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.