Ah yes, I remember it well!

Do you ever get to the end of summer and wonder where the time went?  It's August already and families are preparing to go back to school. At the same time, they are rushing to fit in as many summer experiences as possible before the start of school!  Judging by the crowds at the Bristol Renaissance Faire last weekend, that outing must have been high on the "to-do" list! Today the weather had a slightly fall-ish feel in the morning as I went out to my early breakfast networking meeting. It's all a reminder of how swiftly time passes. 

At my networking meeting, the "warm up" was a clever exercise to make us realize how things are not always the way we remember them!  We may think we remember an event exactly, but time has a way of coloring our memories, as in the old song, "Ah yes, I remember it well!"  One way I remember important events is by looking at my photos. We are fortunate (maybe?) that modern digital photographs contain "metadata" which tells you when the photo was taken and sometimes even where! My cell phone does this automatically because, lets face it, it knows where I am all the time. It's a great way to win the argument about which day we went to the Zoo or which year your cousin got married! It's different with the pre-digital photo prints in their paper envelopes. We might have a scribbled note on the back or a date that the lab printed them. I have talked to so many people who say they have boxes of pictures to organize but they don't know where to start!

This is where I can offer them a solution!  I have mentioned Forever before; that's the company that digitized my videos. They will also digitize your old photo prints! You order a box, which comes with bags and bar codes and you divide those prints-or negatives-or slides- into batches of 25 items and pack them in the box. Then you send it to the facility in Green Bay, WI, using the pre-paid FedEx label. Once they have scanned your items, you can download them or store them in your Forever permanent storage and they send the originals back to you. Here is where it gets interesting: if you put them in your Forever account, you can add notes, dates, information, and organize them into albums, which you can share with your family and friends. I spent a Sunday afternoon recently organizing some pictures this way. Since you own your storage, when you are gone, the family will be able to access the pictures complete with your notes! To learn more, here is a direct link to Digitization.

I always tell my clients that printed photographs are physical memories and I truly believe that. All your important life events deserve to be photographed, as well as the small, daily happenings. But part of preserving those memories is leaving them to future generations. There is nothing sadder than boxes of photos in a dumpster because grandma died and the family had no idea who the people in the pictures were. With the volume of photos I take, I am not going to preserve them all with Forever, but I plan to make sure that the really important ones are safe for years to come!