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For years we stored old photos in suitcases; my parents, as well as ours, when we moved from the old homestead we gave those suitcases to our children.
I took over 10,000 old photos my parents and I had going back over 100 years and sent them to VDOCS for scanning. I had two of those copy machine paper boxes completely full of them.
VDOCS scans each one and the most economical way is for you to pre-sort them by size: all the 5X7 in bundles, all the 4X6 in bundles, etc...that way VDOCS just feeds the bundles into a batch scanner. I hired a few kids in the neighborhoods to take all the photos and sort them into same size bundles. Then I shipped the photos to VDOCS. I got back 9 DVDs, over 40 gigabytes with all the photos scanned.
Then I sorted the photos categorically (family, vacations, employment, education related, rock concerts, outdoors, vehicles, parents, etc) in folders on my computer. (And I back these photos up to other hard drives.)
Also, I make these photo folders available to Google photos and they get uploaded to Google for free.
I have all of my parents photo albums plus my own. All are organized by date and labeled as to who and where. At one time I thought I would split them into 3 sets for each of my parents' 3 grandkids. Never got around to it. The albums all fit in 2 large plastic tubs. Then I also have some in frames (collages that my parents made plus a bunch of portraits representing as many members of the family that I had pictures of. They used to hang in my upstairs hallway two houses ago. My current house doesn't have enough wall space so they are in 2 boxes. I hope my son doesn't throw them all away.
four years ago we got enough of the relatives together to "see the slides".
as they were viewed we decided who gets that one, and which ones should
be preserved otherwise. the actual photographs were divided among the
families. the hardest part was finding a working slide projector.
I dumped 3 boxes in the trash. They were in my garage for 8 years...picture of people I didn't even know and no one in the family wanted them so out they went. I got tired of being the "keeper" of the photos and lugging them around every time I moved.
four years ago we got enough of the relatives together to "see the slides".
as they were viewed we decided who gets that one, and which ones should
be preserved otherwise. the actual photographs were divided among the
families. the hardest part was finding a working slide projector.
Slides can be scanned too. My dad had about 1000 Kodachrome slides from the 1950s through the early 1970s. I used a Nikon slide scanner at my university to scan them in 50 slide batches. Each slide took like a minute to scan. very slow but VERY high quality.
Consider sending your slides out for scanning. You just can't beat having nice JPGs of all your old photos. Easy to view, email, organize, and share.
Interesting to know about vdocs, did you send the photos all at once or in different groups? Any worries about the photos getting lost in shipment?
Sent them all at once...I probably sent them in a way to reduce the risk of being lost...this was ten or so years ago.
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