Blog · Before You Scan

Scanning Best Practices for Family Photos

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By Spencer Baker, founder of Timeline Scan · Last updated: August 2026

The four settings below are the difference between a one-time project and an archive you re-scan in five years because the files weren’t good enough. None of them slow you down, and all of them quietly improve everything that comes after: dating, organizing, restoring, enlarging.

The Four Settings That Actually Matter

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Most consumer scanners default to settings tuned for speed, not for archival quality. Override these four and you’ll never have to redo a batch.

1

Always Scan the Back

The back of a photo holds the most reliable dating information: handwritten dates, names, notes, and timestamps. Always scan both sides: even if the back looks blank, there can be faint timestamps.

Epson FastFoto FF-680W users Check the box “Scan the back of my photos…” and move the slider all the way to the right so “All” is selected with “Save both sides of each photo.” The auto-detect mode misses light timestamp prints and faint pencil writing that our AI can still read.
Flatbed scanner + Mac users Our free FrontBack Scanner app makes back-scanning painless: scan a bedful of fronts at once, flip the photos where they lie, scan again, and every back is saved beside its front automatically.
2

Choose Your Scan Quality

600 DPI Captures every detail visible in the print, including faint timestamps and fine grain. Matches the FADGI guidelines the Library of Congress uses for photographic prints, and the safer choice for future enlarging, restoration, or AI enhancement. Recommended
300 DPI Enough for viewing the photo at its original size. Smaller files, but fine detail is lost when you zoom in or enlarge. Acceptable
3

Save as JPG, Not TIFF

JPG Small files (about 2 MB each). Easier to move around. Best if you don’t plan to make further edits. Most families
TIFF Lossless, no compression (about 20 MB each). Best if you plan to do additional edits. Editing

Timeline Scan never recompresses your photos: whatever quality you send is exactly what you get back.

4

Name Files by Album or Box Label

Use the label on each album or box as a filename prefix for that batch. A box marked “Jul89 – Sept90” becomes Jul89Sept90, so files come out as Jul89Sept90_0001.jpg, Jul89Sept90_0002.jpg, and so on.

This gives us a known time window per batch. For photos with few visual clues, that album context is one of the biggest levers on accuracy: in our measured dating benchmarks, evidence-free prints that arrive with their album context land within a year of the true date about 6.5 in 10 times (about 8 in 10 once the family roster is typed in), versus roughly a quarter of the time when the same prints arrive shuffled with meaningless filenames.

Everything else (color correction, cropping, restoration) is best done later, on copies. Don’t bake destructive edits into the scan itself.

Keep Reading

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Before You Scan

Common Mistakes When Scanning Family Photos

The flip side of this checklist: the pitfalls that turn a one-time scanning project into a permanently unfinished one.

Read → The Complete Guide

How to Organize Scanned Photos: From Boxes of Prints to a Family Timeline

The full digitize-date-enjoy system, learned across 8,000 family prints, that turns out-of-order scans into a chronological archive your family can browse.

Read → All Articles

Browse the Blog

Every guide we’ve published on scanning, organizing, and enjoying family photos.

View all →

Already Scanning?

Once you’ve scanned even a small batch with these settings, Timeline Scan can put it back in the order it happened: it reads the handwriting on the back, analyzes the front, and writes each photo’s real date into the metadata so your library finally reads in chronological order.

View Pricing See the Demo