Your Life in a Shoebox

Are you one of those people whose life is crammed into one or more shoeboxes? These shoeboxes could be in your attic, in your garage or even under your bed, but the only certainty is that these phots and slides have not been looked at for years. Now is the time to bring your old photographs and slides back to life by quickly digitizing them using a professional Photo scanning service. In this way, they can be easily shared with your friends and family around the world.

Maybe there is just about to be a major event in your life such as moving house or even moving to a new country, and now is the time to ditch those old shoeboxes and have your old photographs and slides stored on your computer or in the cloud, so that they are accessible all day long wherever you are.

As well as being an exercise in purging, it is also a way to safeguard the photos and slides (as well as the memories) should there be a problem with the move, or something down the line like a fire or flood.

Slides will take longer to sort through than photographs, see our sorting guide here, but if you have a plan in place, and a deadline, you will get a satisfying box to check off on your to-do list. One word of warning though, sorting these old photos and slides will bring back memories of all kinds and stir lots of emotions.

You will find shots that are blurry or cropped horribly, or with a stray finger in the way, but that was the problem with analogue cameras – You will never know how your photos will look until they have been developed.

The Move to Digital Cameras

Sorting through your photographs and slides will also remind you of how the emergence of digital cameras fundamentally changed the way that you use your photos.

The first thing was your attempt to be discerning with each shot as each one of those photo and slides cost money, and in the case of photos, there would be the processing costs on top.

The great thing about slides is that you can view the shot immediately, but the photographs need processing. Normally on return form holiday, one of the first things that you would do was to pop down to Boots the Chemist or mail them to ‘ProntoPrint’, but for photographs taken at ad hoc events, it could be a long time before the  film is filled up and you get to view the photos.

These days you can view the quality of the photos immediately and many of your photos will never make it off your memory card, even though there are many ways to export them. You will only ever print the very best shots, the rest will be viewed online by your friends and family, often only seconds after the shot was taken.

Sorting and Scanning Old Prints

By sorting and scanning old prints, you can have the best of both the print and digital worlds. You can still look at your old photos alone if you are feeling nostalgic, share memories with your parents and embarrass life long friends at birthdays and weddings, but in a far more convenient way.

Professional Photo Scanning Service

You may have a photo scanner, but the chances are that it scans too slowly, and if you have more a thousand photos it will take an age. Also the resolution quality and colour balance could be questionable.

So, it is much more sensible to carefully pack a box with prints and sent it to a professional photo scanning service such as Digitize Media, who will quickly return digital copies of your prints, along with your original photos and slides.