digitalize all the family photos

I received all of the photos/scans that I sent out last week. The only thing left are those photos in albums that don’t come out. Now I need to back up and store—the easy jobs.

I packaged up all of the rest of the photos that I want scanned (except for my wedding photos)and they will be on their way tomorrow. The only things I would have left to scan are those things that are in albums and will require hand scanning-and I’ve done a lot of those already.

The first batch of slides and photos that I sent to scancafe.com are complete. I’ve reviewed them and am now waiting for them to be returned to me. I know need to gather up the rest to send to scanmyphotos.com. Hopefully in the next few weeks I can get that accomplished. It was really cool to see the scan of slides-most of which I hadn’t seen for over 20 years, some over 40 years. Found a couple really cute ones from when I was a toddler.

I just received an email telling me that my photos are online for my review. You get to review all of them and only have to chose 50% of them. I can’t wait to see them. They are over 30 years old, from when I lived in Versailles and traveled around Europe.

I’ve packed up and shipped all of my slides and the photos I had from when I lived in Europe. I sent the Scancafe.com which has the best price for scanning slide. They also do color correction which is why I sent my photos from Europe since they are over 30 years old. I now have to get the rest of my photos together and send them to Scanmyphotos.com which seems to have the best price for straight print scans. I’m also going to get my wedding video and another video we made for my mom’s 75th birthday. I’m going to try to do that this week.

I started to collect my photos and slides that I took when I lived in France during college. I must have over 500 slides and 300 photos. I also found some slides from when I was a toddler that my parents had. I still have a lot more to go through but this is the start. I forgot how many great photos I had and I have not way to look at them (slides in particular)

I’ve researched online companies that will scan and digitize photos and slides. ScanMyPhotos.com is in southern CA and is pretty cost effective for photos. ScanCafe.com is much more reasonable for slides-of which I have many. Now to collect the photos and get them sent out. I also have many family photos that are stuck into albums that I can’t get out so I have to hand scan the pages and then crop, rename and color. I did several for my mom for Christmas but her 90th birthday is in October and I’m trying to figure out what I will for that.

I need a better way of organizing!

It’s really cool to hand a DVD to my family members with the photos of our beloved ones!

I inherited all the papers, photos and memorabilia from both sides of the family a few years ago. Both my parents were only children and I’ve only got one brother, so there are not a bunch of uncles and aunts and cousins to deal with!
I’ve been gradually organizing all this and scanning the important documents and photos. So far, I’ve created my own chart formats on Excel and gotten the family tree data all charted. I’ve done additional research to fill in a few gaps and have begun to create profiles and timelines for the folks that are significant.
As for the photos, I’ve scanned some, but have had to make some serious judgements about what’s significant – or just plain good versus bad photography – to include in the “final” version. Photo Shop can help restore some of these.
I’ve decided the easiest organization for me is simply chronological with cross references to people and/or events and places on their profiles and timelines as seems significant.
But this will be a long term project that I estimate will take about five years.
And then …. what do I do with the information? I’ve got no kids myself and my brother has only one son, but I’d guess it should eventually go to him.
And how much of the original material should be kept? The idea here is to try to reduce the sheer volume of “stuff”, but I’m a bit concerned that something could happen to the digital files in the future.
As for posting it on line, I’m wondering if this is worthwhile. Who would be interested? Any suggestions?