Sunday ScanFest — Why It’s Important

Today, I took part in my first ScanFest, a monthly online event hosted by Miriam Midkiff of AnceStories. A bunch of us chatted as we scanned in family photos or other items to be preserved electronically for the future. It was a lot of fun — very helpful to have the distraction of friends to chat with while performing what can otherwise be a monotonous task.

Events like this are extremely important. I know how vital it is for me to make copies of my family photographs, but I always put it off. Today, I was able to scan all of the photos and some other documents that I had previously put into a scrapbook about my dad. Some of the items date back to the 1800s. There are others in my family who have copies of some of these photos, but not necessarily all.

In a way, it was even more important for me to scan more recent photos (from the 1970s and 1980s) because these are the only copies I’m aware of — the negatives have long since been lost or forgotten.

Beyond just scanning my images and documents onto my computer, I took the extra step of saving them in a vault I’ve created in Memory Manager 3.0 software by Creative Memories. This program helps you organize your photos, journal your photos digitally and then print them online or at home. The software works with Creative Memories Storybook Creator, where you can create digital scrapbooks to share online or prepare professional-quality printed copies through the CM Photo Center. It also provides a means to store video and audio files. Memory Manager even has photo editing capabilities like re-sizing, red-eye reduction, color correction, etc.

The vaults can be backed up by saving them to CD or external hard drive. The software helps you to create shadow copies for extra security.

If you are scanning your photos, that is a good first step, but please make sure you are making back-up copies, no matter what your system. If you are not yet using a back-up system, please consider Creative Memories’ Memory Manager software. It provide so much more functionality than just a folder on your hard drive.

If you have any questions about Memory Manager, etc., please feel free to contact me!