ReviveYou dug the shoebox out of the closet, and now a few hundred black-and-white prints are waiting for a second life in color. Before any of that happens, they have to become files. The choices you make at the scanner — resolution, format, how you name and organize the output — decide whether colorization looks crisp and true, or soft and muddy. Get the scan right once and the rest is a single click.
This guide covers the settings that actually matter for scanning old photos ahead of colorization, why the file format you choose changes the result, and a naming-and-foldering system that turns a chaotic pile of scans into a clean batch you can run through Revive in one pass.
Start with resolution: scan for detail you can't add back
Resolution is the one setting you cannot fix later. If you scan a print at low DPI, the fine grain, hair, fabric weave, and edges simply are not in the file — and no amount of processing invents them. Scanning generously costs you nothing but disk space, and storage is cheap compared to re-scanning a fragile 80-year-old print.
A simple DPI rule of thumb
- Standard prints (4×6, 5×7): scan at 600 DPI. This captures far more detail than the print shows at arm's length and leaves room to crop and enlarge.
- Small prints, wallet photos, or anything you want to enlarge: go to 1200 DPI. Tiny originals need the extra sampling to survive being blown up.
- Large prints (8×10 and up): 300–600 DPI is plenty; the print is already big, so you reach a usable pixel count without oversized files.
A practical target is a long edge of at least 2,000 pixels. At 600 DPI a 4×6 print lands around 3,600 × 2,400 pixels — comfortably above that floor with headroom to spare. If your scanner offers it, disable "auto sharpen," "descreen," and any auto color-correction: you want a faithful capture, not the scanner's guess. Sharpening bakes in artifacts that colorization will happily amplify.
Tip: Clean the glass and the print first. A single speck of dust becomes a permanent black dot that no scan setting removes. A soft brush over the print and a lint-free wipe on the platen saves hours of retouching later.
TIFF vs JPEG: the format choice that shapes your result
This is the debate everyone runs into: TIFF vs JPEG for photos. The short version is that they solve different problems. TIFF is lossless — it stores every pixel exactly as the scanner captured it, which makes it the right master format for archiving irreplaceable originals. JPEG is compressed and lossy; it throws away data you are unlikely to miss in exchange for a much smaller file.
Here is the good news: Revive accepts JPG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF, and WebP, so you do not have to convert anything before colorizing. Scan to whatever format best protects your originals, drop the files in Google Drive, and colorize. The output is always a color JPEG saved next to the source.
| Format | Type | Best for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| TIFF | Lossless | Archival master scans of irreplaceable prints | Large files; keep as your originals |
| PNG | Lossless | High-quality scans without TIFF's file size | Bigger than JPEG for photos |
| JPEG | Lossy | Everyday scanning at scale; easy sharing | Use highest quality; avoid re-saving repeatedly |
| HEIC | Efficient | Phone-captured photos of prints | Ensure originals are backed up |
| WebP | Efficient | Web-bound copies that stay small | Keep a higher-quality master too |
Scan to TIFF or PNG when…
- The print is one-of-a-kind and cannot be re-scanned
- You are building a permanent archive for a family, studio, or institution
- You may re-edit or re-crop the master repeatedly
- Storage is not your constraint
Scan to JPEG when…
- You are digitizing hundreds of everyday prints quickly
- Disk and upload size matter more than a perfect master
- You save once, at maximum quality, and don't re-encode
- The goal is sharing and colorizing, not archival preservation
One rule holds across both camps: pick a format and save once at the highest quality. JPEG loses a little more each time it is re-encoded, so avoid the habit of opening, editing, and re-saving the same JPEG over and over. If you know you will edit, keep a lossless master and export a JPEG copy for everyday use.
Name and folder your scans for clean batch colorization
Where scanning meets scale, organization is everything. Revive is folder-aware: point it at a folder in Google Drive and it expands the whole tree, queues every image, and preserves your sub-folder structure in the output. That means the folders you build while scanning become the folders your colorized results land in. A few minutes of naming discipline pays off across a thousand photos.
Use descriptive, sortable filenames
Prefer names like 1948-grandparents-wedding-01.tif over scan0001.tif. Zero-padded numbers (01, 02 … 10) keep files in order, and a date or event prefix makes any file findable months later.
Group by album, era, or event
Make one folder per album or decade — /1950s-street, /family-portraits, /studio-archive. Revive preserves this structure, so results stay organized exactly the way you scanned them.
Keep masters and outputs together
Colorized copies land in the same folder as each source, named filename-color.jpg. Your originals are never modified, so the before and after sit side by side automatically.
Batch by the folder, not the file
Open the Revive side panel, select a folder, and click Colorize. One click handles 1 photo, 100, or 10,000 — no dragging files one at a time.
What happens after you click Colorize
Once your scans are named and foldered in Drive, colorizing is the easy part. Files are read through Google's Drive APIs, processed, and written straight back — they never leave Google's infrastructure, and there is no third-party storage in the loop. Revive requests only the narrow drive.file scope, so it touches the files you point it at and nothing else.
Speed is not the bottleneck either: colorization averages roughly 50–100 milliseconds per photo, so about 1,000 photos finish in around a minute. You pay per image — 1 image equals 1 colorized photo — with no subscription, credits that never expire, and automatic refunds on any job that fails, so you only pay for results. See the full breakdown on the pricing page.
Tip: Do a small test first. Scan and colorize three photos — Revive gives you 3 free images on signup, no credit card — to confirm your DPI and format choices look right before you commit a whole archive.
A quick pre-flight checklist
- Dust off the print and the scanner glass.
- Scan at 600 DPI for standard prints, 1200 for small ones.
- Turn off auto-sharpen and auto color correction.
- Choose a format: TIFF or PNG for archival masters, high-quality JPEG for everyday volume.
- Name descriptively with zero-padded numbers and a date or event prefix.
- Folder by album or era in Google Drive so structure carries through.
- Test three, then batch the whole folder.
Nail the scan and Revive does the rest. If you are staring down a large archive, read our guide to colorizing an entire Google Drive folder at once, or see the step-by-step in how it works before you begin.
Ready to bring your scans back to life?
Add Revive to Google Drive, point it at a folder, and colorize. Your first three photos are free.
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