Digitizing Photos: Disaster Preparedness & Decluttering

I organized the massive amount of photos that were at my parents' house.
I think there were about 5,000 of them.

That said, I was hesitant to just throw them away.
This time, I decided to digitize them on my computer, upload them to the cloud, and store the actual photos in a cardboard box.
It might feel like that doesn't count as decluttering, but since what used to be many bulky, old-fashioned albums has been reduced to one small cardboard box, I'm calling it a win.
The albums used to take up prime real estate, but the box is now tucked away in the overhead storage.

Photos are important.
While many things in the world can be repurchased or repaired if lost or broken, photos are one of those things that, once lost, are gone forever.
They never come back.
Memories, of course, remain within you, but human memory isn't that great.
I want to cherish these photos to help hold onto things that I would otherwise gradually forget.

Honestly, digitizing the photos was a huge hassle.
If you have the money, you can hire a service, but it costs a fair amount.
It was difficult for me to spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of yen on that, so I did it myself.
It really was incredibly tough.

The reason I decided to do it anyway is because there have been many disasters lately.
At least once a year, there is some kind of major disaster somewhere.
Earthquakes, typhoons, flooding, landslides, fires.
Compared to before, I have started to regularly and properly check my disaster prevention supplies.
Digitizing photos is also part of those disaster prevention measures.

Whether they get soaked in water, burned, or lost.
I want to preserve these memories even if that happens.
When you actually face a disaster, protecting your life is, of course, the top priority.
And after that, I think the first thing will be to rebuild your life.
But after life settles down, I want something to lean on.
For that reason, even though it takes effort, I wanted to get the photos to a safe place.

What I actually did was:
1. Peel the photos off the many albums and arrange them in chronological order.
(If they don't peel off well, it's good to carefully peel them while warming them slightly with a hair dryer.)
2. Scan them to create digital data.
3. Create a Google account for the family and upload them to Google Drive.
4. Install the app on every family member's mobile phone and log in so that anyone in the family can see them at any time.

Having done it, steps 1 and 2 were extremely difficult.
After all, there were about 5,000 of them.

This is the scanner I used (this is not an advertisement).
This scanner scans photos as you feed them in one by one from the top.
The scanning speed is fast and smooth.
It doesn't automatically scan a stack of photos like a copier, but I chose this one because I could work while checking to make sure each photo wasn't tilted as I scanned it one by one.
Since the order of scanning becomes the display order in Google Drive later, I wanted to make sure they were scanned in chronological order.
I'm not tech-savvy, so I was glad it was easy to use.
By the way, I kept it in good condition and sold it on Mercari for over 20,000 yen, so the cost was kept quite low.

Having done this, there were benefits beyond disaster prevention and decluttering.
It's that we can talk as a family.
Among the photos were pictures of my grandmother's childhood, photos of my parents dating when they were young, and records of the three of us children growing up.
It was really great to be able to reminisce about old times that we don't usually talk about.

Also, when old stories come up, it's nice to be able to immediately search for them and say, 'I think there was a photo like that.'
I think that's the benefit of doing it yourself.
It takes effort, but because you look through everything, it stays in your memory.
If you hire a service, even if you glance through the finished product, I feel like it doesn't stay in your memory as much.
Since I digitized them and uploaded them to Google Drive, I can find them immediately when I want to, and I can share them with my family right away.

As a result, I'm glad I digitized them myself.
Now, even if a disaster that I hope never happens does occur, I have peace of mind regarding that point.
As a resident of Aichi Prefecture, I'm just constantly afraid of when the Nankai Trough earthquake will come.
Besides that, I'm very satisfied because there was a huge bonus of family time.

Today was the 44th day of my daily posts.