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Isn't somebody supposed to tell us things like this in grade school?
   technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Dealing with digital images, Part 1: Why you need some software assistance


Jan. 30, 2000

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers

   First we bought a scanner. Then we bought a color printer. Life has never been the same since.
   I'd like to say that life isn't the same because our humble home looks like an art gallery, replete with splendid prints and gorgeous photos. But that's not what happened.
   Yes, we have handsome color prints of the grandchildren here and there, and you can find lovely pictures of our journeys. But most of the pictures aren't framed properly and we don't even have them organized. Some are on the wall and some are just piled high on a table somewhere.
   Life hasn't been the same for a reason as old as humanity. We've run out of patience. Computers were supposed to make our lives easier, right? Digital storage of documents and photos and everything else is supposed to give you extra time for leisure, right?
   Somebody lied. Ever try finding a picture you scanned two months ago? Have you ever sat down at the computer at 10 a.m. on a Saturday just to do "a couple of things" and realized what seemed like a few minutes later that three hours had disappeared from your life?
   How abut the problem of files that seem to be bigger than Godzilla? I tried scanning one of my wife's watercolor paintings the other day and got an error message about disk space.
   "You turkey!" the error message said -- or seemed to say. (Don't quote me on this, because I'm mostly operating from embarrassment and not from memory.) "You turkey! This file is going to be 19 billion megabooboos big, and you have only 2 miniguffaws of disk space left. Do you want to (R)un and hide? (C)all Microsoft for help? (You wild and crazy guy!) or (G)ive up and go back to Nintendo?"
   I just hit the Reset button and walked away. The computer hiccupped and resumed its normal pose -- a definite leer, if you want to know.
   The next time I ran the scanner, I checked the file sizes first. The super-ultra-special-high-resolution setting I had wanted to use would have created a file 2 gigabytes in size. Even if a file that big would have fit on the drive, how would I have viewed it?
   I got out my calculator. A 2-gigabyte file is 1,400 times bigger than the largest file you can fit on a floppy disk. If I gave you $100 every day, I'd have to keep doing that for 20 million days before you ended up with $2 billion.
   Isn't somebody supposed to tell us things like this in grade school? "Johnny, today we're covering Unit 3 of our workbook. How many days of sleep will you lose if you scan six pictures and then try to find them after your computer has crashed?"
   I'm ready for a darkroom. Or for a better way of organizing things, especially digital photos and the scans that come out of our scanner.
   So next week you're invited to join me on a quest for digital-image sanity.
   What's the best way to scan photos and graphics? What settings should you use? How can you store the huge files that scanners sometimes create without running out of disk space? How can you find all the digital images your camera or scanner created? Is there a way to index them? Can you view them all at once as thumbnail pictures? What software do you need if you want to show off these images on the screen? How do you get color prints of scanned images to look like photos instead of like those awful Excel charts they hand out at meetings? Do you really have to spend $1 a sheet for really good photo-quality paper?
   We'll be looking for the answers over a four-week span. I'll have tips for Windows users, Mac users and Linux users. Stay tuned.