There are real world reasons to have your photos scanned, digitized and protected. Many of those reasons are critical or emotional and can be necessary at a moment’s notice.
Up until now, we’ve dealt with reasons to scan your photos or transfer your videos that had a great deal to do with preserving the images themselves. You can’t have them in a basement—too humid. You can’t have them in an attic—too dry. You can’t even have them in photo albums—the polyvinyl chloride on the plastic is dangerous to your pictures, as it tends to suck up the colors. Add floods or fires to that mix and there is a very valid set of reasons to scan your photos and to do it soon.
Today, families are often scattered all over the country or even all over the world. By having your photos scanned, they can be uploaded to any number of commercial photo sharing sites for everyone to see. Whether it is a student far away, family members living in another state, relatives serving in the military or anyone in a location away from home, they can have access to those images that are meaningful to them.
Those photos can also be included in a montage, set to music and themed by an almost countless array of subjects. You can send people copies of a ready-for-television DVD or even upload it to YouTube.
But there are more reasons, some practical and some sad for having photos scanned. We are used to seeing wedding photos featuring happy, joyous people. But sometimes, those happy feelings don’t last and the marriage comes to an end. What happens to the photographs of themselves and their family? Often those photographs are the contentious subject of negotiations and wrangling. However, some couples just decide to have their photos scanned with each getting a copy of their photo collections. In fact, divorce ranks at or near the top of reasons why people have their photos scanned.
Certainly, the desire to use photos in a memorial service is a very real reason to scan them. It too, is one of the most often cited-reasons for scanning. It gives the family an opportunity to show images of their loved one in the kind of light they wish them to be seen in and remembered by. Similarly, people who have lost both parents want to share photos of their family with their siblings or other surviving relatives. Scanning, outputting on DVD and copying the DVD allow all family members to have their own copy of their parents’ collections.
We live in a culture where people are sharing images at an increasing and very rapid pace. But unless people have their photos scanned, they will not be able to share them online. Our Internet sharing capabilities may have taken off over the past decade, but our photographed history is more than a century old. By showing others your collection one at a time or in small groups, a small number of people in a small area can view your photos. By scanning them, digitizing them and sharing them online, you can show them to anyone who has a computer or a DVD player or even a phone for that matter.
Joe Allen
The Scan Zone
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