• Crop your pictures tightly. Usually focus on the people, unless there's something interesting about the background.
• Use JPEG compression and don't go higher than "medium" quality. The final file size should not usually be greater than 100KB to 150KB (after compression). Don't send anything larger than this or you may clog, and crash, my mailbox.
• Scan colour photos in RGB mode. Don't use "indexed colour" (too much quality loss).
• Scan black-and-white pictures in grayscale mode. If you scan them in colour the files will be three times larger.
• Save the picture in a relatively low resolution mode. On the Web, a computer screen cannot display more than 72 dpi. I would suggest no higher than 150dpi unless you want me to enlarge your photos at this end - which is often a good idea if the original prints are small. For the technically minded: most of the pictures I have posted on the Web site are no bigger than about 300x300 pixels and many are a lot smaller. (On a PC, a 14-inch monitor is about 580 pixels wide.) With JPEG compression, many of them are smaller than 50KB, especially in B&W.
• If you want to see how the pictures will look on the Internet, the simplest method is to open your Internet browser (even if you are not currently on-line). Choose the "work offline" mode. Then click on File/Open and open the scanned picture to see how large it is on the screen and whether the colours/greys are OK.

If you follow these hints we should get a better result and it will reduce the amount of work I have to do at this end. I hope this helps. Please e-mail me if you have further questions.
-Martin (M.)