How You Can Easily Protect Your Old Pictures
How You Can Easily Protect Your Old Pictures
Pictures represent the story of our lives. They can mark important dates, serve as illustrations of how our relationships have changed, or can help us remember a time in our lives when things were different, either for better or worse. While digital cameras have made recording and organizing the images of our lives much easier, many of us still have thousands of photographs in shoeboxes and closets. Although the fun of looking through photo albums and displaying photos in picture frames will never get old, it is still important to protect your pictures.
Get Organized
Digitizing all of your old photos may seem like an insurmountable task, however, you can save yourself time by starting out organized.
The first thing you want to do is make a plan of how you're going to digitize your old photos. For example, you may want to start with the oldest family pictures and do the newest pictures last. How you choose to go about this is entirely up to you, but if you start out with organized photos, you will spend far less time trying to get them sorted on your hard drive. Plus, you'll end up organizing your hard copies in the process.
Second, create a brand new photo library or folder on your computer for your new additions. The more organized you keep your folders, the easier it will be to find your favorite photographs or create themed albums. In the end, it doesn't matter how you do it, as long as you can easily find things quickly and easiliy.
Get a Quality Scanner
If you want to digitize all of your pictures, you're going to need a good quality scanner. Scanners run the gamut in terms of price and quality. Quality in a scanner is mostly related to its scan resolution, and you should be looking for a scanner with a 1200dpi minimum. Any photos you scan at a resolution of under 1200dpi are going to suffer from serious loss of quality if reprinted. Look for a good scanner to run you between $150 and $300.
It's also a good idea to pick up an external hard drive for backing up your entire digital library. With digital, there is the risk of losing your images so the best thing to do is create multiple backups right away in case anything were to happen. The only thing that is more frustrating than painstakingly scanning a thousand photographs is doing it again thanks to some sort of hardware failure.
Get Started
As soon as you have pictures organized into sections, it's time to get started. If you have a large number of photographs, you may want to break this project up into smaller, more manageable blocks of time. Two hours a night may not sound like much at first, but if you stick to it you'll have a fully-functional digital archive in no time without seriously compromising your free time.
As you're scanning each picture make sure to do minor corrections, but try to avoid doing major restoration on any one picture. There will be plenty of time to adjust the color balance or hue of each individual photo, but it is easy to lose yourself in this process. Instead, concentrate on things like cropping, rotation and saving the image in the right folder and keep on scanning.
If you don't have time to scan the images yourself, you may want to consider outsourcing the project. Speak with an employee at your local brick and mortar store to see what sort of digitizing services they can offer, or consider going with one of the many services on the web such as ScanDigital.com, DigMyPics.com, or ScanCafe.com.
Digitizing your photo library doesn't have to be scary. Simply map out a plan of where to start, and start working on it a little each day and in no time you'll have all of your pictures scanned and wonderfully organized.
Commercial Photography - How to Shoot for Magazines Cameras and photography: Way to create moments Enhance Your Companys Image With Attractive Name Badges Buying Photography Convert Image To Text —Solution Of Your Problem Lost Image Recovery - Fixing Tip! Photo Books Data Image Recovery - Helping Guide! Photography Course Singapore To Be Grabbed Glass picture frames – a unique father's day gift What Is Lining Wallpaper And How Do You Hang It ? What Is Woodchip Wallpaper Made Of And How Do You Fit It ? Photography Posing Guide - Keep 3 Rules In Mind During Photobooth Posing!