Digitizing Older Family Photos and Other Memories the Easy Way During the Holidays

This December, pause from the clatter and declutter.

Many families have traditions of doing puzzles and playing board games between Christmas and New Year’s Day. How about digitizing older family photos, videos, and other memories?

Here’s another idea to try this holiday:

After the gifts are unwrapped, take time to collect old family photos, videos, slide shows and other memories and plan to declutter for 2025.

I’m a photo coach and I enjoy showing families how to organize and safeguard their most meaningful memories.

The benefits include:

• Knowing you can easily find photos, slide shows, and other files that are important–like the one above of me and my siblings many Christmas seasons ago
• Having peace of mind because the memories are kept in one safe place
• Feeling satisfied that your family legacy is intact and can be easily passed along to future generations

I’ll be celebrating my 30^th business anniversary in March 2025 and the tools available now make it easier than ever to preserve your family’s story.

The Easy Way to Declutter and Digitize

I teach a simple 3-step process:

1. Gather your older photos, handwritten letters, audio tapes, slide shows, VHS tapes and any other memories you want to digitize. Look for them in closets, boxes in the garage, and storage units if you’ve placed them there.

2. Bring them into a staging area. Clear space on an unused desk or place them in storage containers and keep them in an area where you can sift through them. Keep the photos and documents that grip your emotions and have a file or small box where you place others that may be questionable if you want to keep them or not.

Toss the photos that are blurry and out of focus.

Remember, you don’t need to save everything but only the memories that are meaningful to you now and the ones that will be meaningful to family members 50 and 60 years from now.

You don’t have to digitize them all at once, either.

Digitize every few months if life gets busy.

3. Once you have initial memories selected, you’re ready to digitize them. I use the services of FOREVER® personally and with my clients.

The reason I chose FOREVER® is because it’s a complete, cloud-based memory-keeping system that has tremendous customer support. Digitizing is easy because you send off your files to FOREVER®’s state of the art facility just outside Green Bay, Wisconsin, and your originals are returned to you.

FOREVER® offers much more than digitizing older photos, videos, and other files. It’s a complete memory-keeping system that’s like having a digital bookshelf that’s safe and lets you use your memories in a variety of ways.

The FOREVER® Advantage

Files that are digitized can be stored on thumb drives, laptops, external hard drives and other electronic devices. The files are easy to share with email or services like Dropbox, but here’s what you need to look out for:

many digital storage solutions are temporary and can’t easily be passed from one generation to another.

Thumb drives can get lost, external hard drives can break, and I have a friend whose laptop and flash drive were stolen from off her kitchen table after she left her house for only about 15 minutes.

This is another reason I trust FOREVER®–it’s permanent storage and you own the digital rights to its content.

FOREVER® lets you:

Digitize older media formats.

Store your digitized files for a lifetime, plus 100 years and longer. Guaranteed.

Create printed photo books and gifts like calendars from your digitized files, like this photo book I made from my grandmother’s old photos that I had digitized and reprinted.

Journal your family’s story.

Research your family’s history using FOREVER® professional genealogists for consultations and help with finding records and tracing your family line back centuries.

How safe is it?

Thanks to the FOREVER® Guarantee Fund, files are backed up and migrated to newer technologies as the current file that’s stored becomes obsolete. This is done at no extra cost to you or future generations.

This means your children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren can access not just photos and videos, but also stories about those who have passed. Your legacy can live on, allowing future generations to connect with their roots and the memories of their loved ones.

Do you need to declutter?

Clutter makes us feel overwhelmed.

Please contact me if you need a helping hand to lay out a declutter and digitize plan.

I can guide you through the key steps to get you started on a successful path.

You and your family deserve to enjoy your memories, the story of your family and your legacy.

Declutter, digitize, and de-stress.

Here’s a related post you’ll find helpful:

Let’s Declutter and Digitize Your Older Holiday Photos and Videos and Store Them with the Newest Ones