One of the most time consuming activies in this who process what been: scanning photos
We probably accumulated 25 photo albums over the last 30 years: What to do with all the photographs?
Then there were about 1700 35 mm slides. And maybe 15 VHS videos. ---All those will never fit into an RV!
Here's what we did:
Photos - we sucked it up and scanned thousands of pictures. That has taken months! We could find an online company and ship them off but it is fairly costly.
![](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_esGgBR9kbAw/SYRH_XjbMII/AAAAAAAAEGA/WFBJ-Lzcedk/s320/Photo+Albums.jpg)
![](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_esGgBR9kbAw/SYRAmqm_zyI/AAAAAAAAEF4/Jdo-0Le0WEQ/s320/2009+0131.jpg)
- Take them one at a time,
- Put them face down on my HP Photosmart C8180 All-in-One Printer/Scanner/Copier
- Wait 45 seconds for the scanning
- Get another photo
- Do it again
- And again
- And
35 mm slides - we have been storing boxes of slides. We looked through hundreds and hundreds, sorted through them and kept the ones that had people in them.
(We kept a few 'place shots'.)
That reduced it down to about 700 slides. Then we took them to Costco and had them copy them to CD's. That was a little costly too, but we got it done.
![](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_esGgBR9kbAw/SYRINMXMsGI/AAAAAAAAEGI/NHj8VVJ38y4/s320/Photo+CDs.jpg)
We bought a machine that take the VHS tape and allows you to convert it to a DVD. Ours looks like this and is a couple of years old.
![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_esGgBR9kbAw/SYBVQZNy-ZI/AAAAAAAAEFI/abS_21z6wuM/s320/VHS+DVD.jpg)
If you want to buy a new one, they are about $300 at Best Buy:
![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_esGgBR9kbAw/SYBdRTJGOqI/AAAAAAAAEFQ/9LV99PxnTVc/s320/VHS+converter.jpg)
Other people may use a different strategy - but that has been our approach. If I had it to do over again I would have gotten a scanner that has a document feeder so I could do taxes and other papers more quickly.