I have a box of old photos and documents, Linux Mint and a Canon Lide220 flat bed scanner.
I'm still deciding on software, but gimp and gmic are definitely in the mix.
I plan on storing them on a dvd for viewing (not sure how I'll structure them yet - maybe dvdslideshow), and maybe printing.
I've read the site scantips and done a lot of searching. I understand the difference in file size, print size, and screen size... in theory.

I think I'll scan at 600 or 300, 8-bit color, and save the original images as pngs (or tiff lzw??). I know the tradeoff is file size. I'm looking for the right mixture. I put a piece of black paper behind the images to reduce bleed through. I am putting an artificial limit on the image (screen) width or height of 1024, but keeping the aspect ratio.

Any flaws in my plan so far? Any recommendations?

If I have a document that is 8x11 and I want to view it on the screen 744x1024 and print it 8x11 300 dpi, how do I achieve that? As soon as I decrease the image size, the print size is going to shrink. If I increase the print size, the dpi decreases.

What am I missing?

I've been playing around and scanning images, without any changes. When I look at the image in gimp the print resolution shows a resolution of 300, but if I use imagemagick's identify it shows 118. exiftool shows Pixels per unit 11811.

Not sure where the 118 is coming from.

If you have any books or web sites with scanning tutorials and photo/document restoration that you have found helpful, it would greatly be appreciated. Maybe someone has written about their experience going through this process and has some gotchas or guidelines.

Once done with the scanning, I'm off to the container store to get acid free paper & boxes.

Is the gimp resynthesizer plugin needed these days with gmic? I noticed this tutorial used it.
I can see where the technique would work on an image, but I couldn't get it to work on a document that was folded in thirds. It messes up the words.

Thank you.

There are often two places that indicate an image resolution: the image header as mandated by the image format (JPEG/JFIF, PNG, TIFF) and the EXIF metadata. Gimp usually reports/set the size from the image header and ignores the EXIF one. Other applications may do the opposite (but EXIF data can be ripped out...).

118 is a typical value for displays these days. When an image is shown on screen, its resolution is usually ignored by the viewer application and the image is shown "dot for dot": one pixels of image is one pixels on the screen. This shows the image with the screen resolution and not the intended print resolution. In Gimp you can set/unset "dot for dot" in the Preferences.

In any case the DPI is an indication. What really counts is the size of the image in pixels. When you scan an image the scanner normally sets the DPI of the output to the value used for scanning, so that the image can be printed at its original size.

vA+6Q-Hv[BX],

I don't have much knowledge about printing, so this is my advice about the scanning part:

I would scan the photos with minimal 600dpi. Passport photographs with minimal 1200dpi. Both 16bit (if possible). Save as tiff. Also; scan black and white photos in color! Then you keep the original tint and you will have more shades of gray. Stains are most of the times in a different color than the tint of the black and white photo, so with a color scan you can edit those stains more easy. Maybe you don't want to edit the images now, but perhaps in the future?

Keep always the original tiffs seperate from your final images. Store them on different locations. ( It can be hours of work to scan.)

Afterwards you can downscale the images and save them in other formats.

If the documents are only text, then you can scan with a lower resolution and 8bit. (but in color to eventualy remove stains)

I scanned a whole lot of photos without messing with resolution/ppi at all. Just told the scanner I was scanning photos so the settings were probably put in for me. I cropped them as I scanned them so I had minimal work to do after. When all the photos were ready I put them into a folder, then onto a USB. They were then able to be played on a large TV screen. Most of the photos although much smaller than the screen showed bigger and were still sharp.
You could also play these as a slide show on a computer monitor or data projector to a screen from a computer.