For the web, I would think any degradation would be unnoticable. But if there’s even an outside shot that they’ll be needed for print, I’d leave them as TIFFs.
Storage is cheap, buy a new harddrive.
Bob
….or, if not a Hard Drive, at least buy a CD burner. It’s always best to keep the best-quality originals. You can always convert them to JPEG later, at your convenience. You might be surprised how often, in the future, you’ll wish you had saved the full-size, full quality originals. I certainly know the pain of having mold when I really need gold.
Don’t question this advice offered by me and thousands of others: Just do it.
And Scott Kelby’s book, The Photoshop Cs Book for Digital Photographers, has the first 2 chapters devoted to setting up a good storage system for your images on CDs and creating thumbnails. I highly recommend it, for that, and all the other great Photoshop guidance. It’s a superb book – my Photoshop bible!
My opinion is that if you are intending to print ANY of these scans then the resolution for ALL should be scanned at 300, not 200 ppi. Scan at best resolution for print, and resize and/or resample for web, as needed.
Concerning tif vs. jpg; I see nothing wrong with saving as a jpg after all of your corrections are completed. Just be absolutely, totally, and entirely sure that you have finished all editing to the file. I see practically no difference in quality between a once saved jpg at highest quality and a tif.
Im not disagreeing with any of the other people giving their opinions here. Every answer they gave is correct and makes sense. However I will point out that, yes storage is cheap, if you can afford it. If your budget is small, then storage is not quite so cheap.
I have three hard drives and a CD/DVD burner. I only recently started saving wedding and portrait photos as jpgs because I’m being over run with CDs. Four times as many files on a CD is quite a bit more storage and cost me nothing. Once again Im making sure that my corrections are all finished before doing jpg. In the rare occasions that I need to do more corrections (it does happen) then I resave as a psd before doing those corrections. I then save as a psd or tif. I never RESAVE a jpg.
