Our big remodelling task isn’t anywhere close to done (it just began this week, and Sherry’s sharing glimpses over on Instagram in stories) but I’ve already started another project that I have actually wished to tackle for years: digitizing all of our old images!
It’s arguably less exciting than our restoration, but I’m genuinely excited to tackle this long-overdue task. And because we’re not the only ones who struggle with picture clutter, I plan to record my process for anyone else who is also thinking about digitizing their pictures. So I’ll be testing out a couple of digitization approaches, and sharing suggestions along the way.
Why Digitize Our Old Pictures?
We have 3 primary goals for this digitization task:
1. Protect memories
We prepare to support our old, physical pictures using a cloud photo service (like Google Photos) so they will not be lost in the event of a house fire, natural catastrophe, or just getting lost or damaged throughout the years.
2. Maximize some storage space
Our puffy old albums take up a ton of area. They’re literally more than four times thicker than photobooks we have actually made from websites like Blurb. Transforming our older photos into slimmer photobooks (like our annual yearbooks) will make room for keeping a lot more games, other mementos, and many more future photobooks!
3. Pare down images
At the risk of sounding unsentimental, not every old photo deserves keeping. For instance, these pages below are devoted to photos of MY HIGH SCHOOL LAVA LAMP and some random neighborhood fireworks. We had a good laugh and all of them went right into the shredder.
We have actually likewise encountered lots of blurred, dark, duplicate, or just plain unimportant photos that should’ve been tossed long earlier. So we’re going through these albums the exact same method we may delete undesirable images from our phone’s electronic camera roll.
How We Are Digitizing Our Photos
Here’s where I’m doing a bit of experimenting! Sherry asked everyone on Instagram stories for ideas for doing this, and lots of good recommendations returned. Mainly a ton of ideas for the precise very same photo scanner, and a couple of techniques that people pointed out over and over. So I’m putting a few of the most frequently suggested items and techniques to the test, and I’ll share the advantages and disadvantages of every one.
They are:
* Our printer is still going strong after 7 years, but I linked the existing model offered because our specific model is no longer for sale
Sherry was inundated with requests for more info about our image digitization task, hence this post about my process and what I’m attempting so far. I’ll likewise do a follow-up post once I’m totally done, which will include my recommendations for the fastest, most inexpensive, simplest, and highest quality alternatives. I can currently inform there will not be a clear winner. Although that’s great– great deals of choices!
What We’re Making with Our Digitized Photos
When we’ve gotten everything digitized, we plan to do 3 things:
- Back them up on an external hard drive (this is also where we keep more recent household pictures)
- Store copies on the cloud (probably in Google Photos, where I can modify the date on my uploads (either individually or in batches) so they immediately get sorted chronologically).
- Print photobooks to change SOME of the albums that feel rewarding (some pictures will only exist digitally)
This part of the job is still a bit TBD due to the fact that I’m mostly focused on digitizing things first. I have actually currently started recreating a couple of albums as Blurb photobooks and it’s time-consuming, so we’ll see how many of them appear beneficial to make.
One Last Suggestion
I understand this post is a bit of a “tease” since I’m simply setting out our prepare for everybody who was requesting more details. But stay tuned since I’m humming along on this project and taking notes to put together into a substantial post full of information as well as pros & cons and rate distinctions for you. And if you’re munching at the bit to begin on your pictures, Miss Freddy came highly recommended to us by numerous you (that’s not an associated link). She’s a professional image organizer who has lots of complimentary tips on her Instagram, in addition to e-courses everything about scanning, organizing, and supporting your pictures.
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