*Giveaway closed, Kelli you are the winner! I will be emailing you soon. Thank you everyone for entering the giveaway.
I remember as a young girl rummaging through a large tub of photos and memorabilia my grandmother had. I pulled this box out often and carefully examined each picture and document. As I write this I can see many of these images flashing through my mind. My favorites stuck with me after looking at them so much.
(I was always fascinated with pictures of my grandparents when they were younger. Cute couple. I wonder what my grandmother was thinking in this photo. After 55 years of marriage she still looks at him like that.)
While I still enjoy rummaging through old photos I am currently in awe of the digital age. In 2003 I bought my first digital camera and I haven’t looked back. While I still flip through old photos I love the ease of being able to pull up a slide show on the Mac, putting on some music and enjoying a trip down memory lane.
Recently I went through a bunch of my photos and realized how many I had that I didn’t really need. Some photos were duplicates, bad shots or of course a few that were taken with someones finger blocking the view. I had photos that I had taken when I was younger and apparently I would shoot tons of photos of one person doing something random. Did I really need 20 pictures of essentially the same shot? Um, no! So I picked my favorite.
(I know your loving that bee hive hairdo right! My mom is the tall blond. My aunt looks like she’s getting ready to whack my uncle across the head. He’s probably poking her in the back so I’m sure he deserves what is coming to him. )
I tackled my box of photos and purged all of the bad photos and duplicates. I now have a shoebox size container of photos and I labeled an envelope with each family members name to store the 8×10′s I have. I have a few old albums that have been passed down to me as well. The photos are all holding up pretty well but there are a few that are really showing their age.
(My Mom and I. Sorry for showing off the perm, Mom!)
I want to preserve these memories. What if the unthinkable happened? Photos are irreplaceable. I would love to be able to share all of these photos with the family but it would be to expensive to make enough copies of them all.
The answer is simple, SCAN those photos! I sent in a batch of photos to iPreserve to have them scanned like I did with my magazine pages and I was so happy with the results! I love the fact that I can pull up these photos anytime I like and best of all they will be preserved forever! No more yellowing, tearing or fading. I can post them to my Shutterfly account and let my family browse through them as well then print what they want. Works for me!
(Me and my General Lee big wheel. Yes, I did and still do love the Dukes of Hazzard.)
Thanks for taking this little trip down memory lane with me. Fun wasn’t it?
Now I want you to be able to take a trip like this on your own. iPreserve has offered one of my lucky readers a $50 gift certificate to scan your photos, too. That equals out to 100 pictures!
You can win two ways during this giveaway:
1. Leave a comment letting me know how you organize (or don’t organize) your photos.
2. Subscribe if you don’t already, and then leave a second comment telling me you did so.
You have until midnight, Tuesday, June 16th to enter.
A winner will be announced Wednesday, June 17th.
Remember there will be one new giveaway every Wednesday during the months of June and July! Come back for the next chance to win. Have a great summer everyone!
{ 29 comments… read them below or add one }
I have many photo boxes filled with pictures and some albums as well. I don’t even know where to begin with them. The digital pictures are more organized by event and this past year we have started filing them by month.
I am an organizer, but for the past 7 years I have been storing printed photos in a plastic, under the bed storage bin in a less than organized manner. I am in serious need of discarding some photos that are of poor quality – but grew up in a home where photos were treasured and none were to be thrown out (even the bad). So, lots of photo “baggage” is standard at my house. I have just moved and the box is out in my guest room floor now for better organizing this summer!! Now that I have a digital camera, new photos are stored on my hard drive in organized folders.
I have tons of pictures! When the kids were small, I would meticulously scrapbook and create lovely books. Fast forward a few years later, to a life with no spare time, and boxes full of pictures waiting to go to an album, labeled with month and year…but not time to leave the box. I now have tons of digital pictures stored on a couple computers, and love the ease of posting to FB or the blog. I would love to have the older photos scanned to the computer, so the kids could have easy access to past memories.
I just subscribed! Looking forward to going through all of the archives for organizing ideas!
Unfortunately, all of my photos are in photo boxes right now, with no rhyme or reason to how they are organized :-(
I am a subscriber now!
I have 2 large drawers full of old pics. Your ideas sound great–just to attack it now! Thanks for the encouragement!
I subscribed on Google Reader!
I have boxes of old pictures and negatives that I’d love to convert. I want to make photo books while I still have family members who can help identify the people in the pictures.
I’m a subscriber!!
I have great intentions of putting all my pics on CD’s soon. Great post!!
I just subscibed with Google. : )
All my digitals are on a flash drive, but totally unoganized there. Plus, I’ve uploaded the all to snapfish – in case anything should ever happen to my precious flash drive. But, I have hundreds of paper photos too that need to be gone through and preserved!!
I have all my digital photos stored on an external hard drive. Saved in Yearly folders with another folder inside for each month. My physical photos, thanks to my mother, are all in nice photo albums but I’d love to get them scanned and preserved digitally!!
I subscribe via google reader! I LOVE this blog!
We are in the midst of a move right now and all of my photos are in albums (most of them) or boxes. The plan post-move is to go through ALL of them, scan them, and upload them to flickr and Shutterfly. The best among them will be put in Shutterfly albums, which are decidedly less bulky than the old albums!
And – I already subscribe to your blog through my google reader!
All of my old “film” photos are in sleeve albums. The problem is all of our digital pics are still in the computer and not organized very well at all. My husband has done an okay job of organizing by date, but it doesn’t make it easy to find some random photo that your are not sure when it was taken! I scrapbook – so I would love to begin picking out the most meaningful photos and scrapbook them, but I don’t really know what to do with the rest.
I subscribe too!
My photos are in albums and in a photo-holding-organizing-display tray thingy I got as a gift. I didn’t think I would like it, but kept it anyway and finally put all my loose photos into it. I think I do like it. Lots of dividers for nice neat stacks and then the little “lid” for each compartment has a photo holder so you can put a picture showing what category is in that stack.
I’d still love to scan them and then get rid of most of them.
Thanks!
Thanks for a very thought-provoking post. This is one of those “projects” I keep procrastinating. My photos are scattered all about and I know I need to digitize most of them. It would make it much easier to pull up what I need instead of sifting through unorganized boxes. The iPreserve service sounds really great. I would LOVE a chance to try them out!
For future posts, maybe you could share how you organize your photos now that you have them in digital format (folders, events, etc.). That’s another challenge for me.
Thanks!
Look for a future post on organizing photos for sure!
My current (last 4 years) photos are all digital, so they’re quite organized. I put “photos” on my calendar once a month and download, upload, sort folders, and backup to a flash drive to be sure everything is organized.
I still have LOTS of old childhood pictures, in a storage box, that I would love to have scanned.
My digital photos are mostly in a directory with sub folders. My physical photos are in a big heavy wood box.
Thanks!
Jen
Oh – also – I already subscribe! :)
Thanks for this tip! I’m checking out the iPreserve site right now!!
I have several methods of photo madness. :) I have albums, boxes and scrapbooks. But I’d love to get my old ones scanned – having digital pics is soooo nice!
I’m currently on the NOT very organized side…I have a couple of photo boxes and then several piles waiting to be scrapped…the rest are with Mom in boxes at her house. Thanks for the giveaway!
I’m a subscriber!
I seriously need to organize my photos better. Some are in a storage box. Some are on my computer. Some are on the flash drive. My goal for the summer is to organize them in some way so I can actually enjoy them! I have tons of old, old family photos that I would love to scan and preserve.
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