Photographs and Memories: Digitizing Your Dusty, Moldy Media

You’ve got a bunch of hardware like CDs and DVDs, along with analog media, like VHS tapes. What do you do with all this stuff? Believe it or not, you don’t have to throw them away and buy your favorite songs, movies, and whatever else all over again. As long as nothing is protected by copyright, or your copying falls under the “fair use” of copyright protected material (contact a lawyer), you can save them by digitizing them. This is especially cool if you happen to have something that’s truly irreplaceable. Here’s how to get started.

Scan Photos Using a Flatbed Scanner

Old family photos can be scanned on a flatbed scanner. Just peel them out of the old photo book they’re in (careful), and lay them flat on the scanner. While you can do one picture at a time, it’s actually easier to cover the scanner with photos, then make multiple copies of the digital version later that you can crop (if you only want to have one photo per file).

Scan Documents and Everything Else Made Of Paper

Just as you scanned in all your photos, you can scan in your documents too. This is easy. Just set up your scanner for black and while scanning (unless you need color documents for some reason), and load up the tray. If you only have a flatbed scanner, you’re unfortunately relegated to manual scanning of one document at a time. It’s laborious.

You can actually scan all of your insurance documents, make backups of your Social Security Card, Driver’s license, and any other official document. You never know when you’ll need to print off a copy.

Subscribe To Radio Shows As Podcasts

If you have old radio shows that you love listening to, you can subscribe to them as Podcasts. Most shows out there have already been converted. You just need to go searching for them.

Hunt Down Retro Games

Retro games are on both major app store platforms (Apple App Store and Google Play). If it’s not there, you’re probably out of luck. Don’t download ROMs, as they’re almost always illegal (if the game is protected by copyright).

Download a Good Recipe App

There are lots of good recipe apps out there, but one of the best is My Recipe Book for iOS. Whenever you find a good recipe online or in a magazine, you can add it to this app. You can also enter in your own family recipes. Now grandma’s famous apple strudel will never be forgotten.

The app features multiple timers, a queue, the ability to sift through recipes according to dietary restrictions, and a conversion tool. It’s like a real recipe book, but better.

Rip All Your Old DVDs, VHS Tapes

Pretty much anything that’s analog (and even the digital stuff) can be converted to a “pure digital” format. DVDs are pretty easy to rip. Windows Media Player, for example, will rip DVDs with a simple click.

VHS tapes are a little harder to manage, but not impossible. You’ll need your camcorder and a USB video card extender. Alternatively, you can use the S-video or other video inputs if your laptop or desktop has them.

Fire up a video recording program, like WMP or even VLC Media Player and start playing your VHS. It’ll record the tape (just leave everything alone while it’s doing it) and then you can convert the file to whatever file type you want.

If you want to make things really easy on yourself, use something like YTD to convert the video. YTD (YouTube Downloader) is a simple program that gives you the option of uploading files from your hard drive and converting them with a click. You can optimize video for any number of devices, both on the Mac and on PCs.

Get Your Music Online

Getting your music online used to be a bit tricky, but Apple, Google, and Amazon have all come out with a music scan and match service which attempts to upload your songs to their servers if it’s found on your hard drive.

This eliminates the need to repurchase any tracks you may have floating around on your computer, but it doesn’t do much for you if you have a bunch of CDs.

Fortunately, most media players will rip a CD in short order. Cassette tapes are a different matter.

You’ll need a cassette tape player, an RCA-to-line-in jack or a headphone jack that can be connected to both your cassette player and computer. Make sure that the audio jack gets plugged into the “line in” jack on your computer, not the microphone jack.

Download and install Audacity, open it up, press play on the cassette player, and record your cassettes. Once they’re recorded, you can either upload them to the cloud, or keep them on your hard drive.

Remember to respect intellectual property with copied and downloaded content, and don’t share commercial copyrighted content without the authorization of the copyright holder. And if you are wondering whether it is legal for your to record streaming video for your own personal uses consult a lawyer and read what YTD has to say about that here.

Fiona Waiters has a deep passion for genealogy. After years combing her family’s attics and researching all over the web, she loves blogging about her techniques for family research and preservation using modern tools.