Choosing Photos for a Memorial

Two separate questions get tangled here: which photographs to use, and whether they are technically good enough to print. Take them in that order — a slightly imperfect photograph of the right moment beats a sharp one of the wrong one.

Which photographs

Pick for the face, not the occasion. Formal portraits are the default and usually the weakest choice. They are often years out of date and rarely look like how the person seemed to the people who knew them.

The cover photograph should look like them. That is the whole brief. A laughing snapshot from a kitchen beats a studio portrait where they look composed and unfamiliar.

Inside, go for range. Six ordinary photographs across a life beat one good one repeated in different sizes:

• Young — before anyone at the service knew them.
• Working, or doing the thing they were known for.
• With a spouse or closest person.
• With children or grandchildren.
• Somewhere they chose to be — a boat, a garden, a kitchen.
• Recent, if there is a good one.

Include the imperfect ones. The blurred photograph mid-laugh is the one people stop at. Technical quality matters less than most families assume, except on the cover.

How many

Set by the format, and worth knowing before you start scanning:

• 1-Page — 3 to 6
• Bi-Fold — 4 to 8
• Tri-Fold — 8 to 15
• 8-Page Booklet — 15 to 24

A memorial page has no limit, which is where the rest go.

Resolution: the part that decides sharpness

Print needs roughly four times the pixels a screen does. A photograph that looks perfect on a phone can print visibly soft.

• Cover photograph — ideally 1500 pixels or more on the long edge.
• Interior photographs — 800 pixels or more is usually fine at the size they print.
• Memorial page only — almost anything works.

Two things that quietly destroy resolution: a photograph sent through a messaging app, which compresses it heavily, and a screenshot of a photograph, which throws away most of the data. Ask for the original file rather than the one that arrived in a group chat.

Scanning old prints

• Scan at 600 dpi, not 300. It costs nothing and gives room to crop.
• Clean the glass and the print — dust scans as white specks that are tedious to remove afterwards.
• Scan, do not photograph, where you have the choice. A phone photograph of a print adds glare and a slight keystone that is visible once it is enlarged.
• No scanner? A phone will do if you lay the print flat, use indirect daylight rather than flash, and shoot straight down. Flash on a glossy print produces a white blob exactly where the face is.

Print versus screen

Two differences worth knowing. Print is slightly darker than a backlit screen, so a photograph that is already dim will lose detail in the shadows — brighten it a little before printing. And a photograph that is subtly out of focus is far more forgiving on a screen than on paper, where the eye is closer and the image is not moving.

If a photograph matters and you are unsure, print one test page at actual size and look at it in daylight. It takes two minutes and settles the question.