Taking images of my collection .Scan? Photo?

i would appreciated any advice on the ways other members create images for sharing. What do most prefer? For me the simplest would be best. 

I have a scanner/printer/ and have both a laptop and an IPad.  Once I have created images is it better to store on my hard drive or elsewhere. Any special programs that would help out? Anything free would be great.

i have looked at threads and have not seen questions directly related to my questions. If these questions have been asked elsewhere, please direct me to them.

Thanks for starting this thread, David.  These are very good questions!

I went through some struggles in my early days on TSF (about a year ago), in getting decent quality images in my posts.  A number of very knowledgeable members, such as @falshung , tomiseksj , jkjblue , classicalstamps , Anping , and angore all helped me in figuring out how to change the settings on my scanner to get better results.  That discussion can be found on this thread:

thestampforum.boards.net/thread/4559/image-sharing-sites?page=3

I learned that although PNG files are considered a "loss-less" format for photos and theoretically should allow one to maintain high resolution images, my scanner would not allow me to adjust the settings of PNGs to get the highest image quality.  I got better results creating JPG scans, because in that format I could adjust the image quality settings.

I try to use scans versus photos whenever possible, but since most of my albums are hard-bound rather than loose-leaf, sometimes I take photos because trying to place the heavy album on the scanner would risk damaging the pages and the stamps mounted on them.