The Gabem Umbrella Companies Blog:
Home of Umbrella Company Gossip Online

As you may or may not know we accept application forms and ID (for British citizens using our umbrella company) in a variety of ways, and one of those ways is scanned copies. This is nice and convenient, but does occasionally run aground on one tiny problem, file sizes.

Scanners are one of those peripherals that many people have tucked away but rarely use, so it's easy to see how it might be easiest to just click scan and trust that the factory settings are correct. The problem is that most scanners are anticipating a photo and this leads to some extremely large file sizes.

Our email system is rigged to accept an email up to around 10 Megabytes for a single email, which in modern internet terms is relatively minor, but in email terms remains fairly ridiculous. To give you a little perspective on other things that would each take up 10Mb:

• One and a half copies of the complete King James Bible
• Two copies of War and Peace
• Two copies of the Lord of the Rings (all 3 books so 6 books in total)

A 10Mb picture may paint a thousand words, but emailing it takes up over a million.

We regularly have people emailing 11Mb pictures of their passports, and because of our 10Mb limit they unfortunately never arrive.

So what's the solution?

Well we ran some tests on scan quality and file size and came up with this as our ideal scanning settings:

A black and white image scanned from colour
With a resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch)

This gave us a nice clear image and kept the file size to a respectable 111Kb. (circled in blue in the picture)

If we were simply to make it a colour image the file size climbs to a rather daunting 11.3Mb over 100 times larger than the black and white version (circled in red).

So what does that mean for you?

Well the great thing about the settings above are that they are actually pretty standard for scanners when you switch to scanning in black and white, so hopefully all you will have to worry about is making that one change, and your application or ID should come through nice and quickly.

Hugo
@GabemUmbrella
17/08/2011