digital – Life and Lims

I’m presenting a class for a family history workshop on how to preserve various family memories: audio, video, documents, and photos. I thought some of my friends online might appreciate the information I’m sharing, so here are the basics:

Video

You can use a service to transfer film or VHS/Beta tapes to DVDs or do it yourself. Services are certainly easier but they’re costly.

First, the services I’ve found: Mail your materials in to MyMovieTransfer.com, ScanCafe.com, DigMyPics.com, iMemories.com, LegacyBox.com, or YesVideo.com.

Or go to Costco, Walmart, Walgreens, or CVS (these all use YesVideo service) to drop off your videos for transfer.

Next, DIY methods:

For VHS tapes, you can use a VHS-DVD burner combo player, an analog-to-digital adapter for your computer, or a separate VHS player and DVD recorder. These require various levels of know-how and equipment that might be pricey, but it might be cheaper even with pricey equipment if you have a lot to transfer. Plus, you can re-sell the equipment when you’re done to recoup some of the costs.

Digital Trends provides a nice online tutorial for DIY methods.

Once you’re finished getting your video onto DVD, then you can move on to getting it onto your computer hard drive in MP4 or similar format. For the future, it looks as if everything is going digital, so just go ahead and do it now. This also means you can have all your memories in one place. You can store on your computer and also keep a copy on a backup hard drive for safekeeping, along with all of your other digital copies of photos and audio, etc. I’ve used Xilisoft’s DVD Ripper and it’s fairly simple if you have some computer experience; standard version is $39.99. Other software includes Wondershare Video Converter starting at $39.95.

Digital Trends provides instructions for some free options.

Audio

Transferring cassette tapes onto your computer hard drive and into MP3 or similar digital audio formats is less complex than transferring video. It’s also pretty inexpensive. You just need a cassette player and an auxiliary cord to plug it into your computer, as well as software. The primary software I’ve seen (and used myself) is Audacity. Bonus: it’s free! Here are a couple of online tutorials:

http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-turn-a-cassette-tape-into-mp3s/

http://www.wikihow.com/Transfer-Cassette-Tape-to-Computer

Photos

If you have photos in slide format, you can use a service, which can be quite expensive if you have a lot of them, or you can do it yourself. DIY is pretty easy and just requires a slide scanner, which can be purchased for around $80 to $120.

Loose photos or photos in albums are easy to scan with a regular scanner. Many of us now have combo printer/scanners. If you don’t have one yet, you can purchase a good-quality one for as little as $50. Only drawback is it’s time-consuming. If you’re trying to scan in photos that are still in old albums, you’ll have to scan in each page, make copies of the image on your computer, then crop down to each photo. Afterward, you can use your favorite photo-editing software to clean them up.

There are also apps for this project, such as Pic Scanner, which can be downloaded from the iTunes app store. It’s free for the first 10 scans of album pages and $2.99 after that. Pros: Makes it easy to just “take a picture,” and it isolates the separate photos for you without you having to copy and crop. Con: I liked the quality of my scanner better.

If you do want to use a service, there are lots out there, such as ScanCafe.com, DigMyPics.com, FotoBridge.com, iMemories.com, LegacyBox.com, and YesVideo.com.

Documents

Don’t forget to scan in old family documents as well. Same process goes here for photos. Use a scanner.

Now, going the other direction: many of us have photos from the past 5 to 10 years strictly in digital format. That’s great for storage, but you’ll also want to have some actually in hard copy form. I’ve found it’s nice and pretty easy to make photo albums on my computer using various photo-album services and then just have them printed and bound for me. No printing of individual photos and then assembling into albums. I’ve used Shutterfly, MiniBox, and MyPublisher and have been satisfied with their products. There are also a number of other services I haven’t tried: PhotoBook America, Peggy Bank, and AdoramaPix, for a few examples.

Deals

If you’re going to do any of these projects with services available, make sure you get the best deal you can! Groupon and LivingSocial are handy for this. Sign up for their emails and you’ll get heads-up on the various deals that might involve these kinds of services. I’ve gotten good ones from MyPublisher and am up to date on all my family photo albums thanks to them.

I also like to use Ebates to get cash back and coupons for services. Create an account and you can search for all their participating merchants.

Some current deals (local to my area in California):

ScanMyPhotos.com

Digital media services from Southtree

Video and image digitization services from Peggy Bank

Groupon for 40-page photo books from PhotoBookAmerica

Groupon for photo books from AdoramaPix

So I was reading this roundup article that tells about how people are having problems being DIGITAL hoarders. I suppose this should come as no surprise. I’ve long been overwhelmed by the sheer number of emails, documents, photos and other things I have to keep track of and organize in the virtual world, so it stands to reason that there are people who simply keep all their virtual things.

What’s sad is that it’s tough enough to keep entropy at bay in the concrete world. It takes daily effort to go through my house and constantly sort and throw items that creep into all my hiding places and on top of counters, desks, and shelves. I seem to have almost no help in this battle, though, since my children tend to be squirrels, and my husband would much rather keep pretty much everything, just in case. I’ve mostly broken him of the habit of picking things up at garage sales and (when we lived in the South and people just put old things on the side of the road to get rid of) bringing junk home that other people were THROWING AWAY. But he doesn’t on his own take the initiative to regularly go through things and organize and toss. I’m practically the lone ranger as I fight the onslaught of clutter.

The great news as computers have taken root in our lives is that we’ve “gone green” in many ways, replacing paper documents with e-versions. Sure, we don’t have file cabinets quite as full anymore, but our Yahoo or Gmail inboxes are overflowing. Junk mail that arrives in my mailbox gets thrown right into my recycling can, and then when I go online, I have to do the same thing with its electronic siblings. And as wonderful as it has been to visually document our families’ lives and travels, photos now proliferate in the pictures folder, a cascading wave of so-so shots of wacky faces and blinked eyes washing over the desktop. In this regard, it also doesn’t help that I have a 16-year-old with her own camera who takes it EVERYWHERE she goes and is constantly snapping shots.

So not only do I spend lots of time and energy daily sorting through the pile of paperwork that seems to multiply like rabbits on my literal desktop, I also sit down at that same cluttered desk and face a screen that shows me inboxes and folders full of unnecessary items that ARE SIMPLY 1’s AND 0’s. Even though they are not “real,” not taking up any real estate in my real life, they still manage to plague me as they multiply in my virtual world. There is something fairly satisfying about cleaning out my house, room by room, or one counter or drawer at a time, but the satisfaction isn’t quite as concrete and lovely when I am simply reducing the number on my inbox from 300 down to 230. Nope. But I have to regularly go through everything I own that only takes up space by megabytes and put it in a tiny little icon that says “recycle bin.”

What has this world come to when I have to clean something that, in a way, doesn’t really exist?

Tag: digital

Tips on preserving family memories