Sunday, February 6, 2011

On a roll (of negatives that is)

So when my brother and I inherited all of my dads stuff, we did a great bit of purging, sorting and storing of the things we wanted to keep. But being the girl, my brother decided that I should have the great task of going through the pictures because "girls are good at that scrap-booking stuff", said to the mom with an almost 3 1/2 year old with one book from 0-6 months (but that is another project to come later!). Now, I looked into digitizing the pictures so that we could each have a complete collection, but my pocketbook quickly snapped itself shut at mention of the prices. Now in order to digitize these pictures by myself most efficiently, I took a look at what I had. Rolls upon rolls of negatives from the pictures in the envelopes. This cut my work-load in half. I took all the negatives to good old CVS (where I work) and began scanning them through our negative reader to save onto CD's. Now because I work there, I stood there and did the 2 hours of scanning and saving to CDs all at once and by myself. I don't know if the store would take the number of negatives I had to save them to CD for a customer. They would probably do one roll of negatives per CD, which would be really costly, but it takes a lot of time, so I understand why. It cost me $12 to digitally save over 550 images to CD. Now I don't have to scan any of those pictures on my quest to digitize the collection. Now for the rest of the photos, my plan is to sort them. If I don't know the people in the picture, gone. If it is pictures from vacation of scenery, buildings etc that don't have special memories to me, trash. If the photos can be cherished by someone else (a picture of my dad and his best friends) I want to send them the pictures. I only want to preserve the best pictures for the scanning portion of the project because, let's face it, it is a daunting-tedious-I-don't-want-to-do-it task. Maybe I will do that when my brother is home so we can set up our computers and scanners and do the project together. Until then, I can feel accomplished knowing that I don't have to scan those pictures or wonder what were on those negatives in the photo bin. Here is my collection of scanned negatives and a my son cheesing for the camera.

Doesn't look like as much work anymore!

My mom has always kept great scrapbooks for my brother and I, one for each year of our lives. I hope to get my act together and get some nice scrapbooks together for my son at some point. Luckily his pictures are saved and indexed and waiting for mommy to have a creative streak!

2 comments:

  1. Your mother has a scrapbook for every year of your lives?? Seriously OMGosh! What a women! I have boxes of completely disorganized photos of my 31, 30 and 23 year old daughters and now 2 year old granddaughter!! My girls have done some, but I would like to do some more, but I have never scrapbooked. I have the stuff, so I plan to get started this year. Great job by the way!

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  2. My mom is a very organized person. Two days of the year, Memorial Day and Labor Day she does the scrapbooks. She keeps all of her pictures organized by date in her boxes and empties them into the scrapbooks. She is really efficient at it, after doing it 24 years I'm not surprised! I'll take a picture of the album closet at her house. It is crazy!

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