How to take Good Care of Family Memories ?

Everyone has good memories of their families and friends, and it is a good idea to make sure you can preserve these memories for as long as possible. This article suggests a number of ways you can do this to ensure those memories last.

How many photos do you have in various formats? If you are old enough to remember a time when all photographs were produced on rolls of film, you probably have boxes and albums of photos at home. Even if you are of the modern age and you are used to taking pictures on smart phones and digital cameras, you’ll have countless photos on your computer.

Either way, it makes sense to ensure you protect and preserve whatever you have. You will never be able to replace or replicate most of the photos you own. If something happens to them you will lose them forever.

How to Take Good Care of Family Memories ?

So what should you do first?

Well, in the case of old photos you should make sure you preserve any negatives you still own. You can always sort through them and get rid of any that don’t really matter, but keep all the others in protective wallets. It can be a good idea to get a small safe that is both waterproof and fireproof, as this is able to protect items such as negatives. Think about it – if your entire collection of photos was lost, at least you would be able to replicate it via the negatives.

As far as digital photo files are concerned, the best bet is to create copies of these as well. Keep copies on your computer’s hard drive, but make sure you set up some cloud based storage too. If you do this it doesn’t matter what else happens: you will always have copies in the cloud. These can be accessed from any computer and will therefore be immune to damage if anything should happen to your computer or your home. Hopefully nothing like this would ever happen but you never know – and memories such as these are irreplaceable.

Convert film to DVD

Of course you may also have memories captured on film. Cine film was once extremely popular and even home videos exist in their thousands across the country. In either case it is best to convert film to DVD and to store the DVDs safely in jewel cases. You can ask a professional to convert film to DVD on your behalf so you can get up to date copies that will stand the test of time. It is safer to convert them in this way because video tape is more likely to degrade or get chewed up or damaged. Cine film is even more fragile due to its age.

The main thing here is to make sure your memories are preserved in as many ways as possible. You may want to start by focusing on the most delicate film or content, whatever it may be. Which photos or films would hurt you most if anything were to happen to them? Once you have the answers you can get started. You can always approach the project with the idea of doing work gradually over time, so you are able to get the results you want. At the end you will be glad you put the effort in.