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Overwhelmed going through family photographs

Chilcotin

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DH and I have spent considerable time going through envelopes and envelopes of family photographs. We only had one DD but we traveled frequently and took many photos. We got rid of all the scenery and blurry pictures but we still have so many pictures. We also have about 20 photo albums that are not acid free and some of those pictures are not in good shape. Do you keep your negatives?

We bought some photo acid free boxes at Michaels and have sorted them that way for now. Any suggestions on what you do with all your pictures.

With digital cameras this problem will not exist much longer and for that I am thankful.
 

LUVourMarriotts

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I would suggest converting them to digital images via a photo scanner. You can do this at your house with a multifunction printer/scanner or some big box stores have this service to do for you.
 

ronparise

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I would suggest converting them to digital images via a photo scanner. You can do this at your house with a multifunction printer/scanner or some big box stores have this service to do for you.

my thought exactly. but keep a copy in the cloud and a copy on a separate drive in a safe place
 

SMHarman

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Scan Cafe is an excellent digital conversion service. If you have negatives to convert from. Even better. You can send them boxes, photos on albums all sorts. They work with what you got.

They give you a cloud and DVD copy. They also do basic image clean up and offer enhanced clean up for a fee.

The cloud and portable HDD in someone elses home the office is a good plan.
 

WinniWoman

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My husband scans everything. And little by little he makes DVD's with music to them. Then, he discards the photos.
 

jimf41

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If you've got a few hundred slides/negatives take them to a good scan service and pay for the best resolution. If you have several thousand like I did I recommend getting a commercial grade slide/negative scanner and doing it yourself. The good ones go for $1000- $2000 but if you figure the cost of getting them scanned at about $.50 each for a quality scan you'll save money if you have enough items to scan.

I've scanned about 6000 so far and about 1500 to go. I paid $1100 for the scanner and it's going for about $500 on EBay used. If the math works having your own scanner is the route to go.
 

SMHarman

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If you've got a few hundred slides/negatives take them to a good scan service and pay for the best resolution. If you have several thousand like I did I recommend getting a commercial grade slide/negative scanner and doing it yourself. The good ones go for $1000- $2000 but if you figure the cost of getting them scanned at about $.50 each for a quality scan you'll save money if you have enough items to scan.

I've scanned about 6000 so far and about 1500 to go. I paid $1100 for the scanner and it's going for about $500 on EBay used. If the math works having your own scanner is the route to go.
If your time is free.
Not to sound too much like an ad for scan cafe but 22c a scan is a steal at 3000 dpi.

Http://www.scancafe.com/pricing
And you can toss the bad scans and not pay for that work.

I bought the Canon FS4000 scanner. Not done much with it. Will do my own APS. Far morr automated.
 

jimf41

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Scan cafe's price of 22c sounds great till you add it up and then know what you are giving them. It's 29c each when you add tax & shipping on a minimum of 500 pics. That's not really expensive considering they do all the work. If you have 7500+ like I do it gets really expensive, $2500 expensive and you do not get to return the ones you want for that price.

Price was not the only factor that drove me to buy a good scanner. What I did not like about any of scan companies is that they keep copies of the images. They even advertise this as a benefit. I'm a little OCD about posting pictures of my family and friends on the internet and I'm not going to give someone else the ability to do it.
 

dreamin

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Timely subject

I too am sorting through photographs. My aunt, who has long passed, and my still-alert 96 year old mother-in-law were both big travellers. I have several boxes of photo albums, mainly of their trips. And the truth is.....no one is interested in them. Family members aren't interested in even looking at them and they definitely aren't interested in taking them to their home. They aren't even interested in any of the family or historical photos. So I will be going through the process of keeping the occasional photo of the two individuals but the remainder will be going into the garbage. I feel that travel photos are only really meaningful to the people who were there.

I also have my family photo albums and some scrapbooking albums and photobooks I created. This format encourages you to be selective in the number of photos that will be used in the project. Those I hope will have some value to my children. This year some of the photos were used to create a slide presentation that was shown at my son's wedding. My travel photos for the past 5 years have been incorporated into a travel blog which is stored on a compact external hard drive. I did this mainly to share with family and friends while I am on a journey and they enjoy following along. I am keenly interested in photography so I only select the best photos that tell my story. I hope to be able to review the blogs as I age and can't travel anymore but I'm sure when I'm gone no one will look at them and the hard drive will end up in one of my children's storage areas. The travel journal site I recommend is findpenguins.com

My feeling is we take far too many photos, particularly in this digital age. I already worry about all of my things that my children will have to deal with when I'm gone. I plan to not burden them with boxes of printed photos or overwhelm them with digitalized versions. This has been my personal experience but I'm sure other families have different views and perhaps will place a higher value on the thousands of photos that were kept for them.
 

pwrshift

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I had some 8mm movie films converted to digital a few years ago by two different companies. One company was very poor...looked like they just put the films on a cheap 8mm projector and shot them with a camcorder as you could hear the sound on the digital cobnversion. The other company obviously had better equipment. Both were very expensive, but to me they were almost priceless. So if you use an outside service try them out before you take a chance on a big run of photos.

I'm facing a similar problem with family VHS films I made (remember VHS?) and currently getting them all together to have them converted to mp4 digital format. I know tape to digital won't work well as tape is LO res compared to today's standards, but again, old photos and films are priceless.

As my kids get older they seem to have more interest in them...and their kids are even more interested in them, which makes it all more worthwhile.

Brian
 
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