Your photographs, home videos, and audio tapes are some of your most valuable possessions. They are unique, irreplaceable, your link to the past, and treasured memories.

Moreover, we’re not just talking about personal pics and recordings. Businesses and law firms have mountains of historical data or evidence, typically stored on various audio or video tape as well as photos,negatives, and 35 mm slides.  All of these mediums are fragile and relatively short-term storage solutions.

To protect your most important data and precious memories, families, businesses, and law firms must digitize it all before it’s too late.  Just to give you a little motivational kick in the pants, here are five good reasons to digitize NOW!

1. Safety and Security

Your photos, audio, and video recordings are not safe. In 2017, there were over 1.32 million structural fires in the U.S. The assessed damages were $23 billion. What they can’t put a number on is the irreplaceable personal photos, recordings, and memorabilia. And…these figures don’t include floods or theft.

Digitizing your family’s collection or company’s history enables you to preserve these precious memories in multiple locations. With backup copies, you’ll never worry about losing your records.

2. Reduce Storage Space

Unless you happen to live in a museum, most homes cannot store photos and magnetic tapes properly. Picture frames, photo albums, and VHS tapes take up lots of space and can even create a fire hazard in certain situations. 

Digitizing reduces a closet full of memories into one portable, external drive, archival-grade DVD, Blu-ray disc, or storage on the Cloud.

3. Constantly Changing Technology

It seems that technology changes faster than Clark Kent turns into Superman. Just look at photography. Kodak made the first digital camera back in 1975. It weighed 8 pounds and was 0.01MP! 

Film photography has gone digital, along with audio and video recordings because it’s a better medium. As the equipment and software evolve, archiving your photos and records should evolve as well by digitizing.

Physical media such as photos, videotapes, and audio cassettes barely last a generation. They fade, degrade, and break over time. Did you carefully record events or data onto VHS tapes with the idea of preserving them for future generations? 

Consider this. VHS tapes degrade over time whether you watch them or not. At some point, they will be unviewable, similar to film. The same goes for your 35mm slides and audio cassette tapes.  Plus, VHS players are no longer being produced.

4. Make Sharing Easy

Look how easy it is to share photos and videos today. Most of us do it all from our cell phones. If you have your old analog media (photos, VHS and audio cassette tapes) digitized by Classic Memories, you can share them easily right from your phone. 

It’s easy to share large files through one of the many file transfer Cloud services like Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox. You can also copy them to a USB flash drive or portable external hard drive.

Digitizing lets you share your greatest memories anytime and anywhere.

5. Celebrating a Special or Corporate Event

Once you’ve created digital records, you can create custom slideshows. They are fun for parties, business events or as a memorial. Going digital means, you can mix and match photos, audio, and video into one engaging slideshow.

For business, custom slideshows can take the place of PowerPoint presentations and are far more engaging to watch. Add new animation or video to historical photos and audio recordings for a more entertaining presentation. 

Digital slideshows are an excellent way to memorialize someone’s life through images and recordings. People can have an exceptional experience viewing them.

A Professional Touch

Digitizing your old media is a smart move, but how do you get started? It’s a big job.

Of course, the easiest way to tackle this project is to hire Classic Memories to handle digitizing all the photos, recordings, memorabilia, and editing. 

We do all digitizing work in our New York facility and service customers from all 50 states. We don’t use 3rd parties. That way we maintain strict quality assurance over every step in the process. 

Our customers find our digitizing service an incredible time-saver, and the results are amazing. Contact us for a free consultation.  We’ll explain how the process works and how long it will take.