I wrote recently (see here and here) about sorting my old photographs and taking them to be digitized. I have them back now, and I’m so glad I got this project done! The seven (or more) boxes of snapshots, and framed photos and memorabilia are now on one small flash drive. And there are back-ups of this flash drive on my laptop and in the cloud.
My husband and I have kept a couple of boxes of the most meaningful framed photos and plaques, but the rest of the physical snapshots and memorabilia went in the trash. We only kept what we might possibly display in the future. Still, I can look any of the images any time I want.
Kerri of Enjoy Photo Organizing in Overland Park, Kansas, did an amazing job. I gave her my photographs roughly sorted by year, plus other photographs (many of which were duplicate prints) from albums that I or other relatives assembled through the years. Kerri sorted through all my snapshots, eliminated the duplicates, put them in better chronological order than I had, scanned them, and organized them into dated folders on the flash drive. She also put subsets of the photographs into themed “collections” so that I can peruse those. There’s a bit of clean-up needed, but Kerri’s work was accurate enough that I suspect she now knows my family’s history as well as I do!
Here’s an image that Kerri put in the folder of pictures of my parents that I didn’t even know I had. This photo is from December 1955, and it shows my mother pregnant with me. She is playing with my parents’ first dog Punky.
(How do I know this was the Christmas she was pregnant with me? Because she wore this maternity top in all her later pregnancies. Plus, they gave Punky away in 1956, shortly after I was born because Punky didn’t deal well with a baby.)
Using the digital images is so much easier than digging out albums from boxes or sifting through envelopes of loose snapshots. I can find what I want to look at in a few minutes.
So far, I haven’t taken Kerri up on her proposal to create photo books of various events or individuals or themes. My goal is to minimize space, not create more items to store. But with the images now digitized, creating books in the future would be easy. And someday I might do it.
Unfortunately, I found more pictures after I took the seven boxes to Enjoy Photo Organizing. My daughter’s box of memorabilia had photos in it. My husband had a couple of forgotten albums stashed in a drawer. I found my Hallmark 25th anniversary album in the same drawer. So despite my best efforts, I still don’t have everything in a digital format. But I’m in much better shape than I was.
I really believe digitization is the wave of the future for memorabilia. Yes, there is something to be said for the tactile sense of paging through an album or looking at certain portraits on a daily basis. But when my toddler granddaughter visited recently, she sat on my lap while we spent as long as her attention span permitted watching our Aura digital picture frame. Most of the photos on that frame are of her. As each photo appeared, I told her the story of what she was doing in the picture. And every time she saw her mother’s image on the frame, she ran across the room to hug Mommy. So digitized images can still be vehicles for story-telling and memory-building.
And just like with the Aura frame, I can now scroll through my digitized snapshots on my laptop. When my granddaughter gets a bit older, I can create a slideshow of her mother’s childhood and tell my granddaughter the stories from when her mother was her age.
I am very pleased with the results of my photo digitization project and with the work Enjoy Photo Organizing did. Maybe someday I’ll get the rest of my pictures digitized. But for now, I am moving on to other downsizing projects. My basement is looking a bit more bare, but there is a long way to go.
What do you enjoy most about your photographs?
