BY TIM TALEVICH
LIKE MOST PARENTS, my mother and
father were diligent about taking photos of all
the key moments in their growing family’s
life. ;ere were the holiday snapshots: packages around the Christmas tree, Easter egg
hunts in the yard, Halloween outfits and
more. There were the big events, such as
birthdays and weddings. ;ere were vacations, which in our case mostly meant kids in
the surf, chasing each other in the sand or
watching the sun dip into the ocean at sunset.
;ese pictures made their way into photo
albums—about 25 over the years—which
were always on the shelf to browse through
during later family reunions. As the folks
retired, downsized and moved around, the
books were relegated to large plastic storage
bins, along with all the other papers and doc-
uments that come with life, from birth certi;-
cates to diplomas and all years in between. And
these dozen or so storage bins moved from
sibling to sibling, until they ended up at their
;nal stop: my garage.
Now, the question is what to do with
decades of photos, documents and memories—a family collection that’s too big to keep,
yet too precious to toss. It’s a crossroads that
many of us come to between the past and the
future, paper and digital. I undertook a yearlong project to digitize, organize, share and,
yes, ultimately discard the contents of those
dozen storage bins.
First step: organizing
My ;rst step was to take a broad sweep
through all the bins. I quickly put the photo
albums into one area and all other documents
in another. ;ough it was hard, I adopted this
mantra: Toss it if it’s not absolutely precious.
So out went Christmas cards from friends,
poor-quality snapshots and other things that
were important to my folks but not to me or
my siblings.
Next, I set up ;le folders for each member
of my family ( 10 kids in all). As I came across
a photo or document that would be of interest
to one of them, into his or her folder it went.
Then the hard part began. I sorted
through all the photo albums, taking a long
Preserving
memories
Putting a lifetime
of photos and
more on a DVD
SPECIAL SEC TION
ELECTRONICS
PHOTOS: MIKE SMITH / COSTCO PHOTO STUDIO