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My husband’s dad was an avid photographer while he was growing up, therefore, we have a lot of photos of my husband Jon as a kid. Several years ago we were visiting Jon’s folks in Florida and his dad expressed the desire to have several boxes of slides made into photographs that he could get copies of and give to all the kids. We brought the boxes of slides home to Missouri after our visit thinking it would be a simple process to have them converted to prints. Au contraire.
It’s been several years since we’ve had his slides and we’ve had good intentions all along. I’ve looked high and low for an affordable solution to this problem to no avail. I finally found a place that was more reasonably priced here lately, but still pretty expensive. Over 1200 35 mm slides have been sorted by date, shipped and converted to digital photos onto a CD. Technology at its best! When we received our CD, we immediately made copies for each of Jon’s siblings & packaged them up to ship to each of them. Then, we uploaded the entire CD to Shutterfly, an online photo storage hub that allows you to create all sorts of gifts from your photos. We made two photo books for Dad. His birthday was February 8th and we wanted to have the books created & shipped to him as a gift on his birthday but it took us longer to sort the slides by the year they were taken than we thought. Anyway, we got it done and the books are shipping to dad tomorrow!! Several hundred dollars later, I’m just happy we were able to preserve all of those family photos that were in the process of deterioration from years of storage in their boxes. Where family memories are concerned…money doesn’t matter.
I can’t wait to hear what he thinks about our little project. I know he will cry. Then he’ll call us and cry some more. I just love that man!
That is a fantastic thing to have done…. I expect many of the photo’s are great memories for him and will spark even other thoughts of Love, Joy and Happiness.
I’m sure he’s going to really love his books and he’ll be so happy to know all of the kids have copies of the same photos. They can make their own books if they want to! LOL
OMG, my sisters and I are facing the same kind of thing. We talked about it when we sold the house last year, but none of us really did anything. The boxes of hundreds of slides are at my sister’s in Rhode Island. My husband’s friend just finished doing his own and it took him quite some time. My dad also took a ton of photos when we were kids. Although my parents are gone, it would be a task for ourselves and our children. So tell me dear, what place did you use for this momentous job? Do they have a website?
Marjorie, we had these done at http://www.scanmyphotos.com, like I said, they’re not cheap but it’s the most reasonable that I’ve been able to find. It’s been worth the expense to have those photos from the slides that we can look at whenever we want to or make our own scrapbook online. Maybe all you girls can divvy up the slides so that it’s not all on one person, or one person do the work and you all split the cost. At Scan My Photos, the turn around time was maybe just over a week once we shipped and they received our slides. I’m going to start sending in our photos next that we took before the digital age, those that haven’t made it into scrapbooks yet. LOTS of photos…not looking forward to the process but I’ll be glad to get it done eventually.
Thanks! I checked them out. I don’t know how many we have but it’s probably in the 500 – 1000 range. I will have to ask my sister to count them. With 3 sisters, if we split the cost it should not be to harsh on a single pocketbook. I think the rates are very reasonable for the preservation they are doing.
How much “work” was involved for you before sending them in. Did you have to catalog them or label them or something?
I think they’re very reasonable too…in fact, I was thrilled when I found them and found their prices to be “doable” where some of the other places were just insanely expensive. The work involved depends on how your slides are stored currently and how organized you want them. Dad’s were in some order by year but not all of them. All we did was put everything in order by year. We put the year on the frame of every slide with a sharpie (just in case they got mixed up) and then put a piece of paper between each year. I made it obvious to whoever opened the box that they were divided by year. I figured we could guesstimate the order of the photos within the year once we got them back and that’s what we did. It wasn’t hard. Holiday photos, graduations, vacations, weddings, etc. were easy to sort out. Are yours in some sort of order now??