Protect your family photos with ScanMyPhotos

We have a lot of print photographs in our home. There are 13 or so very thick photo albums, plus untold volumes of loose photographs in shoe boxes in the closet, or bins stashed in the attic. One flood or fire is all it would take to lose all of those irreplaceable memories from our family, and from my own childhood. Gone. You can’t get them back.

That is why I was very interested when I heard about the service offered by ScanMyPhotos. It is simple, fast, and relatively inexpensive to have all of those photos scanned so they can be backed up on a removable drive, and/or stored in the cloud. I now have multiple copies of my precious photos stored in various places on my computer and out on the Web.

I wrote a review of my experience with ScanMyPhotos for Forbes:

How many print photos do you have in your house right now? How many pictures capturing your childhood, special events, family holidays, and other memorable events fill photo albums or shoeboxes scattered about your home? How devastating would it be if you experience a fire or flood, and all of those irreplaceable print photographs are destroyed? You need to protect those memories.

Print photos have a unique appeal and charm that can’t be replaced by digital photographs. It is a different experience to flip through the pages of a photo album than to browse through a catalog of images on a computer. All of your photographs should be digitized, though—if only as a backup to the original print photographs. The digital images can be stored in the cloud, or stored on a USB thumb drive. You can maintain multiple copies at various locations to guarantee that your memories will be safe no matter what disaster strikes your home.

I tried to do it myself once. I used a flatbed scanner and started scanning my photos. I wanted to scan at a relatively high resolution, so each scan took a while to complete and finish rendering the image. After about 100 of those, I decided that process was too slow, and I started grouping them so I could scan four or five at a time. I got through scanning photographs faster, but it just meant adding more time on the backend to crop out each image and save them as individual photographs again. Eventually I gave up. I have more photos than free time, and it was just too tedious of a project to get through.

I reconciled myself to just not having the older photos scanned. Every photo I’ve taken since 1999 has been digital, so all of the moments and events from my children growing up are already digital, and I decided I’d just have to be OK letting those older memories go if something happened to them. Then I reviewed the ScanMyPhotos.com service.

ScanMyPhotos has been around for over two decades. What started out as a boutique photo processing company, evolved into a business that has streamlined the process of scanning print photos in bulk for customers…

You can read the complete article here, including the part where I had the opportunity to speak with Katy Perry’s father about his experience with ScanMyPhotos: Preserve Your Irreplaceable Memories With ScanMyPhotos.