What do you do with a lifetime of pictures, especially the ones that were taken with a film camera and printed on paper? I decided to create video slideshows.
Background
When I was growing up, there were no digital cameras. Everything was film based. In college, I had a decent compact camera that used 35 mm film that went on all of our canoe and camping trips. When my daughter was growing up, we used multiple different film cameras on all of our rock climbing, camping, fishing, skiing and cycling trips. Over the years we collected hundreds of pictures.
Then came digital. Between cell phones and digital cameras now I had even more pictures to deal with. At least, there was not a physical print that would deteriorate over time. So what do I do with a lifetime of old print pictures?
Storing them is a pain. Putting them in albums is time consuming and takes up lots of space. Storing them in a box does nothing to preserve them and that also takes space. At a minimum, I needed to digitize them. Better yet, I could put them into a video slideshow. That way I could give my daughter a copy without dumping a bunch of old prints on her. And I was downsizing!
The Process
Being value driven, I wanted to do the work (scanning) myself. There are services available that will scan pictures, do some editing and save them in multiple formats. Those services are not cheap. In the end, only the scanning could be outsourced and it was not that tough to do.
Collection
My process started with collecting all of the prints that I could find. This was a bigger job than I anticipated because some were in albums, some were in envelopes and most were in plastic bags. So, the first step was to get them together.
Sorting
I sorted based on two criteria. First, was the picture worth scanning? Was it of a decent quality? Did it contain something I wanted to see?
If it was worth scanning, then I would sort it by subject, such as cycling, fishing, camping, etc.
Scanning
Once I was done sorting, then I scanned the pictures. I set my scanner for the highest resolution that it had and created a folder on my computer using subject as the folder name. Then it was just a matter of feeding all of the prints through the scanner. My scanner would do about 3-4 pictures per minute.
Review
When the scanning was complete, I did a quick pass through all of the pictures. Occasionally, a picture may have gone through the scanner a little crooked or the scan was incomplete. In those instances I just re-scanned the picture.
Create Slideshow
The last step was to create video slideshows. There are a lot of good instructional videos on YouTube about creating slideshows with Davinci Resolve, which is the video editor I use.
Copy to Flash Drives
The final step was to copy the photo files and the video slideshows to a flash drive. The flash drives allow the pictures to be viewed on a computer or a smart TV.
Summary
While I am not finished yet, I have made a lot of progress. I gave relatives slideshows of really old pictures for Christmas and they were appreciated.
This spring I hope to finish up and be able to get rid of several boxes of old albums and prints while still having all of the memories available.
