Finally, an economical way to digitize ALL of your photos

Full disclosure: I swear I have no financial relationship with ScanCafe.com. I'm just promoting their site because

1. they're So Incredibly Cool.
2. with more family members archiving their photos digitally, we can more easily share our memories and do family history research
   

ScanCafe.com is the photo scanning service to beat them all. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm seriously considering it. With stacks of photos fading and deteriorating in my basement and attic, I've long felt a need to back up these memories in a compact digital format for preservation against time. But how can I find the time to do that by myself?

Now, I don't have to. Neither do you. Just open an account at ScanCafe.com, box up your photos and ship them to their address. Then, they get securely shipped to their secure, state-of-the-art scanning facility in India whose highly trained employees scan them at the highest quality, put them on any kind of digital media you want (the Web, CDs, DVDs, hard drives), and then send them right back to you. They'll even do custom naming of the folders the images are stored in on the disk! The whole process takes 7-8 weeks for most orders, but that's understandable given the number of images they handle (with lint-free gloves and forceps, I might add).

As a gift, you can even send a duplicate set of DVDs to family members as part of your order. That's great for when you want to share the memories while also diversifying the storage locations in case of disaster.

So, why bother doing this at all? Well, think about where your photos are stored.

• Are all of those photo albums with sticky backs and who knows what kind of plastic cover sheets preserving or destroying your photos? Acid-free photo presentation mediums didn't really come into widespread use until the late 80s.
• What about the cardboard shoe boxes your other photos are in?
• Most of all, what kind of paper were the photos themselves printed on? Are those acid free and resistant to fading and deterioration? Chances are, they're not.
• Now, think about the climate of where you live. Is it dry, humid, hot, or cold, or a mixture of all of the above throughout the year? Photos like to be stored in a cool, dry place free of dust, humidity, insects, and other environmental contaminants. It would be nice if we all had a private, climate controlled storage vault, but we don't.
  

That's where digitizing your photos is probably one of the greatest gifts you can give to your posterity. It renews the "death contract" on fading photos, especially given that you can restore color, remove scratches and blemishes, and enlarge them. ScanCafe.com charges a comparatively small fee for restoring photos and has a Professional offering that gives you a number of FREE photo restoration services including automated dust and scratch removal, manual cropping & re-orientation, manual color correction, and manual red-eye removal.

Just do it. Like these folks, you'll be glad you did.