Last weekend I got a message from one of my cousins that a tragedy had struck – he had water damage that ruined many of his family photos. So if you want to keep throwing back on Thursdays, it may be a good idea to do something to protect your family photos.
For those of us too old to have always had a digital camera at their disposal, chances are you have boxes of photos and negatives somewhere around your house. If they aren’t organized, put it on your to-do list to go through them and decide what you wouldn’t want to lose and what you don’t care about. I’m always shocked when I get the boxes out – I don’t even remember some of the people in the old pictures any more!
Once you sort out the pictures you don’t want to lose – digitize. Most home printers are also scanners so if you don’t know how to use it, get someone to show you. There are also services that can scan your old photos for you like ScanCafe or GoPhoto – but brace yourself for the cost. Having a service scan your photos runs about 3 scans for $24 – and can take up to 3 weeks! You can also take pictures of your old paper photos using the camera on your phone or tablet – but the quality of your copies will suffer.
Next, label the pictures you’re saving with date, names and places if you can. Makes it much easier for you when the old memory gets hazy!
Then save your digital photos to the cloud. If you’re an Apple user, check your settings – you can default anything you save in photos to go to your iCloud account. And if you’re not an Apple user, I can recommend Google Photos. If you have a Gmail account you can also upload photos, create albums and share photos from Google Photos.
Want to know how to use iCloud or Google to store your photos? Check out these resources:
Now here’s my throwback photo from digging in my pictures – that’s me on the left circa 1987 with the world’s worst perm!
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