The Scanning Project

As promised, here is a little more information on the photo scanning project I have undertaken.

My goal is to have all my physical photos converted to digital so that ALL my photos are digital. I have been 100% digital since 2001, so I guess I have a shorter time period in which I need to do this, BUT it seems I took a LOT of pictures in high school and college, so it is taking a LONG time to do this!

First of all, if you have any physical photos at all, get them out NOW and write on the back who the subjects are. The closer you are to that age the better. My high school days are well over 20 years behind me and my college days are about that long as well, so the names of a lot of people in those pictures are long gone from my feeble brain. No one should ever have to go through this,so PLEASE save yourself some heartache and do this now. Even if you will never scan all your pics, you may want to know someday who those people were.

Now that I am off my little soapbox, I can give you the logistics. I knew this would be a pretty big project and I had to fit it in among my other motherly duties, so I decided to give myself 3 months to do it. I broke the project down into three phases, one month each, starting in January. (Yes, I am not quite done, but I am very close!) Within each phase, I had a couple of main steps and each of them had completion dates. I know, I am a little crazy! (I even had a small Gantt Chart. How sick is that?) Within those steps, if it was over a week, I also broke that task down into smaller steps and had dates associated with those steps. For example, the second phase was all my old photos from high school. Within that phase, which was a month long, I knew I had 700 photos. So I knew that dividing those 700 photos between the 28 days of February, I had to do at least 25 photos a day every day. I knew that some days I would do more and some days I would do less or even none, so I gave myself a goal and deadline of 175 photos per week. This came out to the right number but did not tie me down to doing it daily.

Enough with the boring logistics. Whatever works for someone else is the best way for them to do it! I am halfway done with phase three now. It is the last phase, so I know I am in the home stretch now, but I am having a huge issue getting motivated. After over 2 months of this crap, I am ready to move on, know-what-I-mean?

I am not going to include any pictures that I scanned because I want to protect everyone's privacy and blah, blah, blah. However, I have already scanned about 1500 photos and I have learned a few things along the way, so if you want to embark upon a journey like this, PLEASE let me know because I can provide a few tips and tricks.