j6450 scan to email with mac 10.7.2. Email too large to send. How can i make it smaller?

[paigec123]

Also, scan is showing each page as a separate attachment.  How can I put all ten pages in one attachment.  Printer scanned fine on my old PC.

[AMacGuyAtHP]

More information would be helpful about how you are scanning.  Are you starting the scan from the device front panel, from HP Scan, or from Image Capture?  Specific steps can be provided if we have more of this kind of information.

In general you can decrease the size of scans in a number of ways:

* Decrease the scan resolution.  Unless you are scanning a document to extract text (OCR) then 200 dpi is sufficient.

* Scan in Grayscale or Black & White instead of Color.  Scanning in color significantly increases the document size.

* Save the image to a compressed file format.  For photos choose a format such as JPEG.  In most cases you can use controls provided to adjust the amount of compression to further reduce the file size.  For documents use PDF which will compress the pages, and lets you save all pages to a single file.

* For text documents, you can also save the file to a text format (e.g. RTF or TXT).  Since you are only saving the text and not the image, the file size will be much smaller.

To save all pages into a single file, make sure that you are saving to a format such as PDF which can support multiple pages.  Also look for an option in the scan settings for saving all pages to a single file.

Hope this helps,

[paigec123]

Scanning from HP Scan using document feeder tray.   I changed to Text with resolution of 75.  Changed to PDF and checked the box for Combine Into Single Document.  I scanned to Outlook to email it.  Email still comes up with 10 separate PDF files.

[paigec123]

...and I just tried to send the email with all 10 pdf attachments...still too large to send.

[AMacGuyAtHP · Accepted solution]

Sorry you are still having problems with this software. 

Your comment " I scanned to Outlook to email it. " has me confused since there isn't a direct linkage between HP Scan and Outlook that would facilitate this.  Perhaps I've made an incorrect assumption that you are using the HP Scan 3 software that HP has released for use on Lion.  Please ensure that you have downloaded and installed the latest Lion-compatible HP software for your product.

I'm not sure what you consider to be "too large", but I would be very surprised that 75 dpi scans would produce files that you, or Outlook, would consider to be excessive (seems to me that the software ignored the 75 dpi setting) .  The fact that you checked the option for multiple pages to a single file and still ended up with separate PDF files for each page is also suspect.  It sounds more to me like there is a disconnect between where you are setting these values and the way you are starting the scan.

For the version of HP Scan that I assume you are using, the scan settings are made in  the application's Preferences dialog (HP Scan > Preferences).  If you want to use the same settings for future scans, make sure that you save a preset so that you can easily select these settings next time you scan.

Your device is also compatible with Apple's Image Capture scan application.  Image Capture also supports scanning multiple pages from a document feeder into a single PDF file.  You may want to try this alternative to see if the outcome is more favorable.

[paigec123]

Obviously, I'm the one who is confused!  Thank you for your input...I have no idea what I'm doing.  I think you have given me enough information to work with.  I now go the the apple icon, system preferences, scanner, then set up my scanning preferences for pdf, resolution 75-200, black & white, etc.  Then I select scan to documents.  Once the scan is in my documents, i can go to Outlook and attach the document to my email.  This is working fine.  On my old PC I was able to select Scan to Email.  That doesn't seem to work on my Mac with Office for Mac, but that's okay.  As long as I'm able to scan to Documents and end up with one attachment instead of ten, I'm all good.  If you see something else I'm doing wrong here, let me know.  But this is working fine.

Thanks again!

[AMacGuyAtHP]

Glad you've found a way to accomplish this task.  Rather than navigating to scan starting in the Apple menu, one way you could make the task slightly quicker is to open  the Image Capture scan application directly from the Applications folder.  You could even drag Image Capture into the Dock for quick access.

Image Capture also provides an extensible "Scan To" feature where you can add your own applications as destinations.  Open the Scan To popup menu, select Other, and then choose the application you want to add.  You may want to try adding Outlook.

[paigec123]

Thank you!  It worked!