S, Considerable discussion on the Kodak Photo CD format has erupted from your post. This format is a film-to-digital service and since you are using your own digital camera, you may not be able to use this format. I don't think you can take a bunch of floppy disks to the camera shop and have them mastered to photo CD... someone correct me if I am wrong. Your camera came with a program for downloading the images and converting them to different formats. I haven't used the Casio, but my experience with the Kodak DC-50 has taught me a few things. The DC-50 shoots the images at about 750x450 pixels @ 24bit color. Each image downloaded to a .BMP format was about 1.5megs. I can't remember the DPI at this time. Shoot a few pictures with the Casio, download them to the PC and see what dimensions, DPI and file size they come out at. You can load the images into Adobe Photoshop to view this information. Since you are also using a scanner, you may wish to adopt the standard size the camera shoots at for scanned images as well. Another strategy would be to adopt a standard for most images, yet have high resolution scans made from photographs of objects with special details. You are right about JPG formats, they are lossy and you will see this when you begin to compare them side by side with lossless formats. I selected BMP for a recent project as this is the primary image format for Windows and is widely supported. Remember that you can convert images to different formats (JPG for your web site), but if you don't keep the original image as the highest practical quality, you will find that you can't convert from less to more. Depending on the size of your collection, it may cost less to purchase your own CD writing drive rather than pay a service beaureau to convert them for you. They are fairly inexpensive (around $800). The disks range from $7-10, but if you bought a large quantity, I'm sure you could get a discount. Each disk holds 650 megabytes of information. The CD-ROM is a standard piece of equipment on computers today so others will be able to read the images as well. I would also recommend that you have Adobe Photoshop 4.0. You will need this for adjusting color on scans and digital photographs of objects. Version 4.0 supports batch operations such as converting, sizing and saving several images at one time. I just received my upgrade so I haven't tested it's batch capabilities yet, but that's why I bought it. When you start dealing with hundreds or thousands of images... saving a few seconds converting and saving each image will mean the difference between taking the weekend off, or working through it! Your post mentioned using these images in a "regional digital archive." If other museums are involved, the issue of a standard becomes more important. How are you planning to retrieve these images? It seems that you may have put the cart before the horse. Are you planning public access terminals to collections information and pictures, or an intra-museum database? Will the pictures be the only information, or will other data be included as well. See where I'm getting...? If I wanted to see an image of an object in your collection, how would I know on which disk to look? If you are interested in pursuing this duscussion, let me know. Hope this helps. Mark C. Vang : Freya Ventures : (757) 340-0099 2100 Mediterranean Ave. Suite 15 Virginia Beach, VA 23451 > [log in to unmask] : [log in to unmask] < * Interactive touch screen exhibit software/systems and exhibit * * technology integration for museums, science centers, aquariums *