If you have a shoebox full of old Christmas photographs, then now is the time to bring it down from the attic and pass them around the table at this year’s Christmas meal. Everyone loves to reminisce, especially over old photographs showing bad haircuts and dubious festive jumpers. Here’s how to sort our your old Christmas photographs.
Make some tough decisions
Gather all your photographs together and lay them out. You might even want to go through them with a friend or family member to decide which photographs are most important and which ones you want to keep. We recommend sorting your photographs using the traffic light system – red is for the bin (for blurry photographs and those times you forgot to take the lens cap off), amber as a ‘maybe’ pile for you to place back in the shoebox and a green pile for you to safely convert to digital to preserve them forever.
Choose a good photo scanning service
You might think that all photo scanning companies are the same, but some are definitely better than others. Ideally, you want to choose a photo scanning service that offers high-res scans and that you trust to handle your cherished family photographs with care. They will usually post your photographs or negatives back to you along with the new digital photographs. And don’t forget to compare for price!
Delete up to 20% of your photographs
Experienced photo scanning services like My Photo Scanning will actually upload your new digital photographs to the cloud where you can delete up to 20% of them completely free of charge. Not all photo companies offer this, but it is an opportunity to use that amber pile of photographs that you weren’t sure about and convert them to digital without committing to paying for them. When you’re done choosing the images you like, you can download the files and receive them on a disc in the post.
Share them with friends and family
The best thing about digital photographs is that you can suddenly start posting and sharing all your old family photographs – many that people won’t have seen for years. If you’re unsure about what to post then it can be a good idea to add them to a Dropbox folder that everyone can access first, or post them on disc to family members before unexpectedly tagging people in embarrassing old family photos.
Display them with pride!
Now that you have your high-res digital images, wouldn’t it be a shame not to display them? One of the most popular ways to share digital images this Christmas is to upload your images to a USB stick and use a digital photograph frame to set your images on a constant loop. They make an excellent talking point when you have guests over, and old photographs really do unearth some interesting family stories. Plus, digital frames and photo scanning vouchers make great Christmas presents!
