My mother has always been the life of the party.
Plattekill, New York - 1937
My family has been taking photos for over 130 years. As a result, I've inherited boxes of slides, photo books, and loose prints of various sizes that that document our family's history -- from momentous events like my grandparents' immigration from Germany to the United States, to the mundane like the photo above. It would be a pity not to find a way to preserve these images digitally.
Examine the scope of my collection (over 11,000 images), I came to several conclusions:
1. Scanning them is impractical. It takes minutes to digitize a group of photos or slides using consumer scanner technology, and having a commercial firm do it for me would be costly.
2. Organization of the digitized images needs to be planned. I didn't want to go from disorganized boxes to disorganized digital files.
3.