Why You Need To Digitize
Your Photos and 35mm Slides

Here are some reasons for including family photographs digitized plus making your images available for printing by future generations:

• Distribution to relatives. Keep the originals and distribute the digitized copies. Gather together photographs and 35mm slides from many relatives then distribute the album back to them as a flash drive. No need to divide up the family photographs. Everyone gets a full set of photos.
   

• Disaster preparedness. Scanning and saving the digitized images to CD or DVD can provide a compact  storage solution. Make more than one CD and distribute to relatives.  The more copies that exist the more likely your pictures will survive any disaster. Digitized images that are stored on CD can be stored in a safe location like a bank safe deposit box.
   

• Preserve image quality before the original deteriorates. The longer your 35mm slides and photos sit around, the more likely they are to suffer serious degradation from fading, scratches, loss, or damage. If you have a 35mm slide or photo that is rapidly fading, get it digitized now before you lose too much quality. Get a digitized scan with highest resolution and color depth possible and store the picture on archival quality digital media. Plan for migrating the images every few years to a new format or media.
   

• Reduce handling of original photos and 35mm slides to prevent wear and tear. This is a significant factor for museums and photographic archives, but should not be overlooked in family photograph collections. Repeated handling of photographs can easily rub-off penciled captions, for example. 35mm slides are even more susceptible to damage from fingerprints and molds from oils on your fingers.