Digitizing Photos to Preserve Your Memories

Digitizing photos helps you to finally have all of your photos organized in one place!

If you're like the average American, you probably have photographs in several forms such as prints, negatives, slides, and digital photo files on CDs or your computer.

Unfortunately, all photographs, whether hard-copy or digital file, will degrade and deteriorate over time. Despite this, I do recommend digitizing photos as a way to organize them, share them, and even edit them without damaging the originals.

The wave of the future is digitizing photos. As many people now own digital cameras, photos are relatively easy to share via email or image sharing websites. The problem is preserving and sharing older photos that haven't been converted into digital images yet.

Let's get working on digitizing your photo collection!

First...

Get as many of your prints, negatives, and slides together as possible.

Next...

Start with the negatives and slides:

• If you have negatives in sleeves or old film roll jars, you can oftentimes take them into a photo processing store and ask them to convert the images to digital format on a CD or DVD, although that can be expensive if you have a lot of old negatives.
• Another option is convert your negatives into digital files with a Slide and Negative Converter. It's worth doing to prevent losing those images forever to deterioration. Then upload the images to your computer and organize into folders.

Now for the photo prints:

• This process can be very time-consuming, so set aside some time that you can dedicate to organize and digitize photos. Look for photos stored in shoe boxes, bins, drawers, frames, and photo albums and gather them all together.
• Then you will need a scanner and scanning and photo editing software on your computer. Next you will scan each photo, re-size it if necessary, and save it on your computer. There are several different file types for savings images, but the most common on is as a .jpg For example, the file name could be: trip to Disneyland.jpg
• If you have photos stuck in an album, sometimes they can be removed relatively easily. If not, there are adhesive removers you can purchase to remove the photos without damaging them. If you still aren't able to remove the photos from the page, either scan the entire page and crop the photo in your computer software, or go to a copy store like Kinko's and have them scan the page and burn it to a CD or save to a USB drive. Then upload the images onto your computer and organize into folders.

Next...

Once you have digital copies of all of your images, you need to learn about Photo Backup for the digital files.

Then make sure to learn about Safe Photo Storage.

Don't skip the above steps! You don't want to lose all of the time you just put into digitizing your photos by not having a good backup.