Your Photos Play a Pivotal Role in Your Family's History

The importance of having one’s photos scanned can be seen in many ways. In this blog, we’ve often discussed the great fear of losing your pictures to natural deterioration or worse, damage from fire or flood or some way other than normal.

People have told me sad stories of photos missing after construction in their basements or attics—not because water or dust impacted them, but because they were inadvertently loaded with other stuff in the dumpster outside the house and carted away as trash. One of the things I think about when I see news footage of a fire or a flood is that I hope the owners had their pictures somewhere else or were smart enough to have them scanned already.

Any new photos are likely to be in digital form already so they aren’t the problem. The issue is protecting the ones that are absolutely unique and nearing the end of their usefulness. We recently did a project for a customer who had taped row after row after row of tiny Polaroid pictures onto a sheet and had them labeled separately and taped to the photo. They were in a smoky plastic covering so we couldn’t scan them in the plastic. We took the taped pictures out and photographed it for reference. Then, one by one, we cut the photos out so we could scan them and had a photographic guide indicating which caption went with each photo. An arduous task for sure, but those kind of old, tiny black and whites are the ones I think are most important—they don’t have two or three duplicates and everyone in the room wasn’t taking the same pictures. They come from a time when relatively few had a camera so the pictures were largely one of a kind.

Those little pictures were scanned, improved and will now last for half a century or more on DVD and the family can make another collage of the same photos or even have prints of the improved-quality scans and put them together again. It’s great when you can actually see your grandmother’s parents, smiling as if it wasn’t the 1930s.

It’s equally, if not more important for occasions that aren’t so happy. A couple that divorced not long ago had years of photos taken of them and their three children. They were like many families—every signature moment was photographed. But the boxes where they were stored had to reside in one house or the other. Each one was reluctant to part with the photos that represented the moments they wished to keep.

So they decided to have the photos scanned. By doing so, they each received a DVD of their family collection and each could refer to their kids or their childhood memories and even to their divorced spouse. Their entire collection was duplicated—videos too. It turned out to be a good solution to a bad problem.

Scanning photos continues to play a pivotal role in preserving a family’s history. For good times and bad times alike, keeping your life’s imagery intact and preserved will one day be more meaningful than anything else you can touch.

Joe Allen
The Scan Zone