Photo Project

For quite a while now, I have been working on digitizing family photos.

I guess the project started about 4 years ago. When I went home to Pennsylvania, I spent a day with my grandma. She had boxes of old photographs from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, but none of them were labeled. We sat down, and slowly went through all the pictures. She told me who were in the pictures, and I labeled them on the back. We didn't get them all done at one time, but we were slowly able to label them all.

The next step was to scan my own pictures that I had taken before I bought my first digital camera. I had pictures from high school & college, family and church events, and trips to Romania, EuNC, and Israel. Again, it took a while, but little by little I got them all scanned.

In October 2007, my other grandma turned 90, and we scanned many of the family photos and turned it into a video tribute.

Last summer, I bought a new scanner, a CanoScan 4400F for less than $100. It has a special attachment which will scan slides and 35mm negatives (in addition to pictures). I then brought back to Kansas all of my grandma's pictures (the ones I labeled a few years ago) to scan. I also brought my dad's slides (mainly from the 1970s), and a shoe box filled with 35mm negatives. For the past several months, my spare time has been spent scanning these pictures.

For Christmas, I loaded several hundred pictures on digital photo frames. We gave one to my grandma and the other to my great aunt and uncle. For my brother's birthday earlier this year, I posted several pictures of us over the years on Facebook.

I've made a lot of progress in my scanning project. I finished scanning slides a few weeks ago, and today I finished scanning pictures. All I have yet to scan is the shoebox filled with 35mm negatives. I hope to get them done by the end of July, when I move back to Pennsylvania before moving to Romania.

Click on the following links to see some of the pictures I have scanned:

• Family pictures from the 1910s-1970s
• My home church: York First/Stillmeadow Church of the Nazarene (1980s-2000s)
  
• Pictures of my brother and me growing up (1986-present)
  
• Pictures from Romania (2001-2004)
  
• Pictures from ENC, EuNC, and Israel trip (1999-2003)
  

I've also downloaded Windows Live Photo Gallery, which allows me to add tags to pictures similarly to how people are tagged on Facebook. This will help me preserve the content from labels on the backs of the photos to a digital format. Once I'm in Romania, I can continue this project by adding more tags and touching up the photos.