My wife and I were shopping in one of those antique store/flea market places the other day when I ran across a couple of old photo albums full of somebody's history. There were formal shots of people dressed in the fashion of bygone days and a few candid shots too, mostly of kids. I see these things in antique stores all the time and it always makes me sad because those photos represent somebody's heritage.
We have lots of albums filled with pictures of friends and family from our younger days. We also have pictures we have inherited from our parents and more distant ancestors. Some of them are tintypes that have been handed down for many years and more than a few of them have begun to deteriorate. I worried about what to do with all of these photos for a long time and finally decided that the best thing I could do with them was to scan them into the computer and turn them into digital media. Having worked for a long time in the high tech industry I know that the format of any media, picture files included, will change over time; but I'm sure that there will always be a period when cheap means of conversion will be available to turn the old format into the current one. I also know that pictures stored in digital form won't deteriorate any further and those that deteriorated before they were scanned can be digitally restored.
It is a lot easier and cheaper than you might think to scan old pictures, and other paper documents for that matter,and it makes a great thing to do on rainy days or during those days when it is too cold to be outside in the north or too hot to be outside in the south. You can use any Windows PC or Mac to process the pictures. It doesn't need to be a new, big, fast or expensive computer as long as it can handle the hook up to a scanner and has some form of media to store the pictures on. You can always store them on the computer's hard file, of course, but hard files can malfunction and in that case the pictures you have stored on them may be irretrievable. It is also possible that you may have a fire or your computer may be stolen and, if the pictures were only stored on the hard file, they would be lost forever. In addition, if you use antivirus software to scan your hard file for viruses, you will find that an accumulation of picture files on the hard file will make the time to scan it for viruses increase substantially over time. So, while it is fine to store the picture files on your computer's hard file, assuming you are willing to live with a longer virus scan time, it is imperative to also store them on some kind of removable media like CDs or DVDs. If you are really worried about losing the media that contains the pictures to theft, fire or some other tragedy, you can make multiple copies on CDs or DVDs and store each copy in a separate place. For example, you might ask a friend to store one copy for you so that, if your own copy is lost or damaged, you can simply retrieve the copy you have left with your friend.
I use a Windows PC to process photos. My machine has a built-in CD drive, so that's what I use to store the pictures. To do the actual scanning you need either a scanner or a combination printer/scanner/copier. It can be either new or used. While a used one might be cheaper, if you look around you might find a good deal on a new one. I bought a Canon PIXMA combination printer/scanner/copier at Wal~mart for $40. I liked buying a new machine because it came with all the software I needed to scan the photos. Most of the software that comes with scanners will allow you to tell the machine whether you are scanning black and white or color photos so that the computer can process them properly and produce the smallest practical picture file. Often the software will allow you to crop the photos, which will result in smaller files. This is handy if the photos have large borders or if they are in frames and can't be removed. The software that came with my scanner also allows me to scan large photos in pieces and then knit them back together after the photos are in the computer.
I have thousands of photos that I want to scan so I know I will be at this project for a long time. I started with some very old pictures and am working my way toward more recent ones.
In another post I'll talk about ways to view the scanned photos. You can always use the Windows media viewer or the Mac equivalent, of course, but it is more convenient to view them as a digital album, or at least a web page. In later posts I will also talk about ways to convert other artifacts to a more modern format. For example, I have converted all the old VHS video tapes that document past vacations and family gatherings to DVDs. In a future post I'll tell you how I did that.
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