My big fat photo archiving project

During the last two weeks, I have been a little preoccupied with a big photo archiving project. It all started back on Jan. 2 when I completed my photo book for the year 2011.

I used to be a scrapbooker. In fact, my office is still packed with decorative papers, scissors, cutters and embellishments. But I am so glad that my days of cutting and pasting on paper are over! I am loving the amazingly quick, easy and high-quality digital photo books I can create in 24 hours, rather than 12 months!

After a marathon digital photo session on Jan. 2, I decided to get serious about going back and creating a photo book for each year of our family, starting with the first year I had digital photos.

The first thing I did was buy an external hard drive so I could store all of my photos in one place. I copied photos from older computers, my laptop, CDs, and my new computer. I created a photo library that now contains more than 20,000 photos.

While we have some digital photos dating back to 1999, it wasn't until the year 2004 that I switched exclusively to a digital camera. Our third child also was born at the end of 2004. But in October of 2005, my one-year-old computer crashed. The hard drive was fried. And I had no back up of the first year of my daughter's life! 

I was so thankful that I had printed out about 100 photos of her birth and first few months. (WHAT a gift from God!!) So, to complete my photo archive, I have been scanning in all of those photos. (I already had photos for the first nine months of that year, but we bought my new computer the same weekend she was born, so we lost everything from that point on.) 

The past few days, the scanner has been going constantly. It takes 4.5 minutes to scan one photo at 1,200 dpi. We all seemed to develop internal timers that would go off every 4.5 minutes, and someone would switch the photo!

Once I got all of those done, I decided to keep going. I scanned in all of the portraits we have taken since my oldest son was born. WOW! It's been so fun to compare all of the kids at different ages. And double WOW! It's amazing to see them grow up — literally — before my eyes!

Check it out:

2003, ages 1 and 3

2005, ages 6 months, 2 and 4

2005, ages 1, 3 and 5

2006, 2, 4 and 6

2007, 3, 5 and 7

2008, ages 4, 6 and 8

2009

2009, ages 3 weeks, 5, 7 and 9

2010, ages 6 weeks, 5, 7 and 9

2010, ages 6 months, 5, 7 and 9

2010, ages 10 months, 6, 8 and 9

2010, ages 1, 6, 8 and 10

2011, ages 1, 6, 8 and 10

2011, ages 2, 7, 9 and 11

2012, ages 2, 7, 9 and 11