Preserving Your Photographs

Stacks, drawers, boxes, albums - all full ofall their photographs.
photographs. Each photograph has a significantThere are many alternatives to preserving your
meaning, capturing a time, place or person that wephotos. You can hire a service, there are an
wanted to remember. Today we have an abundanceabundance of companies that offer this type of
of photographs on our home computers, because ofservice on the internet. Most companies charge by the
time restraints many find a home on our hard drive,photograph and the DPI (dots per inch). Buy a scanner
never seeing the light of day!and start scanning, the upside is you will save money
Over the years your hard copies of photos will fade,when you buy your own scanner, downside is this is
that just one of the reasons it is important to preservean extremely time consuming process.
your photographs. Often times we don't realize howWhen I scan my photographs in a 300-600 dpi it
precious these photographs are until disaster hits;usually takes about an hour to do sixty photographs. I
flooded basements, fire, humidity, natures elements arethen open up Photoshop and start enhancing each of
not always kind to our photographs. When a naturalthe photos by restoring color, removing red eye and
disaster hits you can replace most of the items youany blemishes on the photograph. This is very time
lost in your home; the one thing you cannot replace isconsuming but it is all part of the process.
your photographs, your memories.Once your photographs are scanned and placed in the
The importance of scanning and preserving ourproper folders; for example, Betsy infant to preschool,
photographs can been seen in the faces of those whoetc., you can now download your photos to cds. I
lost all their photos in Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida,suggest that you make several copies of the cds,
Alabama, Texas, Iowa, and among others Californiakeep one for yourself, send one to a friend or family
fires. I remember watching countless interviews onmember in another state for safe keeping and put one
television, countless individuals relived their experiences,in a fire proof box.
more often than not they mentioned that they had lost