Yesterday I was reading a blog post from someone I follow. Walking Chester is a treat for me. Great pics of an adorable dog, and fun writing. The topic for yesterday’s reading was The Pitcher Purge. I’m not sure if that was a typo or a play on words my tired mind didn’t grasp, but the bottom line is that it was about dealing with boxes of old images. It was very relatable.
For over a decade now, I’ve had our bins of photos right in my path, hoping they would annoy me enough that I would deal with them. My approach changed over the years. First I was going to label and date them all. That was tricky since Hudi and Zeb look so much alike as babies that labeling started to become less accurate than the ideal.
I thought of hiring someone to sort. At least they would have fresh eyes and be able to filter out the doubles.
Then I gave up and kind of hoped they would sort themselves.
That worked as expected.
Nothing changed until my next burst of inspiration which had me purchasing a wand scanner.
Of all the methodology this was perhaps the most solid. I scanned many images, putting them in digital files based by year and decade. The images were names according to who was in them and sometimes where. If I mis-named a child or time, it was easy to rename and re-file.
Life took me off the picture path for a bit. When I came back to the project, it was a few years later, and I didn’t remember my methodology.
So I started fresh. Inspired by Hudi and Mollie’s wedding, I dug through the boxes again. To my amazement, I found that the scanner was no longer the best option. Cellphones changed over the years. Photographed images of the photos come out better than scans of those originals.
Can you tell which image is a scan, and which is a photo of the original?
The scanned image is on the left. (Or top if you are viewing on a mobile device.)
I lined up a bunch of pictures on a picnic table on a non-windy day, and quickly took photos from my phone. Another day, I laid them out on a bed. A pretty good guestimate on time was about 300 images processed in about half an hour. Not bad.
A perk is that now all those images are digital and easily organized better another time. I can even take on that task while waiting for a flight.
I sifted through memories to share on our (and other family members’) video devices (like Google Nest). So simple.
We bundled up the hard copies and gave each son a stack, but the digital memories are now there at our fingertips.
Boxes begone! It’s about time.