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.