How to Digitally Preserve Photos and Videos

This post is sponsored by Legacybox. As always, opinions and admission of cluttered closets are 100% honest and my own.

I’m a huge sap.  There, I said it.

Although, if you’ve been following this blog for a while, you already knew that.

I cry watching P&G mom commercials.  I sometimes need an intervention when holding onto memorable concert ticket stubs.  And my favorite home decor items are old suitcases and antique sewing machines handed down from my grandparents.

I decorated Olivia’s bedroom with my childhood pointe shoes, Robert’s first teddy bear, and a birdcage from our wedding.  And the rest of our house is pretty much full of the same heart and soul.  1. Because it’s free.  2. Because no decor I can buy in a retail store could ever compare to the sentimental things we already have.

But there’s kind of a problem with my memory hoarding tendencies.   After a while, all of the stuff just become dust collectors, and for months, I’ve been meaning to dig through our closets to start purging.  Except pictures and videos… that’s where I get stuck. (There’s a solution with a discount code at the end of this post though.)

When I get in a declutter mood, it’s not like I can start tossing out tons of photos and VHS tapes from 10, 20, 30 years ago.  So they always end up back in a cardboard box and shoved into the back of our closet all over again until the next time I dig them out to declutter.

What’s the point of that?  I can’t even watch our VHS tapes anymore because we don’t own a VCR.

So a few weeks ago, this company called Legacybox contacted me asking if they could help me preserve my outdated memories and convert them into digital files and DVDs.

At first I was all, “No, I’m good.  That’s not really home related.”

But then I realized, all of these stacks of pictures and films are hardly serving me a purpose while taking up valuable space in my closet.  It absolutely is home related and sort of the Achilles’ heel of anyone trying to organize and simplify the clutter in their lives.

Plus, God forbid, if there were ever a flood or a fire in our house, I would be heartbroken if our memories were destroyed.

Once the Legacybox arrived, and I started flipping through our stacks of photos, I realized I should have done it ages ago.  I spent a Sunday afternoon sprawled out on our office floor getting lost in (and a little misty eyed over) some of the best memories of my life.

Here are photos of my twin (a.k.a. my mom) and I when we were about the same age.

It’s nice knowing you don’t have to spend hours upon days of scanning and recording everything digitally.  (Ain’t nobody got time for that.) Legacybox sends you a kit which includes some simple instructions, round-trip shipping, and a crush proof box.

Fill the box with any formats of your memories- VHS, photos, film negatives, slides, movie reels, 8 tracks, audio tapes- and send it back with the pre-paid label.

They provide bar code labels too, so you can make sure everything you put in the box will come back to you a few weeks later along with your new digital files and DVDs all safe and sound.

My box was the Family Package size, which holds up to 10 VHS tapes or 10 sets of 25 pictures and normally costs $250.  To me, considering it’s insurance for most of my entire childhood’s memories, that’s worth it.

A few weeks after I sent off the box, I got my digitized files in a neat little stack along with all of my originals.

I was completely over the moon to show Olivia some of the videos of me along with my parents, grandparents, and brother.  Some of my VHS tapes didn’t even have labels, so I had no idea what footage was on them.

Olivia is always enthralled with seeing photos of me from when I was little.  It’s hilarious to her that I was once four years-old too, I guess.

These were some of the little gems that arrived:

My brother will never live down our Barbie Corvette rides together.

My grandfather passed away just a few years ago, and I miss him so much.  I’m so glad this shot of his first time holding me as a baby will be preserved forever.

I had totally forgotten about this candid shot of Robert and I dancing and laughing on the dance floor at our wedding reception.  Love it so much!

Now that we’ve managed to preserve all of my childhood memories, I’m already thinking all of Robert’s from his childhood will be next on the list to send off so that we’ll officially have all of those preteen brace face photos of ours set in stone forever.

If you need to handle some memory hoarding issues of your own, you can click here to get a LegacyBox for yourself.  Use the code BLESS at checkout to get 40% off your first order until 10/31.

Or if you want to save this post for later when you get into the declutter mood, you can pin this post here:

Do y’all have any closets stuffed with old photos and films?  Or a box with random sentimental things you just can’t bear to throw out?  When you come up with a solution for decluttering the non-photo/film related mementos, let me know.

The post How to Digitally Preserve Photos and Videos appeared first on Bless'er House.