digital_vibe wrote
2. A suggestion was made to scan as TIFF as this will be better for long term archiving purposes, which makes sense but as these will eventually be made available to family members who will likely use some kind of online photo printing service and many of these do not accept TIFF files, I’ll likely have to make a duplicate of each TIFF scan as JPG. Does this present any particular issues/challenges?
The main reason for using tiff is that jpg is unsuited for edting. Edit the tiffs, and use the Image processor script to create jpgs from the tiffs. (File > Scripts > Image processor) If you're familiar with Lightroom, you can import the scans and do editing there. (retouching is best done in Photoshop before importing) Then you can export jpgs from Lightroom.
3. It was suggested that to give me greater flexibility down the road, I scan to a resolution of 4800 PPI. I’ve found I can achieve this by manually overriding Photoshops default max of 600 but in so doing the scanning process is incredibly slow and the file output size very high ( a 3”x3” photo scanned in this manner is over 40MB in size). Given that I need to scan through hundreds of photos I’m not sure that such a process is feasible especially as I’m then presented with storage challenges. Given this, is there a compromise here that provides me a high resolution file that will work well for re-printing as well as providing good archiving and flexibility down the road?
When scanning prints, there is no advantage in scanning at such a high resolution. 600 ppi is plenty, and you will probably be fine with 300 ppi. By testing, you can find out if there is any advantage in scanning at 600 ppi. Scan one image at 300 ppi, then scan the same image at 600 ppi. Then change the ppi to 300 in the 600 ppi file – go to Image > Image size, and change the ppi to 300 with Resample checked. Now compare the two images at 100% view.
4. In terms of software, I’m not using anything that came bundled with the Canon scanner, rather I’m relying solely on Photoshop.
It seems that you're using File > Import > WIA support for scanning, which is a method that gives you very few options. I suggest that you use the software that came with the scanner, which should give you more control and more options. Save the image in the scanning software, then open it in Photoshop.