Nope, not a complaint against Ancestry!

I think many would agree that one of the biggest thrills is to unexpectedly find an ancestor or cousin photo on Ancestry - though I must say it's few and far between compared to how it seems in the TV ads (unless it's just my family).

THEN what is most disappointing is to click the newly-found image and it's only 2-3 inches tall!

Most people don't have a need to know much about scanning, but I do it in my work and would like to put forth the following for the possible benefit of everyone:

-The smaller your source image, the higher you need to set the DPI. All scanners have options to change the DPI, though some dumb it down and call it "high quality" etc. Go for the best. Hunt around until you find a way in your software to get bigger images - it's there, trust me.

By scanning large, I have been able to make out license tag years, other lettering that reveal a location. Who knows what you might find.

-All scanner software has a way to crop up to the actual image before the scan so you are not scanning your whole scanner bed - meaning lots of useless white space. Usually it's running lines where you can drag the sides and corners to crop up to the photo.

-When saving as a jpg, somewhere there is an option for greater or lesser compression. Or they might say higher quality, medium quality, etc. Go for the highest quality. When you see little wavy lines in photos, that means too much compression was used and the quality has degraded.

-If your image is too small, you have to rescan with higher DPI. Just resizing it up with a resize command will give poor results.

I would also like to suggest that if you are making your tree public to put the name of the person on the image when uploaded to Ancestry and not Mom, Dad, Aunt Tilly, etc. If your tree is private, it does not matter, of course.