For years my family has wanted to get my Dad’s scrapbook scanned into digital media for fear something ever happened to it. I finally got it done. My Dad kept it in the depths of his filing cabinet and rarely brought it out, but it’s truly priceless. I’ll just let a few of the pictures and articles do the talking…
Winston-Salem, NC 1949
*note: boring first part, nice pictures down the page
So you might wonder what I did with my time since I resigned at the beginning of June. When there’s upheaval in my life, one of the ways I deal with it is to get hyper-organized. I didn’t plan it this way, but one task led to the next…
It started innocently enough with some music organization. First, I transferred numerous old cassette tapes to .mp3 (mostly live concerts). Then I removed any duplicate songs hanging around in our iTunes library. Next, I decided to find the artwork for every album. We have a good amount of obscure soul music, so tracking down the album covers or some piece of relevant artwork was a monstrously tedious task. After that was all done and our music library was backed-up in numerous locations, I sold off our cds to the local used music store.
At this point, I was ready for more mind numbing chores. Eliminating the majority of the paper in our house is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, so this was my chance. The crucial first step in the process was buying a Fujitsu Scansnap scanner. I had been reading rave reviews about this scanner on uncluttering blogs (yes, they exist, and yes, i read them) for a year or two. I have to say, the product did not disappoint. It does double-sided scanning directly to pdf or jpg and it feeds documents automatically, so you can literally scan hundreds of pages in a matter of minutes. It wasn’t fun, but I eventually reduced two and a half filing cabinets worth of assorted bills and paper down to two or three folders. I also scanned and disposed of the 15 or so huge binders I had from business school. Not surprisingly, my beloved shredder died in the middle of this whole process. I find it remarkable that 15 years of tax returns, assorted bills, owners manuals, all of our notes from undergrad, nursing school, business school, and thousands of photographs can all fit on a moderate size thumb drive. And in case you’re worried about security, it’s all backed-up in several locations and encrypted.
While scanning bills wasn’t fun, scanning our photographs was a treat. And no, I didn’t dispose of those once they were scanned. Here are some gems found along the way…
Adrienne’s kinda pretty, eh?…
So those are just few of the pictures that made me smile. The very best part of the picture scanning project was doing my Dad’s scrapbook. That deserves its own post.
