Time with Family-preserving memories

 Well, the trip to visit the West Coast grands is accomplished. We had some unforgettable moments, carving pumpkins and trick or treating with the littlest grands. The weather was kind to us for the most part and Halloween saw temperatures in the 60s, in contrast to the snow at home. Now, we have jumped right into the Holidays with a capital H.  Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. It is a time to count your blessings, eat too much and spend time with friends and family. We won't see the West Coast family again until next year but I have a lot of photos from the recent trip to remind me of the time we spent together. 

Not everyone shares my obsession with photos-I know a number of people who just don't think to take pictures of their daily lives. Perhaps memories are more important as we age but the sheer quantity of photos we accumulate in a lifetime can get pretty overwhelming. Prior to the digital age, those prints in their paper packets accumulated in drawers and cupboards. There are a number of ways to address this bounty, the most common being to put them in boxes and store them somewhere out of sight. This works for a while but eventually they end up in the dumpster because there's no one left to tell their stories. During lockdown, I spent several weeks going through all my printed (pre-digital) pictures and organizing them. I noted the years and occasions on the paper envelopes and stored them in date order in plastic boxes. That's good as far as it goes but I still have to store the boxes! A few weeks ago, I talked about the 21st Century Dilemma being the electronic storage of all those digital photographs. Well, the last century's dilemma must be storing printed photographs properly, so that they won't deteriorate with time.

Photo restoration is an important part of my business. To make them last, printed photos need to be kept away from extremes of temperature and humidity. Where do we store those boxes of photos?  Most often, in the basement or attic, two of the worst places!  The photos we love the most might be carried in a wallet or displayed on a desk. Photos fade, get torn, creased, stained or water damaged. My restoration process is to scan them and digitally restore them so that a pristine new copy can be made. 

Scanning photos can be time consuming unless you have the right equipment. When I restore photos, I am usually working with just a few at a time so a flatbed scanner works fine.  A quick and painless way to deal with digitizing a whole heap of photos that don't need restoration is to pack them in a box and send them to Forever! That's the company that digitized my video tapes.  They will also digitize photos, negatives, slides, 8mm films and so on. I have a client who sent 1200 photos to be scanned! Her purpose was to keep the memories but get rid of the clutter. Once stored in her permanent cloud storage account with Forever, she can tag them, label them and generally make sure that her children and grandchildren know who all those people in the photos are. Another client sent in years and years of 8mm movies. Once they are digitized, he will be able to watch them again without worrying about the fragile film. Since Forever guarantees that they will convert your images as formats change, these movies will be safe for generations to come!

Back in 1999, a package of photos could be labelled "Memories for the Future" without any sense of irony. As it turns out, preserving our photographic memories may take a little more work!