Top 10 Reasons To Digitize Photos, Films, Slides, Journals, Videos and more

1. Prevent Additional Damage To Your Priceless Mementoes: Faded, torn and molded photographs and documents become more damaged in time. But they also pose a threat to your undamaged photographs. The mold and bacteria on damaged mementoes can contaminate your entire collection. It's especially important to digitize anything that can cause other items to decay. After scanning contaminated photos and documents should be discarded or stored in plastic and kept away from other items.

2. It's much easier to share digitized mementoes with friends and family: Especially now that cloud storage is easily available (and Priceless Preservation now offers permanent cloud storage for all items we digitize). You can share memories with relatives who live in far away places via Youtube, Facebook, genealogy websites, our Priceless Preservation Cloud Service and other cloud sharing platforms.

3. You'll have a much better chance of preserving your family history for many generations: The fact that you'll be able to share your family films, videos, photos and other important mementoes so easily will help you preserve them for many decades to come! Redundancy is an archivists friend. By ensuring that many members of your family have access to your important memories, you'll provide much greater access to these treasures for generations to come.

4. You can use your digitized memories as a launchpad for even better and more exciting projects: That 1965 8mm film of your parent's wedding is pretty amazing. But what if you recorded your mom and dad talking about what was going on in each scene – and then made it the soundtrack to the movie. Narrated slide shows, family history books and interactive family trees – The possibilities are nearly endless.

5. Memorable Gifts: Digitized photos, films, slides and other mementoes make amazing gifts. Several of our clients have had us digitize thousands of slides or photos for their parents for Christmas or Hanukkah. In addition to receiving hard drives with the digital files and uploading the images to our permanent cloud service (from which they can be downloaded by multiple family members), our clients receive a digital photo frame with all of the images uploaded. It's a wonderful gift to open - particularly for retired parents who enjoy looking back on their younger years.

7. Restoration: It's just amazing what can be done to restore old photograph and documents once they've been digitized. Even basic scanning will improve most photos and documents. Click Here to see a gallery of our restoration work.

8. Magnetic media is a ticking time bomb: Although people often think their 16mm, Super 8 and 8mm films are at risk because they may be 50 years old or older, those films actually hold up to time quite well as long as they've been stored in a safe area. It's the VHS tapes, cassette tapes and any other magnetic tapes that are in danger of becoming totally obsolete. They're in such jeopardy because the magnetic particles on the tape wears away in time and eventually these tapes will be unplayable.

9. Wonderful Party Conversation Piece: Nothing unites people at an anniversary party, birthday, wedding or graduation party like a wonderful video, photo book or collage that honors the life of the honoree(s). It's much easier to create memorable photo conversation pieces when your photos, films and videos have been digitized.

10. Last but NOT least, Mother Nature: Unfortunately, floods, fires and other natural disasters pose a great threat to your mementoes. And you never know when something so tragic could happen to you. When you have your collection digitized and stored in a cloud, your mementoes will be as safe as they can be. We will provide you with hard drive or archival CDs with your digital files once your items are scanned. We want you to store your important mementoes in several places and share them with family members to keep these memories safe.