Purging Our Pictures
Well, it’s our last night in our home. Tomorrow morning we leave for the airport while our estate seller sells what she can and donates or junks the rest. I can say with relative confidence that we have done everything we hoped to do to prepare and we are ready to go. I’m pleasantly surprised to find there are no last minute jitters or second guessing.
When we moved to Florida and downsized from 3,300 to 2,000 square feet, we did a major purge of “things” we accumulated over the 12 years we lived in our previous house. What a job it was! This time was much easier, because the estate seller is doing most of the work for us. But in that move we kept a whole lot of photo prints.
If you were born after, let's say, 1995, then you might not realize that there was a time when all of your pictures were in print form. No digital backups were available, and if you were lucky you still had the (physical) negative so you could have more prints made if you wanted. When someone was interviewed on the six o'clock news outside their burning home, two of the most frequent comments were:
Or
Jim, circa nineteen-ninety-something. That curly thing attached to the phone is called a “cord”. It gave you something to twirl around your fingers when you were bored with the conversation.
Since Carrie and I were both born well before 1995, we still had a great number of physical prints from our pre-digital photography days. We did not want to have to store them, so we digitized them. How did we do this?
I'm sure there’s a service somewhere that you can mail your prints to and they will do it for you, though I'm also pretty sure that would have been expensive for the number of pictures we had. I do have a flatbed scanner but that would have been quite tedious. So what we did was use the PhotoScan by Google app on our phones.
I don’t know when this picture was taken, because Carrie looks the same now as she did then (different hair, of course).
This handy tool let’s you scan photos using the camera on your phone. First, it asks you to frame each photograph in a box on your screen and click the start button. Then it guides you through moving the camera lens to each of the corners of the photo so it gets multiple views of the picture that it will merge into the final scanned picture. After you scan a couple and get the hang of it, it’s quick and easy. It even uses your flash so that the photograph is well lit and is smart enough to remove the glare from the picture automatically. The scanned pics are automatically uploaded into your Google photos account, but of course you can upload them to your favorite photo storage service. If you're not using some kind of automatic upload service already to back up your pictures, you should be!
My brother and his wife, before he lost all his teeth and developed his hunchback.
To add a little fun to the process, anytime we came across a fun or goofy or otherwise interesting old photo of a friend or family member, we set it aside. Then later we’d stick a stamp on the back and address it like a postcard to the person in the picture. It was just a fun way to give that person a little flashback instead of just chucking the print into the trash.
But now the scanning is done and the estate seller is finishing up preparing the house for the sale tomorrow. Tomorrow morning we say goodbye to this home and we are eager to then be “home free”.