It’s easy to feel overwhelmed starting a big project we’ve been neglecting for years. Staring at the disarray of photos, albums and old video/film tapes and wondering, “where to start?”, then just walking away to tackle it a different day. But those boxes and crates just won’t declutter themselves. Well, here are some small tips and tricks to assist you in your minimalizing your photos, albums, video and film to help you get started.

Know why you are doing this.. Are you doing this for yourself, family or even helping a friend? Are you just trying to organize? Or do you plan on minimalizing your boxes and boxes of memories to condense them? Or put them onto digital devices so you can view them over and over again. You can even make copies and share them with friends and family!

Know what you have.. Gathering and collecting your items through the house (or houses!). You may find this tedious homework assignment of gathering all your items and putting them together quite troublesome but, it doesn’t have to be. This process can be therapeutic and seeing these items again can also be very exciting looking back through memory lane. Once you have everything gathered, choose one project at a time. For photos, you can go about this many ways. You can choose to keep them organized by size, year or even category. You may notice you have duplicates of your photos or 16 pictures of the same tree and realize you may not need those extra copies. You can take advantage of this opportunity while going through your photos to lessen the amount of your photos by removing the ones you may just not want or need. It may help to go ahead and sort them into three subcategories. A discard pile, MVP (most valuable pile) and an everything else pile. If they are worth keeping, you can keep them aside in a box, put them in an album to keep them organized or digitize them.

What to do with it.. If you choose to digitize your photos, we can help you! Now that you have your photos organized, knowing how many you have so you can choose which Photo Scanning Package we have that suits your needs the best. Now, this isn’t an exact science and we would hate for you to lose your mind counting each photo. But, if you put your photos into a stack and put a ruler next to that stack, 1 inch is approximately 100 (thickness various with photos). That should help you get started on digitizing your photos. If you have albums of photos that you would like digitized, it would be more cost effective if the photos were removed from the album first before sending them to us. You can go through them once you have finished going through your loose photos and organize them the same way as you had before. We do understand that all albums are different and some very fragile. So, if the photos cannot be taken out, we can scan your albums as per whole page. The images can also be digitally cropped out upon request. If you choose to have us scan your albums, you can simply print out our ‘Album Scanning Order Form’ to fill out and send to us along with your albums.

We also have Video and Bulk Film (8mm & Super 8mm Film) Scan-A-Box Packages as well. So, once you have finished your other projects and start to move onto your tapes and film. You can start by separating them. Keeping all your VHS/VHS-C/Mini DV and Hi8 and put them all together.

For your 8mm film, if you have different diameters of sizes you can separate them by size. Since we charge by the foot for 8mm film, we have a diagram to help assist you so you can have a better idea of how much footage you may have before choosing your Scan-A-Box Package.

You may want to view your tapes and film beforehand and that’s a bit tricky since most of us do not have that equipment laying around. However, it may be worth a call to your local library or college to see if you can either rent or use their facilities to view your tapes.

Once you have decided which items you want digitized, you can now choose your Photo, Slides, Video or Bulk Film Scan-A-Box Packages. If you have lesser than our Scan-A-Box Packages, (or if you have negatives to send) we have a ‘Non-Package Order Form’ you can print form home to fill out to send to us along with your items. We do send all of your items back to you when your project is completed along with the device.

Copies of your digitized memories make great Christmas gifts! Wink 😉

If you would like to learn more or have any questions about how we can help you digitize your items let us know!