Scanning old photos

[PhilipHowe]

I've tasked myself with scanning and cataloging all the photos that my mam has from us as children, as far back as my great great grandmother. Quite a lot is lost when you just have a photo and don't know who it is. My mam wasn't keen at first, maybe she thought it'd be boring, but, by the end of it me, my wife, my two three year olds, my sister, my niece and her mate were all sat around the table, laughing at 70s fashion, the 100 different hairstyles my mam had, quite a few good looking women in there as well (one of which, I'm happy to say was my mam).

I have a canon all in one scanner and you just press a button, it auto scans at 300dpi and the photo will then be there for all to see. For the sake of the £40 I paid for the scanner/printer, it is more than worth the money. It also means, as I like 120 miles away from the rest of my family, that I can share the folder and we can all have copies.

I'd recommend it, as you only get to 'inherit' these photos after the person with the knowledge of who is in them has gone.

[John]

Don't forget to check out the ADAPS Gallery archive section - lots of pictures from the club's past including those where even Mr Duckworth had a copious mop of hair!

[Paul Jones]

Good post Philip.

Do people keep family albums anymore? Do people print photos? Will families be sat around the table in future years looking through a pile of CDs and hard-drives?

[John]

The trouble is they won't be looking through a pile of CDs. They will look at them pretty much how we look at floppy discs now.

[PhilipHowe]

I'm toying with the idea of a hidden group on facebook for them and just invite family to see.
Passing a photo around a table is so much more fun than crowding around a computer.
I do print photos out, I have them on my wall at work and send them to my mam, mainly of my kids.
I bought a second hand Canon Selphy printer for about £10 off ebay ages ago. The paper is about £30 for 100, but it's not inkjet that fades, it's the sublimation type which lasts 99 years...

We've started making photo albums again, not photobooks.

[melbarnes]

I did a similar thing to you Philip - I have hundreds of old family photos from parents, uncles, etc, and some that I took with film cameras when the children were small. The ones I took were in albums - but there were lots of albums of different shapes and sizes, and were taking up too much room, as well as the problem of photographs sticking together inside the albums. So I spent a couple of evenings scanning the lot, and now I run them as a screen saver slide show on my PC when it is "sleeping" - that way I'm constantly reminded of the photos, and I see them every day. The lack of space problem has gone too!

[PhilipHowe]

That's great Mel.