I’ve been on a kick of digitizing old pictures

Mela and I have thousands of old photographs that go back for years. All of these pictures are in boxes and old photo albums. I have been going through them and noticing what a treasure they are. I have gone through my parents and Mela’s parents slides and I still have a ton of those to do. Over the last year I have felt the need to try to gather and organize all of these. I wonder if the spirit of genealogy is hitting me finally...

I have an excellent scanner and a lot of hard-drive space so I have been scanning as much as I have time to do. My biggest problem is time. I hate just camping out in my man-cave for hours at a time - I feel guilty when I’m not being with my family or just taking the kids off Mela’s hands.

When it comes to scanning pictures I have to be selective. The pictures have to be in focus and of people. Believe it or not landscapes really aren’t that interesting to me when looking back on pictures taken 20 or even 50 years ago. Pictures of people and family are worth their weight in gold. A picture of the Washington monument from 1966 really isn’t all that interesting to me. All of this has been a lesson for my own photography - I need to document people not necessarily things.

Also I need to make sure I am getting pictures of myself. My wife’s father, John Mattice who pasted away back in 1979, was a great photographer but from all his pictures you’d think he wasn’t involved with his family and then you remember he was the one taking the pictures. So, pictures of the photographer need to be regularly included. When I find pictures of John they are pure gold!

When I get the pictures scanned and cropped I try to determine who is in the picture, where and when the picture was taken. Once I have this information I put it into the metadata of the jpeg images so it is part of the actual file. I need to find a way to share all these pictures. I think I'm going to use my flickr account and post a link to it from my blog.

Some of the more entertaining pictures have been pictures of Mela and her friends back in High School. Most of these pictures have handwritten notes on the back that can be pretty funny. I wish I had time to capture all of these little notes because they are priceless. I’m going to try to run them through my other sheet feed scanner that I use for receipts and bills. We’ll see how that works...

All of this is going to take me months and years to accomplish. I hope I can do it. I need to preserve these pictures for my kids and my grandkids.

Another project will be to scan all my old journals. I have no idea how I’m going to do that...