Blog · Before You Scan
Scanning Best Practices for Family Photos
A little preparation before you scan goes a long way. 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. All of them quietly improve every step that comes after — AI dating, importing into a photo library, restoring a damaged print, or simply enlarging a favorite photo for a frame.
The Four Settings That Actually Matter
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.
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.
Choose Your Scan Quality
Save as JPG, Not TIFF
Timeline Scan never recompresses your photos — whatever quality you send is exactly what you get back.
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, improving accuracy by about 10% for photos with few visual clues.
Why These Four (and Not the Other Forty)
Modern scanner software exposes dozens of options — color profiles, dust removal, sharpening, descreening, contrast, output curves. Almost none of them matter for a family archive. The four above matter because each one fixes a specific way archives go wrong:
- Scanning the back rescues information that is otherwise gone forever — handwriting and timestamps that no front-of-photo analysis can ever reconstruct.
- 600 DPI protects against the future. In 2030 you will want to enlarge, restore, or AI-upscale at least a few of these photos. 300 DPI scans cannot be enhanced after the fact.
- JPG over PNG ensures your photo library will read the metadata and place each photo on the correct date. PNG support for EXIF is patchy across photo libraries.
- Album-prefixed filenames preserve the physical organization of the original albums, which is the closest thing to ground truth that exists for old prints.
Everything else — sharpening, color correction, dust removal — is best done later, in software, on copies. Don’t bake destructive edits into the scan itself.
Keep Reading
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 → Right After ScanningHow to Organize Scanned Family Photos in Chronological Order
Five steps that turn a folder of out-of-order scans into a real chronological archive your family can browse.
Read → All ArticlesBrowse 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 date them automatically — reading the handwriting on the back, analyzing the front, and writing the original date into the metadata so your library finally reads in chronological order.
View Pricing See the Demo