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.
This is all I have left to scan. I bundled each album into a stack with a rubber band and put them in a storage boxes. I am down to the last one. Then I:- 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.
Videos - Over the years we had taped the kids, some special occasions and 'documented' some of our trips (like an in flight air-refueling of a F-16 Thunderbirds from a the KC-10).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.
If you want to buy a new one, they are about $300 at Best Buy:
It took about a month to get them all copied over to DVDs. Pam took on that project. What a relief when that was done.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.
Good job! That's what I did, and it took me 6 mths to do it. I took a page a time not individually. If you need them you can do a crop later. We'll see you down the road.
ReplyDeleteOops, I should have waited 'til Kris was done singing - clicking on comments cut him off :(
ReplyDeleteI have been piddling at the photo-digitizing thing, and the cassette tape digitizing thing, for years, when the road brings me to where they are and I get a chance. I wish I could have done it before I moved into my first rv in 95 but I hadn't even heard of scanners then and I was running windows 3.1! It's amazing how much stuff we can squeeze into a computer now.
What a job.
ReplyDeleteWe used a PanDigital photo scanner that stores the pictures on a tiny SD disk that you can put into a digital photo frame or backup on your computer. We backed ours up on a Western Digital external drive. Now all our photos are stored on this tiny drive and no more boxes, or photo albums to carry around. It has worked out great!
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