The Daunting Prospect of Having to Scan Your Photos

The prospect of taking your photos and scanning them so they can be stored in a digital format can be a daunting one. Many people have looked at their personal flatbed scanner and then at their thousands of photos and became paralyzed by the sheer size of the job. It's an enormous amount of individual scanning processes and it will take so much time that people back away and don't undertake the project at all.

That's too bad on several fronts. The potentially devastating outcome is when something happens between the time you decide to scan your photos and the time you actually get around to do it. Whether somebody passes away, or gets married, or divorced or any other life changing event occurs, you will have wished you would have made the time to undertake that scanning project. I know of a couple who had a terrible flood in their basement which ruined a grat amount of things that were in cartons--including a large number of their photos. Add to that the potential damage from storms or a fire or other unexpected happenstance and you can see how many things can affect your photos. That's in addition to typical temperature changes or storage inefficiencies which speed up deterioration.

It's so easy to understand why people are emotionally devastated when they return to their homes after being evacuated and find their possessions damaged and their memories lost.

But the face-off of you and your scanner versus the thousands of photos in boxes is not the only scenario you have. Your scanner will take 30 to 45 seconds for a scan, or about 10 scans in five minutes. Even if you bunch a few photos on the bed, maybe you'll be able to scan 40 photos in five minutes. But you don't have to scan them yourself at all and the cost to have someone else do it is probably far less than you think.

Today, you can have your photos scanned for about 20 cents a photo. That's 1,000 pictures scanned for $200. They will be scanned and digitized so they actually look better. A scanning service will typically be able to scan 30 photos in a minute or 150 in that same five minute time. They can be cropped an improved and then stored on disc for you to file, edit, catalogued and saved--for 50 years or more. You can make slide shows from them to show on any DVD or duplicate the DVD so others can have a copy. But whatever you do with them, they will be preserved.

Your photos are the roadmap of your life. Everyone important to you is in them and most everywhere you've been is there as well. Dont let them fade away or become damaged or worse.

The Personal Imagery of Thanksgiving

Today is the eve of one of the true, great American days. Of all the holidays in our year, it seems to me that Thanksgiving brings out the best in all of us. It symbolizes family, country and a vision for the peace and tranquility we all wish was ours. It also allows us to take a good cleansing exhale and reflect on those things we might be thankful about.

It is usually a multi--generational affair, bringing together children, parents, grandparents and some great-grandparents in there as well. We can see first hand see how strong the roots of family and friends are as we can look in the eyes of those who came before us and those who came after us at the same time.

It's also a day for picture taking. Whether it's the setting of the table, the standing or sitting around prior to the meal, the meal itself or the post-feast cleanup or the football games on tv in the other room, we furiously take photos of Thanksgiving. What a time to get that shot of this year’s newest, tiny addition to the family being held by the great grandmotherly hands of the family's matriarch. How amazing it is to watch grandpa's eyes while being treated to some exaggerated story of little league success by an eight-year-old. How fun it is to photograph the table and then look back on Thanksgiving’s passed and see that things haven't really changed all that much over the years—at least from a culinary point of vew.

We tend to take so many photos of the youngest people in our families -- -- after all there's nothing cuter than a completely candid photograph of a child. But if you look around, everyone is also taking those kind of shots. The really important shots to get are the ones that include the oldest at the table. They're the ones who have been shaping Thanksgiving celebrations for dozens upon dozens of years and the ones who are most at risk of being near the end of their time at your table.

In my family alone, this Thanksgiving will be celebrated through the veil of loss of three senior members of the clan over the past year or so.

That makes the picture’s we have of our families that much more precious to all of us. Your aunt may be gone, but her image remains largely due to your own memory but also in part to the photographs you have of her. That's why it's so important to make sure those photos, those special family collections, do not fade away and ultimately become irrelevant. You can digitize those photos by having them scanned and housed in your computer or on a DVD and they will live for another 50 years or more. It's very sad that too many of my own family’s pictures have suffered the fate of age. Sadder still that there are very few among us who can identify the people in the pictures.

However, if your photos are scanned and labeled on the spot, transferred to DVD and are kept safe there is no end to what you can do with them. You can make photo collages backed by inspirational or emotional music to play at next year's Thanksgiving. You can create a family documentary that chronicles your family via photos, interviews on video and previously recorded videotapes to give out to other family members.

The point is to keep the memory alive of everyone sitting at that table tomorrow. Thanksgiving day, that grand American holiday, represents the fabric of all we hold dear. It’s part of what connects one generation to the next. That little cousin you had is in charge of Thanksgiving every year because she grew up and those who once held that responsibility have passed on. Don't let your photos, videos and other memories of the day fade away. Keep them alive, scan them and save them. They are a part of you.

Not Fade Away

Not Fade Away. It's a perfect title for a song about your videos.

Anyone who has looked at their collection of VHS tapes knows about what I call The Big Fade. That's when your videos go soft at first and then ultimately start to disappear altogether. Of course, some wont even get as far as even being able to insert them into a machine becase the tape in the cassette became brittle and not usable. Then of course, if it does go in and there is a signal, watch out for all the dropout, which is the tape heads sliding through a section of tape that has lost its information. Your VHS has faded away.

You can cry out in anguish, as in "No! Not fade away!"
You can try to give it a stern order, as in "Not fade away! I command you."

Or you can look at a videocassette transferred to disc and breathe a sigh of relief and say "Ahhh, not fade away."

Each of these statements is very possible and it depends what you do with the VHS's you have lying around. If you do nothing with them, you might as well kiss them goodbye. They will fade and become unwatchable. That's assuming of course that somebody or something hasn't damaged them to the point where you can no longer put them into a VHS machine.

You are far better served by transferring your collection of VHS cassettes to DVD. First off, they will look better. The natural improving quality of DV will make your tapes look better. Secondly, you will make them last for a half century or more and third, you will easily be able to import them into any video creation software and edit parts of it at your discretion.

In many cases, more than one person will want a copy of the DVD. Easily done. You can make several if you need to, including one for your safe deposit box. Plus, as video editing software gets easier and easier, you'll have no problem cutting and recutting the footage to meet a specific need.

It's hard to believe there was a generation, just before my own, where there was little in the way of recorded voices to match the visuals. I've looked at some of those people on films and realized I never heard them talk. I'm lucky in that my parents celebrated their 25th Anniversary at a party in their honor many years ago and we videotaped the daylights out of that event. So, at least I had a vhs of it to hear and see them. But it was the only copy so transferring it to DVD was critical. Now my kids can see and hear their grandparents speak.

The videotape contained in the videocassettes is remarkably fragile. It loses its integrity very fast. But you have a line of defense. Transfer it to DVD and don't worry about it any longer. The children of Baby Boomers have the digital age in their back pockets. It's the Boomers themselves who are stuck with old films, videos and photos. Step one in their revival is to put them onto DVDs.

We Live in Two Worlds

We live in two worlds. At least from a photographic point of view we do.

Most of us have become quite familiar with digital photography, at least enough to be able to take photos, discard the ones we don't like and import the ones we do to any number of photo storage solutions. Many of us know there are nearly endless levels of sophistication for the pictures we take but--as happens so often --the photo we need is the one taken at the end of our outstretched arm with our phones.

This provides immediacy to our world and makes everyone a content provider. It doesn’t matter if one is an expert technician, or knows the basics of photography or has reasonably good equipment. In the end what seems to matter most is acquiring, saving and retrieving content deemed important to us or by us at any given time. That makes photography an immediate or perhaps even an instant medium.

But it wasn't always that way. In fact, many of us, if not most of us, have at least some experience in a world where photos were special. They were planned for, often staged, prepared for and taken. Them it was a highly anticipated event to receive those photos back from the drugstore or in the mail and determine which looked good, which were okay and which had to be hidden away so no one else would see them. They look so real--at least the good ones did. When well lit and well shot they could grab you like nothing else.

I remember thinking how near-genius it was when my mother order two copies of every picture in the roll. One copy went in one of her many photo scrapbooks and one was given to some relative or some adult who was, by happenstance, in the photo.

Most of us know or have some idea what to do with our digital pictures. Whether or not we all take a crack at it, we still know that there are software programs that allow us to change lighting, sharpen images, change portrait to landscape and even take red eye out. Plus we know we can make copies for ourselves, make prints for as many people as we want or even send those photos to a number of people limited only by the number of e-mail addresses we might have. Put them on the internet and there are no limits at all!

But what about that picture of me holding my brother on my lap. The cute one. The one where we both have big eyes and are looking straight into the camera. Wouldn't it be great if we could do the same thing with those paper photos that we can do with our digitally shot photos?

Of course, the answer is we can. Scan your pictures and they are in the same boat as your digital ones -- digitized and ready to last half century or more. Then you can alter them any way you want and send them to whomever you want and do so whenever you want.

We are lucky to be living in a time where our creativity is basically bound by no borders. All our photos from the digital age are part of that. By digitizing the rest of our photos, the ones from the “golden days of our lives,” they can be included in the future as well. There is no more important history than our own.

These People are in My Family?

It was part laughter and part sad irony. I found a whole bunch of photos of my family that were 70 or 80 years old. They were black and white of course and some were on extremely thick cardboard paper while others were little Polaroids. It was like looking at a series of museum photos until I realized that they were family members of mine.

I didnt know who they were, although some had writing on them so I could kind of build the structure of the photos. My family came here from overseas around 1900 and these photos were old enough that I couldnt be sure whether they were from here in the US or before they made the trip.

I wondered who these people were and what their lives were like. How much more simply they seemed to live. They lived a harder life than their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. But it was a lot simpler.

Did they really dress like that? What was attractive to each other? My grandmother's parents sure looked stern and I cant imagine how they had a whole lot of fun. What did they do before radio, tv or computer? Hard to know because there is no record of their thoughts or dreams. I dont even know who most of those people are, but I have a cousin who might be able to identify them.

I scanned them and will label them if I find out who they are. I don't like thinking that the generations disappear. I prefer to think that my kids and their kids will be able to appreciate the fact that they are part of our extended family with these unnamed and unidentified people at the helm. But if our pictures are never scanned, we will lose them to deterioration or to the inability to idenify them.

I honor my grandparents, I remember them very well. But it will probably end there as there are not enough photos of my grandfather to make a case for him to my own kids.

We do a great job with creating digital memories. There is so much content that I believe the generations that follow us will have plenty of content to play around with. And they'll have a wide array of media where family histories can be housed. But the first wave of photos? They are endangered. There are somewhere between three and four trillion photos out there and many of them have been lost to irrelevance. I want to make sure I can stop that wherever and whenever I can. I want to nurse and nurture my little family tree,

The Roadmaps of our Lives

By some estimates, there are somewhere between three and four trillion printed photographs out there. Some have little importance, either they are duplicates or out of focus prints or not the best depiction of the subject of the photo. Others are landscapes that look like so many other landscapes. Many fall into the "it seemed like a good picture at the time" category but if you've forgotten where you were or what was funny about putting your hands to your ears and acting like a moose. Those pictures really have very little value. Some not even worth the paper they're printed on.

But then, there are the gems. The ones that represent people, places or things that are an integral parts of your life life. They are our grandparents, our parents, our siblings, our grandchildren and every one of them, every time you see them, elicits an emotion inside you.

These photographs are the roadmaps of our lives. The list of what kind of photos would be special to each of us would be as long as a phone book. We keep them close to us--in wallets or in our offices, standing on shelves or hanging on walls of our homes. They are our treasures.

Unfortunately, few of us treat them as as the treasures they are. We too often banish them to boxes and then store them in locations where they can slowly deteriorate over a relatively short time. We keep them in places that can damaged by water, moisture, fire or the other environmental conditions that are out there.

Worse still, we all reach a time when those who might be able to identify everyone in a photograph or tell a story about the location are gone. Then what? We no longer have that part of our family's history. We have people that are standing near Grandma or Aunt Elizabeth that we can't identify. We don't know where the picture was taken or by whom. And, as such, they are gone. Images that no longer have any meaning to us.

Fortunmately, there is a way to avoid this. Scan them, digitize them, caption them and save them to DVD. You'll not only have the pictures for 50 years or more, you and your children and their children will know who the people in the photos are.

In my own life, I lost my father more than 30 years ago. I sometimes wonder whether my memories of him are of him in life or in the poses of the photos that are so familiar to me. I am so thankful I still have them. And I keep finding more. With every box of stored photos I open, I am treated to another, often forgotten chapter in my life. It's a visual history of my family and of my growing up.

It is as important to me as any history book has ever been.