Family Photo Album: Steps To Creating A Masterpiece
Recently I got to thinking about the numerous pictures that my family has taken over the years. All of those pictures are in my parents possession. However, I wanted to be able to access them and see them too. I decided that I would help my parents with this process. They are busy people and I knew they wouldn’t have time to scan the pictures themselves. I volunteered to scan all the photos from each family photo album. I am moving to Georgia very soon so I knew that I really needed to be on the ball if I was going to get it done before then.
I began by making a trip to my parents house and first removing all the photos from each family photo album. Luckily my mom and husband were also enthusiastic enough to help me with this process. To be sure everything remained in the correct order and that we could later put it back in the same album, we stacked and tied all the photos from each family photo album together separately (see below).
9 hours later… We finished removing all the photos from the old albums and stacked them into a cardboard box so that they would not slide around when being transported.
My parents live in Salt Lake City near the Family History Library downtown. At the suggestion of my mom, I went to this library to scan the photos. This is because the Family History Library has high speed scanners. I don’t know what I was thinking when I said I would scan each photo using a flat bed scanner because that would have taken weeks! With the high speed scanners I was able to scan all the pictures in about 4-5 hours. There was also a family photo album that had lots of bigger pictures as well as some tiny passport size photos that needed to be done using a flat bed scanner but one photo album is nothing in comparison to the 30 or so others that we were able to do using the high speed scanners. I am seriously considering purchasing my own high speed scanner so that I can continue doing more projects like this in the future for other people!
The end goal is to begin creating photo books using the pictures from each family photo album. To get a better idea of what I mean see the picture at the top of this article. David Geffin also gives some great ideas on how to preserve more of your digital family memories here.