Have you ever wanted all your memories in one place?
It Started with Nostalgia:
My mom has thousands of pictures of my siblings and me growing up. At first, they were neatly stored in a photo storage box, but as time went on, they overflowed into an old shoebox and plastic sleeve photo books. As life happened, even more memories accumulated. Old school photos and artwork from my mom's childhood, family history collections passed down from my grandparents, and snapshots from my mom’s adventures living in Denmark and working in Zion National Park. These priceless moments were kept in desk drawers, shuffled around, borrowed by my siblings, and stored in hard-to-reach places. We had a treasure trove of memories, but no easy way to access them.
My mom & aunt - 1971
When I got engaged, my father-in-law asked for baby pictures of me for our reception slideshow. Simple, right? Not quite. Unlike my husband’s tech-savvy family, we obviously didn’t have digital backups. Even our family’s home videos were scattered across DVD cases, some missing their discs. It wasn’t that my parents didn’t care; it’s just that life had been too busy to keep up with the ever-changing world of digital organization. So, how was I going to retrieve these photos, digitize them, and get them to my father-in-law while planning a wedding?
With my iPhone and Photoshop, I found and photographed about 25 pictures from the shoebox, edited out glare, and centered them as best I could. It was the last thing I wanted to worry about before getting married, but I wasn’t willing to miss out on those memories being part of our special day.
Me, wearing my mom's wedding dress - 2010
As I sifted through those old photos, nostalgia hit hard. I realized how important it was for my whole family to have access to these pictures. I didn’t want my brother and sister to go through the same last-minute scramble I had. More than that, I wanted to preserve and share the beautiful moments we had all lived together.
After getting married, I made it my mission to collect all of our family’s physical media and make it easily accessible. It became a full-blown project: digitizing hours of home movies, compiling silly iPad videos, and organizing photos from vacations and family photoshoots. My husband even wrote custom code to extract photos from an old external hard drive my mom found. It took months of collecting, editing, labeling, and organizing, but it was worth every second. And as I worked, I moved on to my next challenge—digitizing printed photos.
Scanning old photos became a joy, not just a task. Reminiscing and remembering brought my entire family closer together. Now, we all have access to pictures of our entire families story that began the year my parents got married in 1996.
And now, I want to do the same for you.
My siblings and I - 2007