35mm photos now digital!

I had just unpacked two boxes which had been moved many many times without being opened that were full of pictures. My goal at the time I opened them was to go through the pictures and put them in photo books to preserve the memories (before I forgot who's who, when we went where). I have boxes and boxes of prints and Advantix 35mm film, and merely taking them out of the Costco envelopes was an accomplishment which was celebrated with much fanfare around my house...

Then two things happened... For Christmas I decided to make photo books to share with family about our crazy last year (Denver! Snow! Moving to Austin! Austin! etc. ). I had a really pleasant experience with Snapfish and I wanted to make more!!! Second, I read Ben Brumfield shared this article about going through your old photos and the throwing away things your don't really need, but also scanning your 35mm negatives and realized that I was limited in making more photo books about the past because my photos were more and more on 35mm. So... after much research online about scanning services (most run about $0.40 per image ~ $10 per roll, yikes!) which seemed a bit high when faced with at least 40 rolls without even opening up those OTHER boxes.

One problem I found online was that services which would scan your negatives cheaply won't do it to already processed film. They wanted to do the processing and then scan it for your for a few bucks. All my film is processed, so that wouldn't work.

Then I went to Costco. They have the same "let us scan your 35 mm when we process it" service, but they are more than happy to scan already processed film as well! For $3! They did my first roll in an hour while I shopped!

So I took a large handful of their processing envelopes and sat watching tv one night and filled out one envelope per roll and took it in one Saturday. They smiled when I handed them my bag and said it would be ready by the following Saturday. They called 2 days later to say it was ready!

The images are larger than the pictures from our new digital camera and look great! Now I have loaded all the images into my Picasa albums, added (likely) dates and locations for the pictures. Now I am ready to create ~30 page books for each year since Ryan and I met... just waiting on a sale at Snapfish (I hear Costco has a deal with them or Shutterfly on these photo books, maybe this is worth checking out next!)