Jake, Which program do you personally use on an affordable home computer to scan dozens of family pictures or source documents when there is a goal of including 100 or more images in a book report? I'm interested in privately published family histories and budget-priced community books published locally, not coffee table art books printed in a remote country. Packaged Paint Shop Pro 7 with a 495 page printed manual is advertised for $109 on the Jasc web site with a $99 download version of 56 mb for the public Beta of PSP 8. Photoshop 7 is advertised as a 237 mb download for $609 US dollars, plugins, training and support appear to be additional order items. "Lite" versions of Adobe products seem to be incomplete -- designed to convince buyers to pay for the whole version. The PSP manual, online mailing lists and courses are more likely to cover the artistic uses of image products. Researchers who scanned large sets of family pictures for wall charts, books and continuing genealogy databases had to learn the essential features by trial and error. Some researchers have had problems moving sets of pictures from one computer to another. At one time, I had 25,000 JPG images on a single hard drive. I use oval heads cropped from group pictures with original sizes varying from 35mm half frame slides to framed portraits. The letter size scanner glass is not long enough to scan oversize family history source documents as a single image and those sometimes have to be combined from two scans or taken to a copy service with larger equipment. A graphics artist who uses image editing products as part of a full time job will make different choices than a family historian with thousands of family pictures ready to be shared as e-mail attachments. -- Elizabeth ----- Original Message ----- > I have Photoshop 7 and Paint Shop Pro 7 with PSP8 on order. I like both > programs. They both have their plus and minus points as all programs do.

Elizabeth said "The letter size scanner glass is not long enough to scan oversize family history source documents as a single image and those sometimes have to be combined from two scans or taken to a copy service with larger equipment." For longer documents I use a Visioneer Strobe Pro sheet feed scanner. It can accomodate documents upto 20 inches long by 81/2" wide. I import them into Paperport software and then export them as any type of file I wish for subsequent editing. Paperport is ideal for picking out detail and removing the background etc found on old documents. I used to use an HP Scanjet 4S for this perpose but HP refused to issue an updated driver for use with Windows XP, and so a really good piece of kit lies idle. Bob KIRK Dukinfield Cheshire Http://KirkSoft.co.uk http://www.fhsc.org.uk/dukinfield.htm Interests Are: KIRK (Crewe & Manchester) DAWSON (Manchester)

A second computer was set up with a choice of ME or XP Pro at startup. The plan is to try it with older equipment that does not work with XP. One of the combinations is an older version of Optical Character Recognition and Microtek E3 which has a larger glass area and a Transparent Media Adaptor. Early copies of UK source documents were scanned with a page scanner but it hasn't been hooked up in years. Recent UK source documents cannot be scanned or photocopied to look like the original. -- Elizabeth ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Kirk" > I used to use an HP Scanjet 4S for this perpose but HP refused to issue an > updated driver for use with Windows XP, and so a really good piece of kit > lies idle.