What to do with old pictures (not digital)?

[Deleted]

I am working on cleaning out some storage containers today. Amazing how stuff I thought was worth keeping 5 years ago when I last did this is mostly getting thrown out, lol.

I have a ton of old pictures, some from childhood, a bunch from college that were all taken in film. I don't know what to do with them.

I scrapbook, but have trouble keeping up with regular pictures let alone all these old ones. I would love to scan them and keep them in a digital album online, but I don't know that I want to spend hours (or that my scanner can take spending hours) getting them all scanned in. And if I did take on that project, would they even look good?

I know you can pay someone to do it, but I don't want to spend a ton of money either. If it was 10 cents or something I would be fine, but the local place I saw was 48 cents for each picture. Not worth that.

Is there something else you've done? Or do you know of a good place online to get images scanned?

I guess I always could just get a couple of big photo albums, too, and reorganize. Right now they are in several small cheap albums and are hard to look at/not organized.

[Pilsy]

DH and I threw out most of ours.

[bazealina]

THere are scanning companies that you mail the pics off to and they do it. It is much more econimcal than 48cents per pic..closer to 10-12. I don't know the names of them but google could be yiour friend.
I have the same problem. I started scrapbooking my "yesterday and today" album. One page from yesterday (old photos) one from current events.

[winemaker06]

I have scanned albums worth of old pictures myself, and it is a big job. I did ultimately get rid of all the hard copies now that I have them available electronically.

What I started doing was grouping the pictures into timeframes and scanning, mainly because they're all small. For example, if I had a big group of 3x4 pictures from my 15th birthday party, I'd fill up the scanner with them and scan the entire page (approx 8.5x11 b/c my scanner is small). If I ever want one picture out of that later, I can crop it and save it separately.

If you have larger pictures, you can only fit 2-3 per page, but I still felt like it saved time and helped with organization.

[rubytue]

I have a huge bin of old photos. One of these days I'm going to go through them all.

But here is what I did a few weeks ago. I didnt have a scanner at all, so I bought on of the photo scanners (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B004J8HWIM). This thing was awesome. You just feed the photos through it. I did about 100 watching tv. Then you connect it to the computer and download the pictures.

My mother had sent me some baby pictures, my father wanted some of them, do I used this to scan a bunch in and make a photo book for them. It was perfect for what I needed. And I could even fix some of the pictures that had faded or turned funky over then years. I also looked into paying someone to scan them, but it got way too pricey.

[mrst2]

I've scanned most of them and then I keep them all together in a large plastic storage bin.

[limey]

I didn't want to put the time or money into either and I didn't want to store huge photo albums, since I almost never looked through those.

I ended up buying a photo box and just putting my photos in there, sorted with loosely in chronological order. I think I only spent an hour or two on it. It's not perfect, but it's good enough for now.

www.amazon.com/Darice-2-Inch-11-Inch-Storage-Covering/dp/B0055CVAIO/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1356886608&sr=8-7&keywords=photo+box

[thegooser]

I have all mine in a box in my storage space. Digital would be nice but I doubt I will look at them much either way...

[Deleted]

Dec 30, 2012 12:40:53 GMT -5 thegooser said:

I have all mine in a box in my storage space. Digital would be nice but I doubt I will look at them much either way...

I doubt I'll be looking at them much either, honestly, but even once every 10 years would make them worth keeping. I feel like I'd be more likely to flip through them on a computer than to dig through a dusty old box, KWIM?

Ruby I like that scanner you posted. I might have to think about getting one. I'm also going to look further into places online. The local place I found was expensive, but maybe somewhere online will do it for the 10-12 cent per picture rate. With the number of pics I have, I bet that would be around the same price or slightly cheaper than buying a scanner myself (although I could share the scanner with my parents I guess).

[rubytue]

Yeah, I looked into online places. There was one that was having a groupon. Everything you could put in a shoebox sized box for $75-ish. And then I found the scanners could be had for around $50, and then I would have the scanner. Its tiny and easy to store, too. I'm really happy with the choice.

I looked at flatbeds, too. But I didn't need the resolution, as these were mostly 3x4 or smaller. I did scan a few 8x10s and they came out just fine. I really wanted to just be able to feed the pictures in and have the scanner do all the magic. I did not want to spend days and days scanning and then cropping things manually with photo editing software.

[Deleted]

Ok, I just ordered this one:

www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0035WTCTU/ref=ox_ya_os_product

Mostly because it was cheaper and on Prime

It doesn't do larger pictures, but I don't think I have anything larger than 4x6 to begin with. And you can't beat that price (and I can always send it back if the quality is bad).

Thanks for the idea! I think this will be easy and much cheaper than sending them away. More or less, I'm just trying to clean out boxes of "stuff" and cut down on the clutter that isn't being used. I think having these electronically will save space and make me more likely to actually look at them! Plus then they can be shared which is extra fun.

[rubytue]

Nice! I looked at that one, but wanted the 8x10 ability.

from the research I did, Pandigital actually makes the kodak one.