scans from the default of 72ppi to as high as I can go, for the best result.
You might have to play with it though, as in scan a 300ppi, and see what the size of the image is, because that could be a factor in your gathering of images too. so

Agreed. If this is your one shot at scanning these family photos, scan them at as high a resolution as possible, save in a standard lossless format like TIFF, then store those. Convert copies to JPG and edit those as you need for this project. Standard-definition DVDs and TVs can't use any resolution beyond 720x480. HD (blu-ray) DVDs and TVs top out at 1920x1080, though now we're starting to see 4K emerging as a standard (4096x2160).

@TM thanks for that formula. I knew I had it here somewhere. I usually scan at 300. I made the mistake once of using an interpolated resolution of 1200 or 2400 on an 8 x 10 photo. The resulting tiff file was over 100 MB.

@chas_m Great minds think alike, That's what I was thinking. The last time I did something like this I kept the file in tiff format till I had all the editing was finished then saved as jpeg. When I tried saving the intermediate files as jpegs I got some compression artifacts. Might have been due to settings though,