Seattle photo albums and 8mm film to digital in Queen Anne Neighborhood

About Project

Photo Albums and 8mm Film to Digital

When Margie Wetherald decided to digitize and organize her family’s photos, she knew transporting the collection would not be an option.  With an expansive collection consisting of loose photos, photo albums and 8mm film, Doorstep Digital’s concierge digitizing service was ideal for helping Margie accomplish her goals of purging and organizing decades of family memories. The Doorstep Digital team spent several days with Margie at her home in the Queen Anne area of Seattle. The process began by removing loose photos from dozens of albums while organizing and purging at the same time. In addition to the photo albums, Margie also had several rolls of 8mm film that needed to be converted to video. The Doorstep Digital team was able to accomplish all of this over the course of several days.  With her new and well-organized digital collection, Margie opted for the Synology server to store and back up her collection.  The installation of the Synology server meant that Margie’s family photos are now safely stored for generations to come.

Video Transcript

Photo Albums and 8mm Film to Digital

Jack:  Hello! We are here in the beautiful neighborhood of Queen Anne in the Seattle area just near down town within we were privileged awarded with the Weather home? Weather Home family, and this is our friend Margie and this is mother Pia of our team and so we’ve been here for the past three days and a been a ton of progress with, with Margie’s health so a method that does work to help purge and archive and organize our old photos.

Photo Album Margie: I started looking around for ways to digitize and immediately realized too much stuff to mail away and didn’t even really want to cart it someplace I needed to get through it but I didn’t really have an understanding of how to do that so when I realized there was a company that would come to the house and help me understand what to how to get it ready for them and how to do purging and help me with the technology so I will be able to seamlessly access it when the project is done it’s taken three days there’s another day at least and then some more work after that. The only way to do this really was to have someone come of the house.

Jack:  Yeah so we’ve made a lot of progress, all the equipment work well behaved for us and I want to show a couple things I’m going to walk down to our areas that she allowed us to be able to her Basement which was perfect but first I wanna kind the show she Margie keep them over here she she works amazingly and got all these these photos out of albums and down for us too so you can kind of tell you what you did this she did this in a day which is pretty amazing.

Photo Album Margie: So what I what I learned is that for those of us who have 20 to 30 years of albums with the fold that pull up stick on backing most of those pages have now deteriorated and the stickum is in not good condition that bindings are not on good condition and the pictures desperately need to come out of all of those albums and, and be digitalized so what we thought we had done to save was in fact not at all a good idea then of course there were many boxes of photos that hadn’t made it into the albums and I went through those as well and underneath all the albums are many, many, many, many, many of those snapshots that you take when you’re trying to get the one good photo now you know we just just delete all that stuff but I have photos taken by children you know lots and lots of stuff not to keep but you actually have to go through that and this processed forced that to happen and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was gonna be and now. We have the pictures that are worth keeping

Jack: So it that’s, that’s we’re gonna go see now so we’re walking and show you our office which was the basement and where all the work that we do completed and remaining…

Jack: But this was we were able to work from her basement here which was great the great space coincidentally because she made this week kind of her home improvement week and visual improvement and what else.

Photo Album Margie: Well we were reflooring two rooms upstairs which meant that there was a lot of noise and the doorstep people were great because they put up with a lot of noise and dust upstairs which I appreciated.

Jack: No problem so she’s gonna log home tidying up done and some of that’s still progress but we got everything you see here is completed we’re very happy to complete these, these shoeboxes of loose photos and we have a sticker here which says scan, back up and organized and so no she doesn’t do it again we’re able to complete slides and then and then kind of the next phase that we’re going to tale because these is all home movies which will which are old 8-millimeter and they are treasures that will turn out beautifully when, when we turn them into digital files but these will go these will go to digital files onto a temporary hard drive and into the more permanent solution which is the sonata G server.

Photo Album Margie: Well it seemed to make a whole lot of sense to have since we’ve invested in the process to have everything digitized to have a system that is completely safe and that will have more capacity so that we can add more things to it in the future and keep up our proper protocols now that we have this in place and not have photos scattered digitally on laptops and thumb drives and all other places where they are there’ll be enough capacity in this system to his dad had a whole lot of slides digitized before he passed away and now they can go on the system.

Jack: Yeah that’s exciting! Setting up a family repository central repository so that she could share with our family and oh that’s safe and protective over. This is this did a lot of fun to see the progress here thank you for your trust in us to work with you here in this beautiful neighborhood this is Queen Anne area of Seattle.