So, I’m new to this general topic.
If one had, say, 1000 pics to digitize, what is the best way forward?
Thanks in advance!
I just printed (this week) a ton of photos from the past few years. Once we bought a digital camera I stopped printing photos and making a photo album each year. The kids love looking through the albums and I like having a finite set of favorite pictures from each year so I’m trying to go back and finish the “kid” years. As for storing digital, I have everything on multiple flashdrives and some DVDs but am nervous about any of these technologies failing over the years.
Fairly regularly, I go through my digital photos and create a printed photobook on a specific theme using mypublisher.com (I’ve also used Shutterfly). In my experience, digital photos get lost over time. I have a fairly substantial stack of such photobooks at this point. I find my kids do leaf through those occasionally, and they don’t take up a lot of room. The format allows for brief descriptions of the photos. I’ve done books on DH’s bike trip in the Alps; our recent weekend in Crater Lake, my dogs doing agility; favorite photos of 2014; etc.
I am currently putting together an envelope of labeled physical photos (my mother with her first husband, my father as a baby, me on a pony, age 7, that kind of thing)–once I get am “done” with the envelope, I will get them scanned and create a “family history” photobook. It’s a slow project but I’m getting there.
I do think it would be nice to scan some really old ones, however my kids do like looking through albums. My oldest DS was just home for a few hours yesterday and I showed him my project.
It was fun to sit with him on the sofa laughing through album and photos.
We purchased a digital camera in 2004, so all my photos since then are organized very nicely on the PC…but I also like to take from that bunch and have hard copies to look through.
If you have old photos that are faded out try scanning them and running them through a “fix” filter. Worked great on some of my faves.
Great idea…I’m going to try that! I Have a few from the 80’s that have faded pink!
I’m just about finished!!! I ended up with three 400 page albums and one 100 page album…each their own individual grouping! one album just for 5x7 prints and another for 8x10… Various photos from various generations.
I have one large clear plastic photo storage box, with 16 individual boxes within. Categorized and labeled each box.
I have written dates, names, places…not on each one and done it various ways…but at least it is organized and generations in the future will know who is who.
What a job…a fun satisfying task! My estimates are I had about 3,000 photos and discarded 800… About 25% of those duplicates. Got rid of so many old falling apart albums, shoe boxes etc.
I ended up keeping one size of each school year for the kids and putting in their school " memory book"… Threw the rest away.
Throwing pictures away is very hard for me…I love them. I counted and now have 42 albums…most of them I already had.
Wow, that is awesome, Conmama! I have trouble throwing out photos, too. My 999 photos arrived this week and I have some empty albums and boxes for them to occupy but I need the time to pull them out and sort and label them. Maybe after Thanksgiving some of the kids will help me do this.
Have fun psychomomma…you will have fun. I used the pioneer albums…two 4x6 one one side, and also the other. There is a piece of paper in the middle to write on, but it is hard to pull out and push back in. I just wrote on my own paper and pushed it in the slot if I wanted to write something.