Scanning Things In.

Today I have been mostly Scanning Things In.
I promised Rob that I'd send him a pile of photographs of Things We Did Together. As he's still very much paper-based and all of my recent photos are online, it made sense that I'd scan the photos in and send the originals to him.

I was a bit nervous about this at first. My photos! But as soon as I started to see the results of the scanning, I was more than happy to keep my old photographs in digital form. At 300 dpi, you can see a lot more detail than you can at 6 x 4".

These two are from Exeter Cathedral (1998) and Cardiff Castle (2001), respectively.

I've scanned in almost 200 photos so far, and there are still more to go through. Most of them are set to "private" on Flickr at the moment, as I haven't yet checked with Rob whether or not he's happy for them to be shared.

If you fancy a bit of amusement though, there are two galleries full of beer-fuelled shennanigans over on Facebook, in the form of lots of parties at the Hobgoblin. My photos are from 1995 to 2001, although I'm sure I'm still missing a box somewhere. The galleries are here and here. I don't think you need to be signed in to Facebook or me on my Friends list to see them. Let me know if that's not the case?

What I'm wondering now is what on earth am I going to do with all my photos?! I've got absolutely hundreds of the damn things, all stored away in boxes, and I never look at them.

I think my first challenge is to get them all scanned in, and all backed up onto CDs. That way I have two digital versions of them, as well as the paper ones that I'm still keeping. I'd quite like to do more with the paper ones than just shove them back in a box though. I recently inherited lots of family photos from my two Grandmas, so it would be quite nice to put together some new albums with those pictures shuffled into the chronological order.

I took all my photos out of their albums many years ago, as I was using those self-adhesive ones, and was worried about the photos being damaged. I have some lovely new albums, old-fashioned ones with black pages, but I haven't got around to doing anything with them.

As always, I think this is something I'm going to have to work on in my Spare Time. I have plenty of access to the scanner this week though, so at least I can get a move on with that part.