Digitising photos - have you done it?

[GherkOut]

I have probably 3000+ family photos. In albums, special boxes, wallets from the developers and loose. Mostly standard formats 5” x 7” etc but also lots of random ones, school photos, passport size from booths, graduation…
They take up A Lot of Space!

Over the years I’ve also created digital folders on my laptop for pics uploaded straight from my SD card when I bought a digital camera.

I’m considering taking the step of digitising the whole lot (Winter project!) and then storing them online and/or backed up on some kind of external hard drive.
Then ditching the hard copies.

Has anyone done this?
Do you regret it?
Points to consider?

I have done this. It is lovely to relive the memories as you do it.

I did my parents' family albums so all my parents'childhood photos. The earliest one was 1915. As my parents didn't write dates on loose photos I had a lovely time putting them into chronological order guessing whether they were older or younger. They are separated into my Dad's photos and then my Mum's and then them together.

My childhood family photos were luckily in an album started in the 1970s. I filmed the album as I turned page by page so I have that memory forever too before I had to destroy it by carefully removing the stuck down photos and scanned them. I had my Dad's permission to do that, my Mum died years ago. He has a digital photo frame so now can see the photos instead of them being tucked away and he also uses an ipad to view them too. He is in his 80s.

I used a Brother A4 sized portable scanner. I just fed them in one by one. Same with all our wedding proofs as we bought them over 26 years ago. Next year I will be scanning in our photos from the pre-digital age.

Definitely use belt and braces, cloud for sure and maybe an external hard drive. We have just recovered photos for a friend on a crashed and corrupted external hard drive. They had no back up. Some are lost forever.

We took the SD card from the scanner and uploaded that to a file. However, we pay for all our files to be uploaded to some cloud backup thing. The plan is to copy them over to my Google photos but I needed to pay for more storage due to the size of them.

My advice is to use a plug in scanner, I kept having to recharge mine but it was something we already had at home.

Thanks for the tips!

It does take time but is worth it. I save on a separate printing platform Snapfish. Then save on cd and USB sticks. It's quite quick to save once scanned. That takes ages.

I also bought a slide scanner from Lidl that scanned negatives and slides. Really good value and nice to see so many old shots.