Preserving Family Photos
March, 2007

I’ve Got Many Family Photos I want to Preserve,
Now What Do I Do?

Over the years many of us have taken and collected many photos.  They were put in scrapbooks, tossed in drawers or organized in such a way that someday we would preserve them.  With the new computer age the logical approach is to scan them into the computer and then onto cd’s.  However, as those of you who have scanned photos onto your computers know, it is a very time consuming process.  We are retired and are suppose to have a lot of time on our hands, however, we do have other activities we want to be in as well and it’s just not good for our health to spend days sitting in front of the computer – we need to be more active!  

The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well!  To the rescue comes a service that will scan all your photos for you at a reasonable price. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “A Lifetime of Photos on a Single Disc” (January 31, 2007) discusses this service.  More and more photo-shop owners and online businesses are using high-speed document scanners with automatic feeders to make quick work of digitizing the photos.  

The article states that “The photos may not be sharp enough to blow up into much bigger prints. And the images are stored as numbered files on the CD, so you will need to open each image to know what the picture is.  But, once the pictures are digitized on a CD or DVD, it is easy to make more copies or store and label them on a computer hard drive.”  

Local photo shops and internet sites are now offering this service.  Below are a selection of internet sites as listed in the WSJ article:

Ancestry.com Now Available
The City of Roseville library has subscribed to Ancestry.com, the largest source of historical documents for genealogy research.It can be accessed on any Roseville library computer.

For more genealogy information click on the Genealogy group website.

Click here to return to Genealogy Main Menu