Getting ready to ‘Full Time RV’ requires getting rid of a lot of things. Some items our kids wanted. A lot of items we threw away. We sold some items on Craig’s List. We also gave some things to friends or charities.
One of the most time consuming activies in this who process what been: scanning photos
We probably accumulated 25 photo albums over the last 30 years: What to do with all the photographs?
Here’s what we did:
Photos – we sucked it up and scanned thousands of pictures. That has taken months! We could find an online company and ship them off but it is fairly costly.
This is all I have left to scan. I bundled each album into a stack with a rubber band and put them in a storage boxes. I am down to the last one. Then I:
- Take them one at a time,
- Put them face down on my HP Photosmart C8180 All-in-One Printer/Scanner/Copier
- Wait 45 seconds for the scanning
- Get another photo
- Do it again
- And again
- And
As you can imagine, I have been doing this for months. I got some great help from Michelle and Kayla when the visited. They watched some movies while they scanned several hundred of these bad boys.
35 mm slides – we have been storing boxes of slides. We looked through hundreds and hundreds, sorted through them and kept the ones that had people in them.
(We kept a few ‘place shots’.)
That reduced it down to about 700 slides. Then we took them to Costco and had them copy them to CD’s. That was a little costly too, but we got it done.Videos – Over the years we had taped the kids, some special occasions and ‘documented’ some of our trips (like an in flight air-refueling of a F-16 Thunderbirds from a the KC-10).
We bought a machine that take the VHS tape and allows you to convert it to a DVD. Ours looks like this and is a couple of years old.
If you want to buy a new one, they are about $300 at Best Buy:It took about a month to get them all copied over to DVDs. Pam took on that project. What a relief when that was done.
Other people may use a different strategy – but that has been our approach. If I had it to do over again I would have gotten a scanner that has a document feeder so I could do taxes and other papers more quickly.
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