Living in New York City can be tough—the high cost of rent sure doesn’t guarantee a large amount of living space. So, when ScanMyPhotos customer Brandi Larsen needed to move into a smaller NYC apartment, she was faced with a downsizing dilemma.
One of the things taking up a lot of space in her current apartment was a whole bookshelf of photo albums that were practically disintegrating as time wore on. As she was preparing for the move, Brandi knew it was time to turn her analog photos into digital copies.
“The albums held every picture that I had before photos went digital. They were mostly high school and college photos, and a few my parents had given me from growing up—there were more than a thousand pictures. I had to ditch the albums to get everything scanned—and that part was difficult. There were notes, ticket stubs, and all sorts of memorabilia next to the photos so I took pictures of the album pages in order to hold onto the memories without wasting any physical space.”
After a Google search, Brandi discovered ScanMyPhotos and decided to give it a shot. She removed the photos from the albums, put everything in order, and sent them to be scanned.
“I thought I would toss the hardcopies afterwards, but without the bulky albums the photos now only take up about five inches of space versus a whole bookshelf. And even though I was a little heartbroken about letting go of the albums, I now have them in the digital photo stream on my computer and can look at them whenever. Our TV is even hooked up to the computer and the screensaver randomizes the photos we have on iCloud. We’ll see pictures randomly come up and my daughter gets a big kick out of the ones from when we were younger.”
With her own photos taken care of, Brandi then turned to a bigger photo-scanning project.
“My mother passed away in October and it was awful. I gave my dad a flash drive of every picture I had taken that she was in and I made a digital album to send to him—I’m also in the process of doing that for my grandmother and aunts. And then for dad’s birthday, I bought him a ScanMyPhotos a package and he and I have been going through all our family albums and pictures together. He’s working on sending all that in next.”
While a photo scanning project can be time-consuming, it can also be a rewarding experience. Through both her own digitization project and her father’s Brandi learned something surprising about her family.
“As I was going through all these pictures I realized our family is hilarious. I can’t tell you how many pictures I’ve seen where we’re all making silly faces. I’ve seen the same silliness in photos of my parents and my grandparents—and it’s a pattern my husband and I do in our photos together and with our daughter. There’s this one photo of my mom that’s my favorite—it was moving day and she had my lamp shade on her head and she’s leaned back and laughing. Going through these photos you can see my family has so much fun together and we’re funny. There are lots of silly faces—it’s the best.”
The result of one downsizing project yielded great results for Brandi. She was able to free up space, organize and preserve her photos, and strengthen her connection with family members all in the course of one transaction.
