Tech Question About Printers and Scanning Photos

I think it's the resolution that's making your scanned files so large.
The higher the resolution, the more crisp and clear your pictures are but it can make your files huge.
If you can lower the resolution the files will be smaller but if you go too low the pictures will start to look blurry - play with it a bit till you get something that works for you.
You can always scan them as they are now and reduce the resolution later on with some photo editor software.
You can recover from too high a resolution at scan time but if it's too low, there's no fix for it.
I'd error on the side of a higher resolution (but maybe not as high as you have yours right now).
Disk is cheap.
You can always get a large external drive on which to store your photo collection.

You are scanning photos.
Your photos are "just a simple 4x6 printed photo."
BUT, remember, you are wanting to save these photos, DIGITALLY. On the hard drive. A hard drive, does not care if the photo is a 4x6 or a 3x5. It only knows, computer formats/language. Therefore, the size of your photos (4x6) is NOT the same as, digital storage of it. You are talking, apples and oranges.
So, you must, upon scanning them, save the scanned photos.... to a "JPEG" or "TIFF" format. For example. So that, it can be, stored digitally on the hard drive. And therefore, as a JPEG or TIFF format, it will then not take up all the room on your hard drive.
And know, the difference between a JPEG and TIFF file.

It is about, HOW you save these files and in what format. Digitally.
It is not about, the paper size of the photo or editing the colors on it.
And yes, photos, if not changed to a JPEG or TIFF type file format... WILL take up TONS of megabytes on your computer.

You have options on saving it JPEG and then a large, medium or small size of JPEG. go medium, about a 6. Too small and your photos won't turn out well.

When you scan in the photos, one of the options you should have is resolution. The higher the resolution, the bigger the file. So that's one thing you'll have to play around with.

When you save the file, there should be a way to change the type of file you save it as: .jpg, .png, .tif, .gif, .bit

bit - bitmap - This type of file takes up a lot of space
jpg - jpeg - This format doesn't take up as much space as bitmap

tif, gif and png do not use much space, but jpg is very, very common, so I would use that.

It is true that 54 mb isn't huge, but you probably don't need yours to be that big. Most of the pictures from my camera are 2 to 3 mb. It really depends on what you are looking to do - whether or not you are planning to enlarge them. If the resolution is too small, you will be limited in the size of the picture you can print. An 8x10 might be too blurry.

What I do is take a new picture with my digital camera and then just put the memory card directly into my computer and drag the image files from the memory card to either the computer hard drive or I plug in my back-up drive and copy them onto that. I hated working with our older scanner since mine would always show up as a large image with the photo only about 1/4 of the full image, the way it was sized on the glass. The only tricky part with taking new digital photos of your old hardcopies is the lighting. You want it bright all around but not so bright that you reflect off the photo surface or leave shadows for a light coming from behind. I recommend a bright day and no flash.

It is not the size that determines file size, it is quality. It doesn't really matter whether you are scanning a black and white, you still want color because you need the quality unless you want stores what kind of looks like a photocopy.

I am too lazy to start the computer that we store our photos on but 54mb is nothing. Our pictures are stored that you can produce full sized canvases from them. 1100 by 1500 are pixels, not inches.

I really get the feeling you have no idea what you are looking at, nothing wrong with that, but if you are to print those files you are going to get a 4 x 6. If you try to shrink them you are going to get a wallet size.