Digitizing 60 Years of Family Photos - Share the Memories!

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The discussion revolves around the digitization of family photo slides spanning over sixty years, with one user sharing their experience of converting these memories into digital format for their parents. They plan to present the digitized photos in a digital frame, highlighting the surprise their parents will have upon seeing the vast number of images stored on a small SD card. The quality of the old slides is noted, with some images appearing as if they were taken recently, showcasing the durability of the slides over time. Participants express nostalgia for old photographs, appreciating their unique textures and the emotions they evoke. There is also a conversation about the technology used for digitization, with some opting for professional scanning services due to the labor-intensive nature of the process. The topic of photo enhancement is discussed, with users sharing tips on color correction and the importance of preserving the original quality of vintage images. Overall, the thread emphasizes the value of preserving family history through digitization while fostering a sense of nostalgia for the past.
Ivan Seeking
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I am currently digitizing sixty years of family photo slides [I should say over thirty years worth going back over sixty years]. What a treat! My parents really have no idea what is going on. I plan to give them digitized copies in a digital photo frame with all sixty years included! What I'm not going to tell them is how long it will take to cycle through all of the photos. :biggrin: I wonder how long they will last upon the first viewing. They really have no concept of memory capacity these days, so it should come as quite a surprise to see all of those slides on that tiny little SD chip.

One that I thought worth shaing was this picture of my mom and dad's car when I was just a little seeker. Isn't that about the ugliest car you have ever seen?! :smile:

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/3143/459431r1055.jpg
 
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I kinda like the way old cars look. New cars all seem to look so much alike, they're sort of boring.
 


It's not often you see such an old photo with such high quality. Is that the seventies? Or earlier?
 


tchitt said:
It's not often you see such an old photo with such high quality. Is that the seventies? Or earlier?

That is from 1959! Yes, after all of these years, the slides have held up exrememly well. I have some scenic shots that look like they could have been taken yesterday. For example:
http://img200.imageshack.us/img200/7179/459431r12626.jpg

But, I was hoping that other members may have some family photos to share.
 
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Ivan Seeking said:
That is from 1959!



Unbelievable.

I mean photo quality :wink:
 


Borek said:
Unbelievable.

I mean photo quality :wink:

Indeed! You can imagine how pleased I was with the results. Mom and dad are going to freak when they see this.

Btw, dad took all of these using a camera that he bought in Japan during the US occupation.
 
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735e.jpg


My Father in the 1960's when my Granny told him to catch the turkey, for Thanksgiving the next day.
 


hypatia said:
735e.jpg


My Father in the 1960's when my Granny told him to catch the turkey, for Thanksgiving the next day.

Did he catch it?
 


http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/3019/familyxud.jpg

A (poor quality) picture (from left to right) of one of my sisters, one of my brothers, and me taken in the 60s from the side of the gravel road on which we lived. The picture was probably taken by my oldest brother using an old Brownie,

http://www.brownie-camera.com/.
 
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  • #10


Ivan Seeking said:
I am currently digitizing sixty years of family photo slides [I should say over thirty years worth going back over sixty years]. What a treat! My parents really have no idea what is going on. I plan to give them digitized copies in a digital photo frame with all sixty years included! What I'm not going to tell them is how long it will take to cycle through all of the photos. :biggrin: I wonder how long they will last upon the first viewing. They really have no concept of memory capacity these days, so it should come as quite a surprise to see all of those slides on that tiny little SD chip.

One that I thought worth shaing was this picture of my mom and dad's car when I was just a little seeker. Isn't that about the ugliest car you have ever seen?! :smile:

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/3143/459431r1055.jpg

Ivan.. you're kidding right? That car is amazing! But not as amazing as the one right behind it!

All of these pictures are great guys. Today's pictures, much like today's cars, all look the same to me. There is something that is so real about old pictures. They are so textured. I know that life looked the same as it does now (i.e., the grass was the same green and the sky the same blue)... but pictures make it seem like it was so different. Know what I mean?
 
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  • #11


mkb06.jpg


View from my window, late seventies.

Edit: hm, that's not a family photo. So here is my Dad, probably a few years earlier:

mkb04.jpg
 
  • #12


Borek said:
Unbelievable.

I mean photo quality :wink:

I think slides tend to be hirer quality.
 
  • #13


Ivan, that looks like a screen capture from Mad Men ;)

I'll join the party. My gramp doing some fieldwork,

http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/7629/fieldwork.jpg
 
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  • #14


It was 1960; the world hadn't turned colour yet.

wedding2.jpg


Edited to add: So my parents got married in black and white.
 
  • #15


junglebeast said:
Ivan, that looks like a screen capture from Mad Men ;)

Heh, not at that resolution!

Just out of curiosity, can anyone name that car - make and model?
 
  • #16


GeorginaS said:
It was 1960; the world hadn't turned colour yet.

wedding2.jpg


Edited to add: So my parents got married in black and white.

I take it you were a colored child?
 
  • #17


Ivan, wouldn't that be 'coloured' child? :biggrin:
 
  • #18


GeorginaS said:
It was 1960; the world hadn't turned colour yet.

wedding2.jpg


Edited to add: So my parents got married in black and white.

Wow, how cool is that...your father had Harry Potter glasses! :biggrin:
 
  • #19


Tsu said:
Ivan, wouldn't that be 'coloured' child? :biggrin:

See? Tsu is paying attention. :biggrin:

Moonbear said:
Wow, how cool is that...your father had Harry Potter glasses! :biggrin:

Harry Potter didn't have a spiffy brush cut to go with his glasses, though. :wink:
 
  • #20


Saladsamurai said:
Ivan.. you're kidding right? That car is amazing! But not as amazing as the one right behind it!

Yep that was back in the day when a person could recognise the make of a car by just seeing a tail light or fender.

I love the great pics that can be made from old slides.
 
  • #22


Moonbear said:
Wow, how cool is that...your father had Harry Potter glasses! :biggrin:

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Harry Potter has GeorginaS' father glasses? Harry Potter ripped them off! You might be looking at a big pay day.
 
  • #23
The slides preserve the images incredibly well, don't they Ivan?

You decided to change the thread name? I realized I wasn't being very phunny with my photo.

Your project is a great idea. I sent my parents one of those digital picture frames for Christmas along with a compilation of scanned photos on a memory stick. My father even figured out how it worked without asking me. It's handy for them too because they don't have a computer so they can review their camera images off of its memory card on a larger screen than the one on the camera.

Family albums and photos are the best. Now you've got me thinking that I ought to digitise more of mine. I have some truly oldie goldies of great grandparents as children that are beginning to crumble. Digitise and even re-printing is probably a good plan.

But! I'll bet your folks will be thrilled with your efforts.
 
  • #24
Double post. Gack! The forum's phunny this morning. My apologies.
 
  • #26
Lol. I have to buy scanner and do the same one day, trick is - many of the slides I have here were not kept in the correct conditions and they are terribly dusted

Ivan, what scanner have you used?
 
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  • #27


Moonbear said:
Wow, how cool is that...your father had Harry Potter glasses! :biggrin:
He looks like Clark Kent.
 
  • #28
Borek said:
Lol. I have to buy scanner and do the same one day, trick is - many of the slides I have here were not kept in the correct conditions and they are terribly dusted

Ivan, what scanner have you used?

Heh, I took them to Walmart to be scanned. :biggrin: They have 6 MP scanner. The cost of having them do it was about the same as buying a scanner... actually, it was a little cheaper doing it this way. Since we don't have any more slides to do, and rather than spending the time scanning them myself, it made sense to take them in. For me the work was in carefully removing each slide from its metal frame [seen in the photo] with a little screwdriver; organizing by events or dates; orienting for lanscape or portrait; flipping those that were mirror imaged; adjusting for color and brightness if needed. Interestingly, the slides from 1979, for example, didn't hold up nearly as well as those from 1959! Many needed color correction.

They could have been done more cheaply by sending them away but I didn't want to let them get out of my control. So a batch of 200-300 was taken in each morning, and each evening I collected what had been done and what wasn't done.

I must say that this was the first time I was ever happy with WalMart. They did a great job. It was funny too because the people who worked on them kept telling me how fun it was. Apparently they got a charge out of watching our family grow and age over the years.
 
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  • #29
Just don't make the mistake of using CD's ad your new storage medium :wink:
 
  • #30
junglebeast said:
Just don't make the mistake of using CD's ad your new storage medium :wink:

I thought about that. Multiple backups were saved on hard drives as well as in flash memory. The photo display uses an SD chip. My dad is going to be blown away that all his [and my] years of photography is contained in that little chip. :biggrin:

Does anyone happen to know how long flash memory is supposed to be reliable? I assume the answer is "decades".
 
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  • #31
Depends on how much reading/writing of the drive you do... but if you only look at them 'every once in a while'... then you should be fine for a good 10-20 years... but you should replace the drive probably every 3-4 maybe 5 years just to be safe...
 
  • #32
Ivan Seeking said:
Does anyone happen to know how long flash memory is supposed to be reliable? I assume the answer is "decades".

As I understand it solid state storage is immortal in the same way as the elves in lotr -- they never die of old age, but you can still kill them.
 
  • #33
junglebeast said:
As I understand it solid state storage is immortal in the same way as the elves in lotr -- they never die of old age, but you can still kill them.

No, flash memory retention is finite. Depends on the technology, and how often the cells are accessed, but for low duty like this, the "decades" number is probably accurate. If you refresh the data every 10 years or so, the lifetime should be quite long.
 
  • #34
berkeman said:
No, flash memory retention is finite. Depends on the technology, and how often the cells are accessed, but for low duty like this, the "decades" number is probably accurate. If you refresh the data every 10 years or so, the lifetime should be quite long.

Does reading count as refresh, or are these completely separate processes?

Or is it technology dependent?
 
  • #35
Borek said:
Does reading count as refresh, or are these completely separate processes?

Or is it technology dependent?

For flash devices that I'm familiar with, you need to do an actual write to refresh the trapped charge. Reading doesn't do anything with the trapped charge, other than to sense whether it is there or not.

So to refresh most flash memory cells, you would do an erase-write cycle.
 
  • #36


Ivan Seeking said:
Heh, not at that resolution!

Just out of curiosity, can anyone name that car - make and model?

Looks like a Studebaker Lark Station Wagon.
 
  • #37


S_Happens said:
Looks like a Studebaker Lark Station Wagon.

Bravo!
 
  • #38
I'm definitely not old enough to be the one who should have answered that...
 
  • #39
Hail Ye Old People! :biggrin:
 
  • #40


Astronuc said:
He looks like Clark Kent.

I'll have to tell him that. :smile:

IMG.jpg


Maternal grandfather of said Clark Kent lookalike with the Harry Potter glasses. (My great-grandfather.) This one is circa 1890 something. I scored in the picture collecting department because no one else was particularly interested in my grandmother's photo collection when she passed away.

Oh, and Ivan, congrats on accomplishing such a huge job. Lucky you for not having to scan them all yourself. That would have been an icky labourious job. And thank you for the idea of preserving those memories digitally. It hadn't occurred to me and a lot of my old photos are deteriorating.
 
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  • #42


George Jones said:
http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/3019/familyxud.jpg

A (poor quality) picture (from left to right) of one of my sisters, one of my brothers, and me taken in the 60s from the side of the gravel road on which we lived. The picture was probably taken by my oldest brother using an old Brownie,

http://www.brownie-camera.com/.

Is it me or do pictures like these just make you cry? What I mean is the nostalgia and the youth that was there.

Do you guys miss it? I think I do.
 
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  • #43
Cry? Not. Nostalgia? Sure thing.
 
  • #44
Nice enhancement, Ivan. What did you do?
 
  • #45


FireSky86 said:
Is it me or do pictures like these just make you cry? What I mean is the nostalgia and the youth that was there.

Do you guys miss it? I think I do.
The past was a different time and place. We didn't know much about the wider world and it's troubles - Ignorance is bliss.

But we grow, we learn.

Sometimes I miss the simplicity and more peace and quiet.


My reference is a place on the south coast of Australia looking out over Bass Strait and the Southern Ocean. The small town where I lived had a population of about 200-300 people. I could look north to farms and forest hills beyond the farms. The beaches were not very crowded. When storms passed, I could stand and watch tall waves breaking over the rocks and jetty.
 
  • #46
GeorginaS said:
Nice enhancement, Ivan. What did you do?

I tried a quick color correction and then adjusted the brightness, contrast, and midtones. I don't have anything special; just Microsoft picture manager. Since I've had a bit of practice lately I thought I'd see how well I could clean it up. You may be able to do better by playing with it for awhile.
 
  • #47
I think removing sepia tint is not a good idea - I suppose that's the way the picture looks.

They were all slightly brown 100 years ago :smile:
 
  • #48
Borek said:
They were all slightly brown 100 years ago :smile:

I guess it depends on the purpose. If you want the best pictures possible, clean them up. If you want the color for nastalgia purposes or to give it an old look, leave it be. In my case, I had color slides from 1979 that were turning brown. THAT was not acceptable. In this particular case, it is almost like giving the photographer better equipement. :biggrin: A picture that was never possible!

The point was to show how easily the photos can be enhanced with inexpensive software.
 
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  • #50
My first impression was that those photos look like a movie set, Ivan. Very cool. Who went to Tijuana in the 50s and took those pictures?

And yes, Borek, you're right. Those are the colours of the original photograph. Although clean up can make certain improvements to the photos -- as Ivan demonstrated -- I'd keep the original quality of them because their colours and hues are part of the history of them.

I'm a huge fan of old photos, and I'm not sure why. I just like them.
 

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