Artwork scans - dpi resolution?

Roon Software Discussion
1

Hi All,

Those titles I actually scan the booklets for I scan at 300dpi. Is that enough resolution or do people use higher like 600dpi? That would create massive file sizes I guess.

Many thanks all!

Henke

2

I use 300dpi. I think that’s adequate for now and into the future. No right answer though.

3

Short version:
I scan at 600 dpi and resize to 1000x1000 pixels.

Long version:

I manage my library using an Archive/Library strategy.

  1. The Archive lives on a NAS and gets backed up to a cloud backup service. This is where I have put thousands of hours into carefully archiving all of my CDs. In this archive, my rips are stored as single file FLACs with .CUE sheets. It also includes full resolution 600 dpi scans of front/back art. Sometimes I also make scans of liner notes, media, etc.

  2. The Library is wherever I need to play the music. For a long time, it was iTunes on my desktop synced to my iPod. I would transcode to MP3 because storage was limited. Once storage became cheap enough, I started transcoding to ALAC. Now that I’m serving my music through Roon and Plex, I’m building up a FLAC Library to play from. When I add something to my library, I embed a resized image of the original scan (originally 600x600, currently 1000x1000).

The whole point of the Archive is security and future-proofing. I never let any media management software touch it and I store lossless files with high resolution scans.

A 600x600 image used to look huge. Now it looks tiny on high resolution monitors. Someday, 1000x1000 will look tiny, too. When it does, I’ll be able to go back to my 600 dpi scans and go to whatever resolution works best at that time.

4

Thanks Ken!

@EvilGnome6, I probably don’t understand image resolution properly but what benefit is there scanning at 600dpi and then resizing to 1000x1000? Isn’t the point of higher dpi’s that you can have larger pixels such as 3000x3000 for instance?

Many thanks!

5

It’s not that resizing in itself has great benefits. It’s about being having a higher resolution image in my Archive. This way I don’t have to physically scan the covers again if I want a higher resolution image in the future. Resizing from a high resolution image is much faster than scanning the cover again.

6

Good thinking @EvilGnome6

I’m often dismayed by how little thought people give to storage being cheaper in the future, etc.

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