Deep Thoughts About Vacation Video: Scanning Photos

What Good Are Old Photos?

Lonely photo albums.  Forgotten memories of vacations past.

Before digital photos, we used film cameras and took snapshots while traveling.  It could cost hundreds of dollars to have those pictures developed and printed!  Something that valuable deserved to be preserved in an album, so I have six shelves full of binders like those seen above.

These albums also serve as scrapbooks.  I've clipped page protectors full of brochures, maps, tickets, and receipts into the binders.  After 1989 they were joined by boxes of videotapes.  What do these carefully constructed photo albums have in common with unedited videotapes?

1. Together they store the memories and history of our trips.  
2. Once placed on the shelf, they are never looked at again!

You probably already know that I have hundreds of hours of unedited vacation videotapes.  Each year I catch up with two or three projects, and I've always been glad that the old photos and documents were carefully organized.  Old itineraries help to re-establish the proper chronology of the trip.  And once the photos are sorted and scanned chronologically, and I can use them for the project's "B-Roll" -- to fill in any gaps where video coverage was inadequate.

A set of properly scanned, named and dated old photos are easy to back up; easy to share!  This digital photo frame now cycles through several thousand of those old snapshots:

Bring old vacation memories back to life
 by displaying them on a digital frame like this one!

Try using scanned vacation photos as a computer screensaver!