Photo albums still line shelves in some living rooms and the feeling of going from page to page gives viewers a feeling of excitement when, not knowing what comes next, they find a photo from 1975 when they were just a baby – or just had had a baby.
On the other hand, those albums do require maintenance – cleaning and implementation of other anti-mold techniquest – and take up lots of space. Digitally scanning all the photos can take ages but you’ll be able to share the photos with all friends and family with an email address.
So what do you do in this case?
Do you sacrifice a few weekends in exchange for more space and less dust? Sure, it’ll take some time to get done – but it’ll be time well spent in exchange for preserving these memories on a digital medium.
Do you just leave it alone? You’ve got far more important things to do than to spend time scanning photos that are already well-preserved and not doing any harm as-is.
Which way would you go on this? Let us know in the comments.
Done. Scanned all of them, cropped each photo, pushed saturation and contrast a bit, sorted them in folders by years then subfolders by events. Yeah, took me a week or two. I resisted the urge to overfix the photos, no repainting scratches and stains. Those are part of the photos now.
Though, albums are still collecting dust on the shelves. I like browsing the printed photos. But I feel more secure having them digitized and burned on a disc.
I should do the same with parent’s albums as well. But now I know how boring that job can be so I’m reluctant to start.
Wow, that’s some a organization project. Maybe you can digitize your parents’s photos as an anniversary gift 🙂
I am currently archiving my grandparents memories. This includes all the old faded photographs as well as VHS tapes and reel-to-reel.
Advice: Take it all to an AV service bureau to have it digitized. You will still have a pile of work to do, once you get the 5000 images and videos back from the bureau.
Your typical home gear can only rip video at real time. So 20 hours of video = 20 of ripping. This does not include setup, organizing or editing.
And 5000 photographs on a flatbed scanner? forget it! )
Is it expensive to have all this work done?
Took the time one weekend while my wife was gone to scan in about 640 photos. These were old ones that we had stored in boxes. With both of us having digital cameras now, especially my wife, the collection has grown immensely. I think it was well worth the time. I crop or fine tune as I use them for different projects.
Last week i am digitalizing familiephotos. Because i bought a digital photoviewer for my mother. Now i am bizzy digitalizing old familyphotos (from the old days of my family in Indonesia. A lot of work but time well spent. Great to view these photos on my iPad. Digitalizing all these images gives me also opportunity to make great keynote presentations from these images.
I started scanning them myselves, it’s a ton of work. I’ve seen some scanning companies around, I think I’ll just send it to them, and I’ll organize them when I get them back.