Preserving pictures from old negatives...
Again, I am probably the last person on earth to discover this, but I thought I would share just incase ONE person is as clueless as I have been.
I love old photos. I am the keeper of all the family archive photos and documents.
When it comes to my immediate family photos, I have always developed and printed every roll of film, printed every single digital picture (phones and cameras,) labeled the back of every picture and put each into photo albums for each kiddo.
When I bought my first digital camera in 2004, I would print EVERY picture I took, label them and put them in each kid’s individual album. Then I would make a back up copy onto a CD, and in recent years, a jump drive. All labeled by year and stored in my fireproof safe….
Even now, every year I print every picture on my phone, label them and store them. Then I copy the entire year onto a jump drive.
From birth to adulthood (when I had to snatch pictures off their social media), I have them all…THOUSANDS.
Unfortunately,I have never been able to find a good way to wrangle the boxes and envelopes of negatives…THOUSANDS!!!
Granted, all the pictures have been printed and stored, but I could never bring myself to dispose of the actual negatives….you know, those flimsy brown strips (for you youngins who don’t know what a negative is). I mean, what if the house burns down and the albums go up in flames. Keep in mind the negatives have been stored in a cedar trunk in the guest room so not sure what I would do if the entire house went up, but that is another issue.
One day last year I stumble on this nifty little gadget….
I found it here on Amazon.
It really works exactly like it says it does…you run each negative through the machine, punch a button and it sends the photo to a SM card that can then been transferred to your computer, then stored to a jump drive.
There may be one out there that lets you save it directly to a jump drive but I couldn’t find one at the time.
The photos are top notch quality…and even better when you consider that the machine allows you to make minor edits to the photo before you save it. It works on 135, 110, 126mm negatives.
It took a few days of sitting and scanning but it was worth every minute. By the time I was finished I had every “pre-digital” photo stored onto a jump drive.
I gave each of the kids a jump drive of their photos….great stocking stuffers! While they have all these pictures in their albums, most kids (anyone under the age of 40) will probably never sit down and go through a picture album…but they will pop a jump drive into their computer and look at old baby pictures.
Which is exactly what my youngest daughter did…”How did you get anything done the first 6 years of my life…I was so cute, oh my god!”
Yep…she was.
I had almost forgotten how incredibly precious they all were…until I got to spend a few days looking at, and preserving, all their old pictures.
Now my next big archival chore. Transferring all the photos on CDs onto jump drives…because evidently, in spite of what they told us, those too can degrade over time…so now I am transferring thousands of photos on CDs to my computer so I can put them onto jump drives.
We have 4 computers and three ipads in this house and not one has a CD drive…that should tell you something!
