Easy Tips for Reducing Storage and Bandwidth Costs for Document Imaging Solutions
Because document images are generally on the large side, digital imaging can be a strain on your computer’s memory and disk storage. No one wants to wait hours just to send that one document over the network. Kind of an issue, right? But fret not, dear friends, for I have found some great tricks you can use to reduce these storage and bandwidth costs. Be sure to adopt these techniques to keep your computer a lean and mean document management machine:
1. Resample the image to a smaller size and adjust the DPI so that it prints to the same size.
A color scan of US letter size paper at 300 DPI is 2,550 pixels wide by 3,300 pixels long, for a total of 25MB. If you resample so that you cut each dimension in half, and then adjust the DPI to 150, your image takes up just over 6MB, or 25% of the original. This will reduce the storage size and the bandwidth needed to transmit the image over a network.2. Convert to grayscale or black and white.
If your document is using 24-bit color, but you don’t mind losing color, you can convert to grayscale, which uses about 33% of the space. If you can convert to 1-bit without losing meaning, your documents will be about 4% of the original size. This will reduce the storage size and the bandwidth needed to transmit the image over a network.3. Use a better compression algorithm.
Advanced compression algorithms like JBIG2 and JPEG2000 can result in smaller files without sacrificing quality. You might not have an easy way of viewing these images directly, but PDF supports them as a way to compress its images, so put them in a PDF and anyone with Acrobat Reader can view them. [Note, information on industry standards can be found at AIIM Standards.]4. Use tiled formats.
If you often need just part of an image, use a tiled format, such as Tiled-TIFF, which makes getting regions of the image faster. If you have web-based viewers that know how to tile images before sending them, you’ll use fewer server resources to tile the image.5. Use automated border crop.
Some scans, especially of smaller items, like checks, have a large dark border around the edges. Use an algorithm that can detect and remove this, leaving you with just the important part of the image. Incidentally, this will save you ink if you print these documents.6. Remove blank pages.
If you are scanning two-sided documents, you probably have some blank pages. Detect and remove them.7. Remove unneeded metadata.
Images often carry around extra metadata that was put in by the device or software that created them. If you don’t need it, remove it. You’ll save storage and bandwidth. If you need the data, it might be better to extract it and store it separately.8. Create thumbnails on the server, and send them on demand.
If you are preparing a web page of thumbnails, then make them on the server (don’t use browser features to resize them). Detect if the thumbnail is viewable on the page, and request it on demand. This will lower bandwidth requirements and make the pages load faster.
Source: Digital Landfill
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ZDNet introduces Doc (The DocuMentor), sponsored by RICOH. Through his blog, Doc will educate you about Document Management. So who is Doc? Doc is something of an enigma. He was born to a Russian ballerina and a German electrical engineer who some believe was running covert operations for shadowy corporate interests. Doc grew up in various locations in the United States, although no one seems to know precisely where, least of all Doc. His early schooling was unremarkable except for the time he was caught trying to replace all the mimeograph machines with high-tech color copiers that had mysteriously disappeared from a shipment to Albania. At MIT, he made a name for himself by transforming a large printer into a robot that hunts and eats Roombas. Professionally, he reportedly has seen the insides of more brands, versions, and generations of printer and printer-related hardware than almost anyone. Some say his obsession with paper, printing, and mechanical movement was either started by, or evidenced by, a traumatic childhood episode when he crawled inside an old Xerox 2400 and tried to print himself.
Anyway, Doc has hands on experience with stuff like printer maintenance and fleet management, but his mastery of document management leaves no stone unturned. Important issues like sustainability, security, and regulatory compliance are top of mind for Doc, as are other business technology needs like networking and IT services, making him a true blue IT renaissance man.
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