“Scan Your Old Photos Now” by Joan Y. Edwards

You’ve heard of people losing their memories.

You’ve heard of people disappearing.

I was scanning old pictures to send to my nephew for the Celebration of my sister, Judith’s Life. Some of the people and items in the pictures are disappearing. It’s as if these photos can’t remember what was put on them many moons ago. It’s the materials they used to process these pictures in the 1940s that’s causing them to deteriorate. Through the years, Kodak and other film processors have learned through experience and research how to make pictures better preserved.

If you have photos from earlier than 1950, I’d suggest that you scan them at 600 pixel resolution. If the pictures are in good shape, probably 300 pixels in resolution will be okay. Most of the ones that I have after 1950, are okay. Everyone is still clear in the pictures.  If you still have the negatives, you can get them developed. But if you don’t have the negatives, my advice is to scan them. You can scan them yourself, or pay someone to do it for you. I had a huge amount of slides, over 1000 of them. I had DigMyPics.com to do them. I liked their quality and timeliness. There are others cheaper and some more expensive. You will figure out the best plan for you. Of course, today’s pictures are almost all taken with digital cameras.

I’ll show you what I mean about the people and items disappearing:

My purpose in writing this blog is so that you will search out your old pictures. You might get ideas for a story or two there. You can use pictures as props for your stories. You might enjoy going down memory road. You can share your pictures in many ways.

You can upload your photos to Shutterfly or Facebook. You can also get a free Dropbox account. Put a folder on your computer. Fill it with pictures for all of your family and/or friends to see. Send them a link, and they can see them and download them to their computer: http://www.dropbox.com

If both of you have a Dropbox account, you can share the folder and it will stay in both accounts.

I just sent my nephew a link to the Dropbox folder on my computer with 175 pictures of my sister and our family in it. He said he was able to download the pictures. That’s a lot quicker than sending separate emails with 2 or 3 photos each. It saved both of us a bunch of time.

You can also save manuscripts on your computer. Copy and save them into a folder. Copy and paste this folder into Dropbox folder on your computer. Then if you go out-of-town or don’t have access to your computer, but you have access to another computer, you can work on your manuscript, save it and the revised version will be there in your Dropbox folder when you get back home. Incredible.

Other people can only see the folder with a link that you send them. However, you can see all the folders in your Dropbox. If you have one word file you want to share, you have to put it in a folder and share the folder on the Dropbox.

Enjoy your old pictures. Take some new pictures. Do something fun to celebrate your life today. I’m glad you parents had you. You are a blessing.

Thanks for reading my blog. Please leave a comment.

Never Give Up
Joan Y. Edwards