{"id":36660,"date":"2022-10-08T00:01:54","date_gmt":"2022-10-08T07:01:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/barbarafalconernewhall.com\/?p=36660"},"modified":"2026-06-06T08:58:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T08:58:16","slug":"scan-those-family-photos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/scan-those-family-photos\/","title":{"rendered":"Scan Those Family Photos — Today!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"scan<\/a>
Our family photos are stored in 38 photo boxes, waiting to be digitized. It’s on my to-do list — scan those\u00a0 family photos. Photos by Barbara Newhall<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Scan those family photos!<\/p>\n

I’ve been saying that to myself for years.<\/p>\n

Our family photos — thousands (tens of thousands?) of them — have been lurking at the bottom of my to-do list for decades.<\/p>\n

Dutifully, I’ve been copying a reminder — “scan family photos” — from the bottom of one list to the bottom of the next. And from their place at the bottom of the list, those words have been giving me the evil eye. I could die any minute, they reproach. It could happen fast, no warning. I could wind up leaving my kids with boxes and boxes of photos to —<\/p>\n

To do what?<\/p>\n

My Millennial Heirs<\/strong><\/h5>\n

I live in a house. I have a closet big enough to store 38 boxes packed solid with slides, photos and negatives.<\/p>\n

My kids, on the other hand, are millennials. They have just enough space in their dwellings to house themselves, their spouses, their laptops, and a miscellaneous kid or two — with not an inch to spare for nine cubic feet of family archives.<\/p>\n

And so, all those photos need to get small. Very small. They need to be digitized.<\/p>\n

Over they years, naturally, other projects have elbowed out the “scan family photos” project. The wall between the kitchen and the dining room cried out to be taken down<\/a>. The retaining wall in the backyard<\/a> had to be kept from sliding downhill; it was going to take the Monterey pine with it.<\/p>\n

And then Jon died. And with that, a whole new set of gotta-dos crowded onto my list. Meet with the lawyer about the will, Meet with the cemetery guy about the burial site. Talk to God (refuse to talk to God?) about what God had done with Jon.<\/p>\n

But then, this past Friday, to my surprise, “scan family photos” found its way to the top of my to-do list.<\/p>\n

\"scan<\/a>
My daughter’s old bedroom closet is the storage site of 38 boxes — nine cubic feet — of family photos, waiting to be digitized.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Not the very top. On Fridays, the No. 1 spot goes to “write blog post.”<\/p>\n

Friday is my designated writing day<\/a>. The blog posts you read on this website get written on a Friday, though bits of them sometimes get written in the wee hours of a Saturday.<\/p>\n

And so, on this most recent of my Friday mornings, it looked like “scan family photos” was headed to the bottom of the to-do list once again.<\/p>\n

Except it wasn’t.<\/p>\n

To heck with the blog post<\/a>, I said to myself over breakfast oatmeal. What I really, really want to do today is get face-to-face with those boxes of family photos upstairs in Christina’s closet. All 38 of them.<\/p>\n

Organize the photos. Locate someone to scan them for me.<\/p>\n

And that’s what I did on Friday.<\/p>\n

It’s a Big, Big Project<\/strong><\/h5>\n

It will take some time — days — to organize those photos. But it will feel super good to have this project behind me.<\/p>\n

I’ll be able to die in peace.<\/p>\n

Seriously. Dying with thousands of family photos in disarray in a bedroom closet for the kids to come across when they go to sell the house (move into the house?) — it’s not what I’d call a peaceful death.<\/p>\n

Peaceful for me, maybe. But not for my kids. And I like my kids. My kids are cute. They were even cuter when they were little, of course. And I’ve got ten thousand photos to prove it.<\/p>\n

\"marine-world-africa-usa\"
One of the thousands of photos stored in Christina’s closet. Taken at Marine World<\/a> on Mothers Day, 1983. Yes, they actually let Jon hold that tiger cub.\u00a0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"scan<\/a><\/p>\n

I have a closet big enough to store 38 shoe boxes packed with photos and negatives. My kids do not. It’s time to scan those family photos. Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,30],"tags":[103,485,1188,82,2638],"class_list":["post-36660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-a-case-of-the-human-condition","category-my-changing-family","tag-aging","tag-family-photos","tag-house","tag-on-the-funny-side","tag-scanning-photos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36660"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49296,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36660\/revisions\/49296"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/server.stagingweb3.net\/barbarafalconernewhall\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}