Scanning Help pls

unsure

Hello helpful MSE'rs,
I've been landed with the task of scanning a couple of hundred photos many very old bw (some very small 2" x 3") so that they can be assembled for a slide show ( which someone else will do) to be shown on a 40" screen at my mother's 80th birthday party in a few months....and I haven't a clue! (unfortunatley I do have a scanner and a little bit of time on my hands and I do want Mum to have a nice surprise at her party)!!!
Having scoured around a bit I've managed to scan about 20 pix at between 300-1200 dpi (depending ons size , quality and my pc's willingness/memory) and saved them as tif files. They are coming up in size as between 1-20 mb each. Which I believe from recent attmpts is too large to email. My new assumption was that I would save them to disc and post them to the lucky recipient.

1. Is this the right approach?
2. Is there an easy way I can get them in a format to play on my 32" LCD Tv just to give me an idea of scale/quality before I go through them all and discover it's been a horrendous waste of time?

I do have cd/dvd burner but I'm not clear of the hardware compatibility of the different formats and the ease and quality issues of transferring from one to another.
Any advice gratefully appreciated.
Thanks

Chippy_Minton

TIF is an uncompressed format so the size of each photo will be very big. Can you scan in JPEG format or convert them to JPEG using Irfanview? https://www.irfanview.com

ckerrd

I would have thought that the scanning software that came with the scanner should allow you to save the files as Jpegs.
You may be able to alter the compression setting so for the small pics, go for low compression and higher quality.

You should then be able to burn the pics onto a cd/dvd and then view them on your tele via dvd player. (if it plays that type of format)

unsure

Thanks for the replies,
I was warned that compressing to Jpeg and then enalrging later would lose quality which is an issue, epecially as some/most of the photos will be shown at 20 times their original size and need to look as good as possible at that resolution. So I did a test and the jpeg file seemed to lose a lot of definition and picture info when significantly enlarged compared to the tif file (at least on my screen which is less than half the size of the one that will be used on the day).

I can see that jpegs would help with emailing but if tif files will provide better quality then that's actually more important at this stage and I would prefer to go that way and hand over a disc. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing out something due to my general ignorance if such matters.

Thanks for the help