Family Photos - Priceless Memories at Risk

Family photo collections contain priceless images that bring back vivid memories of family joys, milestones, trips, and other moments deemed worth preserving.

With changes in technology, the "bad news" is that many families now have combinations of photos in older acidic and deteriorating albums, loose photos and transparencies in multiple boxes, and a ton of digital images on a hard drive or CD. This mix of formats is enough to lead many of us to inaction, which places many of these family photo images at risk.

The "good news" is that these very same advances in technology have created the means to easily consolidate, organize, and more broadly share your priceless family photo images.

Clearly a well organized digital image library of family photos provides the greatest opportunity to take advantage of online services and software that can easily and inexpensively create slide shows, photo books, collages, image gift items, and a dozen other satisfying ways to share family photo memories.

As a first step to consolidating older prints or slides into a digital image library, it is necessary for someone to scan the print or slide. Many families hold the view that this is something they should do at home. They then become challenged with the lack of technical expertise, or by not being able to find the time necessary to get organized and to actually complete the scans.

It is clearly easier to have someone perform the scans for you, and there are well established services that will complete your scans for you with little preparation required on your part. A little culling of bad or duplicate prints can save you some money, but you can simply send a shoebox without any sorting or culling. The cost of these services is very reasonable when you consider the benefits of preserving your priceless family memories and the value of being able to creatively use the digitized images in a multitude of image projects in the future. The cost of having your scans done professionally is very inexpensive when considered against the potentially high cost of doing nothing.

To get started, it is not necessary to send your entire collection to be scanned. Although volume discounting is available, it may actually be easier to get your head around sending a few old prints to a professional scanning company to satisfy yourself about the level of service, the quality of scans, and the reasonableness of pricing. To better understand the services and pricing of a couple of the major scanning services, visit ScanDigital and ScanCafe.

It is likely that once you get started, momentum will build. I am confident that once you have begun to create a consolidated family photo digital image library, you will see a range of expanded sharing possibilities that will excite you.

For more information about organizing, preserving, and sharing family photos, visit http://www.localarchiver.com/.