I recently attended a meeting of museum curators at the Pennsylvania Historical Society and the recommendation there was a minimum of 300 dpi minimum, and a specification of 600 dpi recommended, for document PRESERVATION. The format recommended was TIF uncompressed. These can be very large image files.
An 8 x 10 inch image at 300 dpi (the minimum) is about 21 MB in TIFF uncompressed in my testing. This resolution is especially important for the PRESERVATION of handwriting and 6 point fonts, they told us. However, they did not make exceptions for photographs of groups of people or for portraits. The discussion was about PRESERVATION. There was no discussion of compromise in this meeting of museum curators. This is what I got from Legacy Technical support regarding my trouble tickets on Wed, May 30, 2012 at 1:46 PM " ... we recommend that you make smaller jpgs of 150-200 KB ... Sincerely, Sherry Technical Support Legacy Family Tree ..." I conclude that Legacy was not deigned to be used to meet today's PRESERVATION standards. Legacy is a good records management system (referred to as an RMS in the meeting I attended) that stores metadata external to the images (not to be confused with metadata stored within the image file - a completely different topic ). Those external images that Legacy links to should be about 150-200 KB JPG's according to Sherry (see above). Also Jim at Legacy technical support is more generous in specifying approximately 300 KB. Jim at Legacy said my 1,100 KB JPG's should be reduced to about 30 % of that size. Apparently there is no published specification for Legacy maximum image sizes. However, technical support at Legacy does have one they use when you contact them for assistance. I have found that Legacy does work, after a fashion, with large image files but apparently that is not a supported feature of Legacy. It just happens to work in many cases. For example, all of my census files are much larger than the technical support limits of Legacy. When it does work, we are "lucky". These large sizes are not officially supported, in my experience with Legacy technical support. Therefore, if the next version of Legacy did not support our large images like the current version, we might be told then that Legacy was never intended to support them. Ouch! My question is: What is the supplemental strategy for PRESERVATION of images that is appropriate to complement Legacy now that I know that Legacy is not designed to support image PRESERVATION specifications? I am not to the point that CE Wood suggests in possibly looking for a better alternative to Legacy. I am surprised and disappointed by the unpublished limitations of Legacy picture gallery. I am still hopeful I can make Legacy work for me. It will require more work on my part and yet another layer of organization for me to sort out. I am sure one or more of you have sorted this out, especially those who have been told the limitations of Legacy by the Legacy support team. Bill Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Legacy User Group guidelines: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp Archived messages after Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Archived messages from old mail server - before Nov. 21 2009: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Online technical support: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Help.asp Follow Legacy on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/LegacyFamilyTree) and on our blog (http://news.LegacyFamilyTree.com). To unsubscribe: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/LegacyLists.asp
