What family stories are most important to preserve for my children?
To get started, spend some time interviewing or emailing your relatives to get the important stories recorded. Grab the oldest photo albums you have and review them with family elders to figure out who’s who, or sit down at the computer and type your own memories of key moments. Remember, the point of photos and videos is to tell stories, but they rarely tell the whole story. Figure out what stories you want to tell and whose help you need to tell them, and you’ll be well on your way.
What parts of this project do I want to do myself?
Scanning: Two to three minutes per image to scan, crop, and retitle. Plan on anywhere between five to 20 hours for getting organized before scanning. Organizing Your Digital Library: 30 to 90 seconds per image to folder, caption and/or tag. Interviewing Family Elders: Two to three hours per family member for interviews, plus one hour per interview to transcribe notes. Genealogy Research: Three to six hours for a general scan of available documents. Compiling a full family tree could take 50-plus hours depending on your family’s history and the availability of key documents. Designing a Family Book or Website: You can easily spend over 100 hours designing a full family history book, but a book about a specific time period or segment of the family can be produced in under 10 hours depending on your knowledge of the software you’re using.
What’s my budget for hiring professional services to help?
Scanning: Prices generally range from 30 cents to $1 per photo or slide, 20 to 30 cents per foot of 8 mm film, and $15 to $25 per VHS tape. Scanning delicate scrapbooks, artwork, letters, or framed items may cost more. If you are planning to buy your own equipment, basic equipment can cost between $800 to $1,500, or $5,000 to $10,000 for professional-grade digitizing. Organizing Your Digital Library: Professional organizing services will usually run $50 to $100 per hour. Interviewing Family Elders: Family members will likely be happy to talk to you free of charge. Oral historians generally charge $150 to $300 per hour. Genealogy Research: Professional genealogists usually charge over $100 an hour and frequently have 10 to 20 hour order minimums. You can often find affordable support at your local genealogical or historical society. Online resources can cost $50 to $100 to access. Designing a Family Book or Website: A professional design service will usually run between $50 to $120/hour. For web design, students and entry-level designers often charge $20 to $30 an hour. Video editing usually runs $60 to $90 per hour.
Counting Photos: Tightly stack your photos and measure them in inches. There will be roughly 100 photos per inch. Shoe boxes typically hold an average of 600 photos per box. Photo albums and scrapbooks usually hold an average of 175 photos. Counting Slides: Tightly stack your slides and measure them in inches. There will be roughly 25 slides per inch. Additionally, most boxes or carousels are clearly labeled as containing either 80 or 140 slides. Counting 8 mm and 16 mm Film: Group your reels by common sizes and use the graphic below as your guide:
How do I decide what photos to scan and videos to convert?
Identify and digitize the items you know you absolutely cannot live without. For example, your baby books, wedding albums and videos, ancestral scrapbooks, etc. Prioritize the formats that are fading fastest. VHS, Hi8, and any other camcorder tapes degrade at the most rapid rate. Focus on stories that are important to your family. Don’t fall in love with your own photography skills. You may have taken 15 beautiful shots of the same sunset, but you only need to scan one and write a thoughtful note about what happened that day. Prioritize before organizing. Create three piles: Scan, Keep and Discard. Scan the no-brainers, keep the tougher decisions for another time, and discard the true clutter.
How do I best share all of this with my family?
Photo BooksPros: Easiest to self-teach, easy to fill in content gaps with written sectionsCons: Cost of printing copies for the whole familyTip: Make sure to get PDF or e-book versions of any book you make online Documentary VideoPros: Combination of audio and video is uniquely powerfulCons: Challenging to self-teach and expensive to outsource; content gaps can make finishing a project difficult WebsitePros: Flexibility to build over time while enjoying the work in progressCons: Long-term responsibility to maintain itTip: Upload your material to a free cloud site and see if your family uses it before investing in a custom site Eric Niloff is the co-Founder and CEO of EverPresent, a team of 40 scanning technicians, digital organizers, designers and editors based in Newton, Massachusetts. Eric writes and advises on how to make family history preservation part of family events, estate plans, and other family moments.
