If you are like me and my wife you have taken a ton of photos and videos over the years. Memories stored on film, video tapes, digital video tapes, floppy discs, etc. We have gone through at least two video cameras and I kept them to use as a playback device for those cherished recordings. Recently, we decided to break out the old video cameras and videos and take a look. Unfortunately neither of the players were working and I got an error messages on one. Now, there we were with a stack of various tapes with no way to play them. Facebook seems to read our minds or listen to our conversations because soon I was getting ads for companies that digitalize tapes for a fee. There are numerous companies that do this service and they take about any kind of media and put in on a DVD, thumb drive or send it to you in digital form. My wife and I collected 14 tapes of various sizes and sent them in. The company we used sent a box for shipping and barcodes to attach to each tape we sent in. It was very easy. A couple of weeks later we received our tapes back along with DVD for each tape and a thumb drive with all the footage. We have only watched a small portion so far. We had one tape that was very degraded and they couldn't get much off of it. What a great way to save the memories for the future.
We had video of Christmas celebrations, birthday parties, sports games and school activities as well as a lot of other video of our kids growing up. I'm sure each of you have something similar sitting around the house. We still have thousands of print photos that need to be organized. The companies will scan photos, but I feel like it would be really expensive to do a large quantity. I figure the price we paid to ensure these memories are viewable and can last a few more years was well worth it. If you decide to look for a company to do your videos and photos, I suggest you shop around and then wait for emails to be sent to you. We eventually got an email offering rates of 60% off the regular rate. I thought the final price was very reasonable.
As we get older these memories are as precious as most anything else we own. Looking back at the videos show how quickly our kids grew up and moved on with their lives. It reminds us all to live in the moment and cherish every minute of every day and to go back and savor those cherished memories we have. Some of my best memories are only recorded in my own mind. If only I could put them in video format!
What kind of media do you have laying around and how are you organizing it and protecting it for the future? Any success stories or disappointment with any digitalizing companies? How do you deal with photos? We have albums, photo boxes and drawers full of photos. What about your modern day digital videos and photos from you smart phone, how do you save and sort this large volume of media? I delete a few photos every once in awhile because I take screen shots of things I want to try such as a new coffee shop or I take a photo of a special light bulb or furnace filter I need to buy. If I don't go weed out these photos I could wind up saving them forever in the cloud or on my computer. Fifty years from now some grandchild will look through my photos and say "Why in the world did he save a photo of a furnace filter!"
I need to send my tapes in.
ReplyDeleteWe found a dozen or so old VHS tapes of our girls when they were 8-15 years old performing at various school functions. Luckily, we still had a working VHS player in the garage. With a $35 converter kit we are able to convert the tapes to digital. Some will be burned to DVD, others kept on thumb drives.
ReplyDeleteEbay has plenty of VHS players for $35-$80. It isn't as easy to do it our way, but certainly cheaper than the off-site companies.
Old cassette tapes were also converted into digital files to be stored on computer external drives. And, my wife has probably 1,500 photos that are still in old analog albums. They are slowly being scanned into the computer to join her tens of thousands of other photos.
All this keeps us busy.
Great idea on the VHS player. It definitely would be cheaper than sending it off.
DeleteWhen scrapbooking became a thing, I was showing off some of my work to an aunt. She said - no one will care about them when you're gone. What a crank! I thought. Upon further reflection, I know it's true. My son won't recognize more than half of the people in the photos so carefully curated into albums. I don't think it will matter what format those pictures present themselves. In 20 yrs the current digital formats may very well be seen as archaic by those left behind.
ReplyDeleteIt is sad how quickly what we value in photos and personal items lose their importance to future generations. As we dabble in genealogy we wish we had photos of our ancestors a generation or two back. I'm sure there were some photos, but probably got lost over the years or stored in a family members attic to slowly disintegrate. In the first days of photography you probably had to be well off to afford a family portrait. In today's world we probably take more photos in a day on our smartphone than previous generations had taken in their lifetime.
DeleteNO videos here, but a frightening amount of pictures. And my late husband was into the scenery, not me or the kids. So I have multiple boxes to go through. But I also have old family photos of my parents as kids and so on, that I am not sure how to deal with. I'm honestly tempted to scan them into ancestry and then make shutterfly type albums of what is left..
ReplyDeleteI like the shutterfly album idea. My wife has made similar type of albums on a different site of our granddaughter's photos and they turned out really nice.
DeleteThank you so much for your visit and comment today. It was wonderful to meet you. I spent a year after I retired, scanning all our photos and putting information onto all the properties. I'm now planning on choosing representative photos from each year and making photobooks for the kids/grandkids of all those years when our kids were growing up.
ReplyDeleteOne important thing for me to remember was to date the photos Year-month-day and not write out the date as March-17-2021. It's better 2021-03-17 or the files and photos get all jumbled up.
Good for you getting all those photos scanned and organized. We need to start doing that, maybe one bite at a time.
ReplyDelete