Lasting Legacies Articles

Fire! Part 2: Photo Preservation

Now that you’ve identified the photos that hold the keys to your important memories, the next step is choosing a method to preserve them in an organized fashion.

One way to tackle this is by putting your photos and other small mementos into scrapbooks. Scrapbooking has become an entire industry. If you enjoy arts and crafts and have time and money to spend, this may be a terrific new hobby for you. Unfortunately, scrapbooks require storage space, just like your old boxes of photos. In fact, they may take up significantly more space than your original boxes. If downsizing is your goal, you will want to consider other options.

You can save and share your photos easily with digital archiving. If you don’t have the equipment to do this yourself at home, you can mail your photos to an online service and they will transfer your prints to .jpg format on CD or DVD. If you don’t want to put your precious photos in the mail to a faceless company somewhere on the other side of the country, your local print shop or a personal historian may be able to help. For those of you in the Eugene–Springfield area, Lasting Legacies offers an in–home service, which includes scanning the photos right in your home and correction of minor discoloration, scratches, and dust damage.

Consider having your favorites made into a DVD slideshow. This is another service Lasting Legacies offers to local customers along with in–home scanning of your photos. Your slideshow can be accompanied by a music soundtrack or by your own digitally recorded narration. A DVD slideshow can be viewed on a computer or a television, and makes a wonderful gift. Or, have some of your photos incorporated into a memory quilt. Now you have a clean closet, and a jumpstart on next year’s Christmas shopping!

My favorite way to preserve the memories, though, is with a memoir. With a memoir, you will preserve the most important part of your treasure—the memory that each photograph represents. Although a CD or a DVD will last many, many years, anyone who has lived more than two or three decades will wonder just how long it will take for any new form of media to become technologically obsolete. A book of your memoirs illustrated with photographs will never go out of style. It preserves not just your image, but also your voice, your personality, and those precious memories in more detail than is possible in any other way. As a personal historian, I can help you put together a book your family will treasure for generations to come.

You may be thinking I’ve forgotten about those other mementos—the blue ribbons and pocket watches. Never fear! I’ll tackle that subject in Part 3.

Author: Linda A. Smith

03-05-2008

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