Opportunities Abound for Sharing Your Photos

Today’s technology provides us with so many opportunities; it’s hard to decide which ones to take. Let’s just take the world of photos and concentrate on how to present those photos.

You can take your photos and do pretty much whatever you want with them. It’s now easy to present them in digitized scrapbooks, complete with calendars or hard covers. You can upload them to a seemingly endless number of photo sites and make them sharper, restore colors and crop them along the way. You can organize them and give the structure. If you’d like, you can even output certain photos and add music or even interviews to make a family documentary.

People upload their photos to social networking sites so their new friends or their families can see them the way they looked as children or introduce new people to their parents through pictures.

All of these creative presentations of one’s photographic history are interesting. Sure, we love our own photos more than anyone else does, but most everyone who views your digital scrapbook or slide show finds something they like or finds interesting.

But regardless of how you ultimately intend to use your old photos, unless you want to hand them to someone to look at, they are going to have to be scanned, digitized and output to a medium where you can view them. You’ve got boxes of those photos, but with most of the scanners that people have in their homes, it is an agonizingly slow process—so much so that people start and lose the will to go on or choose not do it at all.

But with photo scanning companies with high-speed scanners, it is cheaper than you probably thought to have all your pictures digitized and ready for you to use with the terrific technology-based presentations.

For example, for only about a quarter each, you can scan 1,000 pictures. That’s for photos that are scanned, physically viewed and enhanced if necessary. Lots of different companies can do it for you, but obviously, I would hope you’d give The Scan Zone a try.

Whatever company you choose, I urge you to start soon. Your photos and videos are not getting any younger and with every passing day they are a bit more at risk for fading or being lost or somehow destroyed.

I suggest going to where your photos are with a bunch of plastic bags and a black marker. Move your photos into organized piles with different themes like you would with old baseball cards. Then just put each pile in a bag (or bags) and put them in a different box marked “Ready for Scanning.” This will force you to go through them but without the angst of thinking you have a brutal scanning job in front of you.

Scan and digitize your media and you’ll trade an entire box, taking up space, for a single DVD. You’ll be able to take advantage of all the new technology that’s out there to show your photos. These are your memories. It’s our job to preserve them.

There is a Little Bit of "Us" in Every Photo We See

A friend of mine scanned some pictures of her early life and put them on Facebook. She made a few comments about them, describing what they were, where they were from and who was in them. From there, it was really fun to watch what happened.

Her photos were of her life from the time she was a young girl through her mid and late 20’s. I didn’t know anyone in any of the photos except for her but everyone seemed to look so familiar. From the way they looked, her friends could have been my friends and her family had the same look and feel of my parents, grandparents aunts and uncles. She had that youthful, 60’s and 70’s young girl-look that my friends had too.

Looking at her photos made me want to go and look at mine because if I could have fun with someone’s photos featuring people I didn’t know, how great it would be to spend time with people that made up my life.

I sure wasn’t alone in enjoying her pics. Her friends and family were commenting on Facebook, talking about how she looked, how the family looked and how they sure had a great time. Other people in her circle of friend and family started to put photos of their youth on in response and in a very short time it was a veritable festival of family photography.

All those pictures of everyone’s youth up there on Facebook have one thing in common. Every one of those old pictures first had to be scanned and digitized before they could be used on Facebook or anywhere on the internet. The photos were old, many were already faded and most would have benefitted from the minor corrections typically provided by a scanning company, like The Scan Zone. But as digital files, they will now last for the foreseeable future. And any of those people who scanned them in order to share them could burn them on DVD for storage and sharing and not worry about them for 50 years or more.

It was a heartwarming expression of the appreciation of life that I witnessed from my friend’s photos. And as I looked around, just on Facebook, others were doing the same thing and their friends were commenting and uploading photos. They were reminding the people close to them—and others who might not have even known them—what life in their youth was like.

The Scan Zone and dozens of other scanning companies can help people do that. I hope people get around to doing it before their memories are destroyed in a basement or due to a flood or lost in a move. We all make our memories—and they take a lifetime to collect. The sheer number of those photos make people shy away from undertaking the project of digitizing them. But it takes hours for a company with a high speed scanner to do it for you.

Once they’re scanned, you can put the best ones on Facebook and let others comment on how your hair looked, how thin Aunt Carolyn was and what was up with that shirt!

Who Is this Person in this Photo? Oh, it's Me!

What is it about seeing old photographs of ourselves that touches us in such different, remarkable ways? Why is it that we see an old photo in which we are included or featured in and right away we want to tell someone “Hey, look at this picture of me.”

Perhaps it’s part ego, perhaps it’s part reflection or perhaps it is our defense against accepting what we might have become now that all those years and life experiences have literally reshaped us. “See, there was a time where I was everything that I don’t seem to be right now.”

The past serves as a great ally as well as an unbeatable opponent. If you’re like me, you link to the past quite easily. I may have a great deal of trouble getting to a place 5 or 10 miles from my door, but I have no trouble getting to place called 1965 or 1973.

I scanned a set of pictures recently which included shots of me from 30 years ago. Of course I enjoyed seeing all the shots of that series because they included my family and friends and spending time with those pictures was the closest I’m ever going to get to spend time with those people again—at least in that way.

But I can’t explain the therapeutic value of seeing photographs I was in and being able to say “There is that guy that I remember being. There is that guy who discovered certain music or enjoyed certain people, live through this president and that or even went through all the rites of passage we seem to have to pass through to get from then to now—wherever now is.

Without a doubt I did what we all do…shook my head and asked where did the time go and promised to remove the baggage I’ve collected along the way so I could look more like that in contemporary photos. But the most remarkable thing was to be able to insert myself into the moments and the context of those photos. I was able to reintroduce myself to the person under the tree in one of those photos. He was 25, unmarried, no kids, no real job, no mortgage, no fears, no boundaries. I first wanted to tell that person “You can’t believe what you have ahead of you.” But I stopped and instead asked “What can you tell me about who I was when all this journey-through-life stuff was beginning.”

That was the therapeutic part.

Many of the photos I scanned that day were fading and were looking very much like the past. But once they were scanned, refreshed and made vibrant again, they offered even greater insight because I could actually see what was in the photos and who some of the other players caught in that instant of time actually were.

After scanning them, I logged them and saved them to DVD and made duplicates of them. But I couldn’t help stopping to look at whom I was with that day or what I might have been thinking or doing when someone interrupted my moment to “Look this way and smile.”

But after a long time doing the headshakes and making the “wow, did I look like that” comments to myself, I made the one final silent chuckle, stopped and called out to my daughter coming down the stairs, “come here, take a look at this picture and tell me who it is.”

There are many reasons to scan your old special family photos. You’ll protect them, give them new enduring life, put them on long-lasting media, share them among others in your family and so on. But one of the most important reasons is to see yourself again. Go back to the moment the photo was taken and touch that time in your life. You may reacquaint yourself with someone very important in your past…..you.

We Have Only a Limited Time to Feature the Matriarchs or Patriarchs on Video

One of the services we provide at The Scan Zone is producing “family documentaries” for our clients. We take hundreds of photos, some videos, music, write a script and actually produce it as a 30-minute documentary. A key component of the piece is an interview with the matriarch or patriarch of the family as well as any other family members who can talk about a family’s history.

I always suggest to people that they sit down with the older members of the family and get their perspective on what life was like in early days, how they came to this country and what they thought of the changes in America from then until now. It's mind-boggling to realize that this living testament to the continuity of family has seen so much and is sitting in front of you. Its one thing to read about those seeking a better life coming here or life during the Depression or living through World War II from books or other sources. But it's another to hear it from directly from your grandmother or uncle and know their stories are not only real, but ultimately lead to you.

However, there is one daunting universal truth: Your time with these special people, with all that experience, is finite. They won't be here forever.

Why is it important to videotape them? For several reasons. It puts these key family members on a long lasting DVD in an interview format talking about their lives. It locks in a family’s history from as far as the interviewees can remember straight through to the youngest members of the family right now. It gives context to a family’s story---and the pictures move and they sound like themselves.

Unfortunately, the best of plans don't always work out. Very dear friends of mine were considering doing a family documentary. In fact, we were already at the point of blocking the story and figuring out when to get these folks on tape. But a sad thing happened. The matriarch of the family slipped into an illness that resulted in her being placed in a nursing home with little chance that she will ever again be capable of participating in the documentary.

This is extremely sad. It makes me think of my own life. I have very little material on videotape from my father, mother or grandparents. Yeah, I have hundreds upon hundreds of photos, even some film, but next to no video. In fact, that gives me little, if any, examples of how my Mom or Dad talked. I’d love to let my kids embrace a grandpa they never met, but it will have to be done without voice or movement.

If you’re lucky enough to have people alive and vibrant who you can get on camera, think about doing that. We can even help you do it professionally. If you have videos they are in, please protect them and transfer them to DVD. If you have photos featuring them, scan them and keep them safe. Then you can begin to think about a family documentary that features them and the rest of your family.

Time is a fleeting enemy. Here today and gone tomorrow. That's particularly poignant when thinking about our older family members.

The Pure Joy of Living in the Moment

My mother was mad about photos. They were among her most prized possessions. She took them, got copies of others and put together an enormous collection.

My parents both worked at summer camps for about six or seven years and my mom's self-imposed responsibility was taking pictures of everything that took place each summer. She put them in soft cover books and every time one of the kids from camp would visit my folks in the off-season, they would visit my mom's library and spend hours reliving each moment.

As the years passed after her summertime stint, the camp memories began to fade. Fewer people came to visit and there were fewer opportunities to look at them. The books of photos from 1967 through 1973 went into a closet and then a box and then ultimately stored in the basement.

My mom passed away nearly ten years ago. For most of the time since, I didn’t know where those photos were. I moved them, put them in other boxes and stored them in my own basement. They were even placed in a box without being labeled, so I'd long forgotten exactly where they were.

Over the past few years, people from that time in our lives have asked me about them. The camps my family worked in are long defunct and so the only living testaments to them –besides the ones inside the people who shared the experience--are the photos or the 8mm and super 8mm film in boxes.

Well, I found them. Actually, I came upon them by accident but dragged the box upstairs to my home studio and began to remove them from the collectors’ books they were in. All of the photos were small 3x3 prints, most were faded away or had begun their fade and many stuck to the book. There were well more than a thousand photos.

But the experience of going through them and preparing them for scanning and then viewing the finished scans on my own computer, tinkering with them or changing the cropping was exhilarating. I traced the period of time that meant so much to my family photo by photo. I found myself in the moment with each picture. I could get there in a flash and stayed as long as I wanted or until the next photo came up.

I was almost too late to bring them back to life. As time passed, they would have faded more. They would have gotten mold or dust or would have been lost. I already saw that when we showed the pictures to the kids, they loved seeing my brother and I as youngsters but for most of them, they were just a bunch of old pictures of days long since passed--like World War II or the Renaissance for that matter!

But for my brother and I, they were an open window; allowing us to peer back into a time we loved. I’m thrilled to have that time memorialized now on DVD, watchable at a moment's notice and there to show anyone who’d care to watch.

Im glad my mother took it upon herself to photograph this period of time. I can’t watch them with her, but just by the subjects of each picture, she was editorializing and I clearly got the message. So in a way, I was watching those moments in time right along with her.

Photo Sharing Sites Are Our New History Books

It’s amazing to me how many photo sharing sites there are. From our own computers, we simply upload photos we want to have shared, choose whether to do so publicly or privately and follow the instructions. From there, your photos are online for those you want to see them, download them or print them.

I think it’s one of the most remarkable advancements in the effort to communicate the nature of our lives with others.

The concept first gathered steam in the late 1990’s and by now, there are almost too many sites to choose from. Within those sites you’ll find templates for all kinds of things including e-cards, slide shows and books. But it gets even more incredible when you realize that you don’t even have to be tethered to your computer to send and receive photos. Your phone can do it for you. Within seconds of taking or retrieving a photo, it can be anywhere that has a delivery capability, like another phone or computer.

Now, many sites include video as well, so most of your media can be shared with someone across the street or around the world--no mailing photos, no sending DVDs. And it happens fast.

So why am I talking about photo sharing sites when I have a photo and slide scanning and video transfer business? The answer is simple. There are an estimated 3.5 trillion photos out there still on paper. There are a vast amount of slides and videos as well. I’d love to see them all digitized, put on safe media to last 50 years or more and then be done with them. A one-time effort and we can recover the space they’re taking up and avoid the great potential for disaster by losing them to fire or flood. More important than that, we can communicate our visual histories with those who are part of it and those we want to provide a glimpse to. However, until your photos, slides and videos have been digitized, you can’t use these sites to do it.

Consider this. You have a couple of thousand pictures that pretty much make up your family’s history. You can have them all scanned, improved and put on DVD for storage and later viewing. You can make copies for each of your four children, one for yourself and even one for the safe deposit box. Then your family’s history is safe and secure, no long reliant on boxes in a basement near a pipe that leaked. And the cost for all thsi is measured in hundreds, not thousands.

Since they will be digitized, you can choose the ones you want to upload. You can also choose the ones that will never see the light of day! You may want to do a collage or slide show with music and that will be available for people you want as well.

When your valuable memories are in a digital format, so many things are possible. When they remain on paper or on videotape, you are rolling the dice that they’ll be there, as you remembered them, when you open the box or slide the videocassette into the dwindling number of VCR’s out there.

I Can't Believe I Lost Them

For quite some time now I have been telling people about the importance of having their photos scanned.I've written about about, spoke in person about it and tried to get the message across that people could end up very sorry if they don't take the bull by the horns and scan their photos.

Since I opened The Scan Zone, I have heard terrible stories of people who lost their photos in a fire or a flood. Every photo scanning company has experience with a client or prospect who tells a story about losing photos to something--unfortunately, it's after the photos are lost.
Unfortunately, I can now count myself among those who have lost critical photos. I have been trying to make time when I could to scan my own family photos. I have the equipment and there is often down time so there was really no excuse not to finish the job. I estimate that there were about 25,000 pictures in my basement and I have been scanning them. From the time I began the project, it has been going well. Many of the photos were losing the battle to age and I have had to work with them to bring them back to life. But through it all, I was so fortunate that I didnt totally lose photos to something unforsee.

Well, that all changed today.

This morning I was looking through all the boxes in order to find some photos to bring to my brother's house. I wanted to bring him some photos that had to do with our Mom, who has been gone for nearly 10 years now. I opened a Rubbermaid storage bin and I immediately knew something wasnt right. I could smell mold. Strong. And when I started reaching in for some of the key pictures I knew were in there, many of the photos were fused together, like they were glued. They couldnt be separated and some practically came apart in my hands. They were destroyed. About 25 of those large protraits in cardbord holders were lost. Yeah, there was my college graduation and some other portraits I and my brother sat for. Then there were some pictures from my wedding. Gone too.

That wasnt even the worst. There were dozens of cardboard holders with photos of my parents, their friends and some of their relatives too. I remembered the pictures...they're were people at dinner at the lake, or they were having a fun night out on the town. Or they were all caught at a big table at a resort and I always love to see my old relatives looking so young and free..But I opened them and the mold must have destroyed them.

I was crushed. I held them in my hand and saw there was no way I knew to rescue them. Gone too were my grandparents at some sort of lodge event. Worse than that, I lost the family portrait set of my grandmother's family when she was only two yearsold--before arriving in the United States at the start of the last century!

WhenI put that Rubbemaid filled with picutres off to the side of the closet, I didnt consider the possibility that water damage from a small leak would ruin those wonderful photos. I took the all the folders and tried to see what I could do. Even the old reliable of a hair dryer wouldnt split them apart and I could not recapture those signature, historical family portraits.

So I'm left with a number of different kinds of feelings. I'm angry that these pictures were ruined on my watcgh. Im terribly saddened that these photos are gone and I can't get them back. I'm a little sheepish for falling into the exact trap thart Ive been telling people for all this time to avoid.
So, I'll say it once again, this time from deep within personal experience--please don't let your important photos be detroyed or fade away. Digitize them and save them to DVD so they can last 50 years or more. You wont regret it.