Faith inspired me to do a project I have been wanting to do for a few years now and am going to start on it by Saturday.

My parents have about 60 thick photo albums of pictures of our lives. Mom used to be quite the shutter bug.

Since some of the pic's from the 60's and 70's are starting to yellow and fall out of the albums, i am going to digitize them all and scan them into a computer, then put them on DVD's and give them out to each of the family members as Christmas presents.

Should take all of a few months to do, It will be exciting to find out how many GB 48 years turns into.

I'll update you on the progress. Going to get the first two or three albums tomorrow.

Don't forget to post some of those pics here.

Dude, you're going to lose interest in this project super fast when you realize what a pain and physical job it is. I started my own personal albums last year and by the time I got all the buggers out of the albums I'd had enough.

Do your parents expect you to put them all back into the albums?

My parents were wildly Kodak crazy and left about 18,000 prints behind. (Remember, 6 kids, 6 birthdays, Christmases, recitals, concerts, plays, halloween...) plus road trips and so on. After getting about 10% of my own done, I realized that our parents' photos will never get done unless we send them out.

We found a company that uses an auto-feeder and a high-speed scanner. We have a whole linen closet filled with photo storage boxes and they said they can turn them around in one week. They will also burn them to a master set of DVDs as well as upload them to a photo storage site so we can each archive them to our preferred media/method.

My sister and I did their wedding album together, she pulled and wiped while I scanned and labeled files, then she put them back into their places. It was only about 60 pics and it took us 3 hours. The scanner bed had to be cleaned about every 15th photo or so.

Cool, Earl! I truly hope that you don't lose interest, as AMN suggests you might. Sounds like an awesome project. Keep us posted!

I may end up doing all kinds of photo scanning for my reunion project, although, not at all on the scale you will. I'd like for us to have a reunion booklet, with yearbook pictures, current pictures, a profile, whatever.

People can send 1 or 2 current pictures online, but, if I do it, I'd have to scan yearbook photos. There'd be about 100 alumni. Nothing like the 60 photo albums you're talking about, though!

And, I'm actually hoping that I can find someone else to volunteer to do that. I don't have enough knowledge about anyone's skills and interests to delegate someone specific myself.

With the combination of what I know, plus my DH's computer guru skills, I think I'd be able to do it, if no one else will.

~ Faith

Keep us posted, Earl. How's your project coming along?

~ Faith

I like the old photos, yellow and all. I have thousands of digitals I am afraid I'll lose. My project is to get them all organized and printed. Opposite of you. I have lost images in the past thanks to computer failure so hope to be done by the end of the year too.

I'm with Sandy on this. I just went through a big box of old photos....some of them from the 50's, 60's and 70's! There's something about the faded, yellowed paper they're printed on. I like that. As I get older it seems I like the more nostalgic things.