Making a Photo Book With Scanned Images
Old Pictures
For a New Book
Q. I would like to make a photo book, but instead of using images from my digital camera, I’d like to scan in old family pictures on my printer-scanner. What’s the best way to do this?
A. The first step is to scan the photos at a high enough quality so that they print well in the finished photo book. The service you use to produce your project may have its own guidelines for scanning and image size listed on its site, so check there first. Some of the more popular ones include Snapfish (snapfish.com), Shutterfly (shutterfly.com) and Kodak Gallery (kodakgallery.com).
If you cannot find the information, setting your scanner’s software to capture the images at a resolution of 300 dots/pixels per inch should ensure your final images are high quality; the 300 d.p.i. setting is often used for image files by printed magazines. Some people prefer to have a company, like ScanMyPhotos.com, scan the photos for them.
If your photos are faded, you may be able to improve the contrast or color with photo-editing software. If you do not have a program like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Apple’s iPhoto to edit your pictures, you can try Microsoft’s free Windows Live Photo Gallery (part of the Windows Live Essentials collection for Windows Vista and Windows 7 at explore.live.com) or Google’s free Picasa program (available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems at google.com/picasa).
Once you get all the photos scanned, the next step is to upload them to your photo site of choice and arrange them onto a book template. Some applications like iPhoto include book templates. After you plug in your photos, you upload the project for printing and binding.
Customizing
Audio Alerts
Q. I’d like to use a sound clip I found on the Web as the computer’s audio alert noise. How do I do this?
A. On Windows systems, short WAV files work the best as audio alerts. Once you have the one that you want, just go to the Start menu and choose Control Panel. Open the Sound control panel and click on the Sounds tab — or click on Hardware and Sound and then on “Change system sounds” in more recent versions of Windows.
In the Program Events area, scroll down the list and select Default Beep. In the Sounds area of the box, click on the Browse button, navigate to the new sound file you want to use and select Open. Once you have your new sound file assigned, click on the O.K. button. Microsoft has a tutorial video on changing system sounds at bit.ly/cl2Tic.
On a Mac OS X system, make sure the sound file you want to use is in the AIFF format. (If it is not, you can convert it with iTunes as explained at support.apple.com/kb/ht1550). In your Home folder, open the Library folder, then open the Sounds folder and drag in the new file. Under the Mac’s Apple menu, select System Preferences. Click on the Sound icon, and on the Sound Effects tab, choose your new alert sound from the list.
TIP OF THE WEEK Even if you cannot afford a vacation, you can jazz up your Windows 7 wallpaper with scenes from other countries — without having to download a thing. Just go to your Start menu, and in the Search box, type in C:\Windows\Globalization\MCT and press the Enter key.
A list of folders appears, each named something like MCT-AU or MCT-GB. These are the personalized themes for other English-speaking regions like Australia and Britain. Open the folder of the country you want to add, open the Theme folder and double-click the file inside to add the new images to your available desktop backgrounds in the Windows 7 Personalization options. J. D. BIERSDORFER
Personal Tech invites questions about computer-based technology to QandA @nytimes.com. This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually.
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