Holiday Gift Ideas for Family Photo Sharing

As in holiday seasons past, many of us will struggle with finding "the perfect gift(s)". This is often difficult and many of us will default to spending money on a gift that someone does not really need.

Here are a few ideas for unique gifts that can be long remembered and perhaps even treasured. The gifts relate to helping others maintain and share their special family photos.

The two large and reputable online professional scanning services, ScanCafe and ScanDigital, both offer gift cards for their services. ScanCafe also offers a pre-paid gift box that the recipient simply fills with photos, slides, and negatives. What comes back is a collection of digital scan files and the originals.

The collection of scanned images can then be duplicated and shared with an entire extended family. With these digital files, each family member can add the scans to their own photo collection and creatively use the images in a broad range of their own projects.

You may be running out of preparation time to assembly images for a special photo book for the holidays. However, you could describe a photo book project you will commit to as a gift. For ideas and a sense for the process, visit Picaboo, Snapfish.com by HP , or Kodak Gallery. Photo book products at each are impressive. I believe Picaboo leads the pack with its range of themes, templates, and creative ideas to be found at its website.

If you have a special image that you would like to present framed, it is not too late to upload a scanned image to one of the major online printers and to order a ready-made frame from the likes of Dick Blick Art Materials. I suggest that you look at Nielsen Bainbridge Artcare metal ready-made frames at Blick. These are museum quality, attractive, reasonably priced, and come with everything you need to impressively frame a print (except for a bit of photo safe tape to attach the print to the mat).

For more family photo organization, preservation, and sharing suggestions, visit LocalArchiver.com.

Family Photo Organizing and The Holiday Season

In past posts, I have suggested that it becomes much easier to organize and share family photos when older print images are scanned into a digital format.

I have also suggested that many family members often have their favorite photos held captive by another family member who somehow wound up with albums or boxes of prints when someone moved or passed away. Perhaps the other family member has good intentions and plans to scan and share the images someday, but has not found the time.

What better time than the holidays to talk about sharing photos. Some of the largest and most encompassing extended family gatherings take place over the holiday season. Additionally, other family members are typically somewhat nostalgic, in a sharing mood, and of good cheer during holiday gatherings.

Perhaps you can recruit some other family members who would be happy to take part in a project to consolidate a family photo collection by converting it to digital format. Perhaps some family members would be happy to provide some funding to have older prints scanned professionally for easier and broader sharing.

If available older prints are collected and scanned, contributing family members could have originals returned and other interested family members could each have a consolidated digital collection on CD or DVD. If you think your extended family might want to use a professional scanning service, check out ScanDigital and ScanCafe, two of the largest.

Who knows where such a project could lead? Perhaps some family members would carry the project further and expand it into a genealogy project or develop an extended family online share site.

For more ideas on organizing, preserving, and sharing family photos, visit LocalArchiver.com.