The Digital Insider

Steve Post recently hired ScanDigital to convert more than 30,000 images to digital and transfer 200 Video Tapes to a hard drive. Steve was kind enough to share his story with us.

I always wanted an easier way to enjoy my family memories. Our albums were falling apart, the slides in basement were fading and reels of film from me as a young boy were brittle and useless. I wanted to update these old memories and covert them to digital format forever, but it wasn’t until the Malibu fires hit our community that made me reconsider the urgency of preserving our family photos and home movies.

I remember how hard my heart was pounding when we were told that our home was under mandatory evacuation. I frantically loaded my computer into the car, but our scrapbooks and albums were too numerous. I had only grabbed our wedding album. The thought of losing everything my wife and I had worked so hard for and the place that held so many memories with our three beautiful daughters was terrifying.

My family and I were very lucky. We have several friends who lost everything. Our home was one of the few untouched by the devastating flames. Shortly after returning to our home, my family and I gathered up our entire archive of photos and home movies and sent them off to ScanDigital.

At this time, I began work on a new home theater room. My daughters loved the idea, seeing the room as a great slumber party activity, without realizing how much more important they’d find the room. I wanted this room to be a place where we could enjoy our family history together. Not only the memories of our family, but of older and passed generations too. In just a few weeks, ScanDigital had converted all of our memories to digital and had returned the originals along with DVD and hard drive copies of everything. I was shocked to see that all of our family history fit on so few disks. I was so excited to plan a family night, telling the girls to have their homework done early.

My girls loved seeing old photos of my wife and me as children, but got a real kick out of seeing their grandparents and great grandparents. They gained a whole new perspective on our family’s history. I was finally able to put a face to the names of past family members and share stories that I will always remember. Now we are able to relive the 4-5 generations worth of memories with an easy click of a mouse.

I feel thankful having all of my memories at my finger tips and the ability to pass down memories to my children. One day, they will have the ease of sharing our photos, movies, and stories with their children as well. I’m so comforted knowing these memories will be around for future generations to enjoy!

My original plan was to finalize part 2 of the series I started here a couple of weeks ago, but then I came across this piece on CNBC yesterday and thought it would be interesting for our readers.

David Pogue from the New York Times did a piece on “AFLS” - Analog Format Loss Syndrome. As he mentions in the piece, so much of the equipment out there available for consumers are simply too difficult for the average user’s patience. Not to mention that the resulting quality is lower than expected.

This really reaffirms ScanDigital’s value proposition. We completely remove the leg work from converting your photos, slides and negatives into digital format or transferring your old videos and film into a usable digital format.

To see the video, please click here (CNBC wouldn’t let me embed the video in this post):

Do you suffer from AFLS?

Going Digital – The Holy Grail of Photography, Film and Video is a 4 part consumer education series by ScanDigital’s President, Anderson Schoenrock. The purpose of the series is to help educate customers on the process of transferring their photos, slides, negatives and film to digital.

If your family is anything like mine, we have boxes upon boxes of precious family photos sitting in a closet in a spare bedroom. We have everything organized into shoeboxes or small plastic containers. Years and years of memories, roll after roll lined up on a set of shelves.

I have been so busy building this business that it was only recently that I finally got around to organizing my own materials to be converted into digital. A few months ago I pulled everything out of the closet and decided what was worth preserving and what I didn’t need. A common question at this stage: do I send in my photos or negatives? In most cases, the answer is the negatives. Assuming the negatives have been kept in a dark box somewhere these will provide the best digital image. Because the prints were taken from the negatives, scanning those is similar to taking a copy of a copy. We can still obtain a great digital photo from prints, but well preserved negatives are the way to go if available.

Next I went through everything. Decided which photos I wanted to keep and which I didn’t care about. Not surprisingly, I wanted to keep most of it. Except a few obviously poor shots, everything else I wanted to keep.

I labeled my envelopes and put everything back in a box to bring into the office. The process was pretty straightforward and didn’t take to much time.

Next up were my old home videos. This was even easier, I just pulled out all my old VHS tapes to bring in and a handful of 8 mm reels from my early years. Again, I just wanted everything converted.

I did not give myself special treatment in our queue, but just put the order in as our customers do. About a week later I had all my photos in digital and within 2 weeks had all of my video transferred into digital format.

On thing that I really liked was our hard drive option. I now have everything on a neat little USB drive. Storage prices continue to come down while storage space is becoming even smaller. I now have 160 GB worth of photos, video and music on something that can fit in my pocket and requires no more power than what can be supplied from my Macbook.

Transferring my old materials brings numerous benefits, not to mention it freed up a ton of space in my closet. It is time to say goodbye to those old shoeboxes and slide carousels in your basement! My materials are no longer trapped in these out of date formats, they’re now in digital where they can be shared, enjoyed and preserved forever!

Next Up: Part 2 – The Dangers of Leaving Your Materials In Out of Date Formats

Having lived away from home for almost 12 years now, I rarely have the opportunity to spend Mother’s Day with my mom. With one son on the West Coast and another on the East Coast, my mom usually receives something in the mail from us. Lucky for my brother and I, our parents encouraged us to move away from home and expand our horizons. They’re proud of what we’re doing now and never sweat us being away for Mother’s Day, birthdays…etc. (We do all typically spend Christmas and Thanksgiving together).

Each year my brother and I coordinate our gift for Mom. We’ve exhausted the flower option and there really is not much my Mom wants / needs. This creates our annual Mother’s Day Dilemma… What to send home for Mother’s Day?

Usually we’re both so busy that the holiday creeps up and then we have a Thursday before Mother’s Day scramble, but this year we’re on top of it. My brother called me on Sunday afternoon with a gameplan. I quickly explained that I had also been thinking about Mother’s Day a lot this year because we were receiving Mother’s Day orders at ScanDigital and were even running some Mother’s Day Specials. (Spoiler ALERT: Mom, if you’re reading this before Sunday, please stop and come back later!) I then went on to explain my plan: Let’s take all of our family photos and pre-load them onto one of the new ScanDigital Photo Frames. My brother quickly agreed this was an excellent plan and so it was decided.

Over the past couple of days I’ve been working on pulling together a bunch of family photos to load on the frame. It has been a great time and a great reason to enjoy all those family vacation memories. I think Mom is going to love the frame and I am thrilled that earlier this year she sent in a bunch of our family photos to be scanned. We scanned some negatives and slides from our trip to Europe in 1991 that turned out to be real winners. My Mom is still in the process of organizing a new batch dating back to the 1980s to be scanned. I can’t wait to see those. It will be fun to load these onto the frame as the family’s collection is archived and preserved digitally. I’m excited for the first time in a few years to be able to give my Mom a gift that is new and hip. This is sure to top the casserole dish we gave her last year! Here are some of my favorites for the frame:

How we ever convinced Mom to touch this pigeon, I’ll never know
(St. Mark’s Square, Venice, Italy)

Mom is usually fairly calm, but couldn’t help being nervous while I rode on the back of a motorcycle on the Autobahn at 12 years old
(Aufham, Germany)

EuroDisney was a much needed break from all the historical sites
(EuroDisney outside Paris, France)

All that site seeing was pretty exhausting.
(Backseat of our rental car on the way to
another Western European town)

It is that time of year again. The time of year when the weather starts taking a turn for the better and we all realize how much stuff we’ve been packing into little closets and cabinets throughout the house. If you’re like most people, your closet looks like this photo.

Well this year let ScanDigital help with your Spring Cleaning efforts! Some of you may have seen our Spring Cleaning Special email on Tuesday, but for everyone else I am excited to announce our ScanDigital Spring Cleaning Special here on the Digital Insider. This promotion will help our customers save dramatically on the conversion of their photos, slides and negatives to digital. Through the Spring Cleaning promotion our customers can receive more than 25% of select photo scanning services and 22% off our negative scanning service.

Here are the details:

Spring Cleaning Pricing:
Photos scanned at 300 dpi: $0.35 (27% discount)
Negatives scanned at 2000 dpi: $0.45 (22% discount)
Photos scanned at 600 dpi: $0.55 (19% discount)
Slides scanned at 2000 dpi: $0.65 (5% discount)

To participate, simply place an order at www.scandigital.com and use the following coupon code:

Spring Cleaning Coupon Code: “SpringClean24″
Valid for all order PLACED by April 30, 2008

Even through the special we still honor our 100% Satisfaction Guarantee and the following standards of our service:

• Highly Secure: All Materials Fully Tracked at All Times
• Fastest Turnaround Time
• No Organization or Pre-sorting Required
• Your Memories Preserved for Future Generations
• All Work Performed in the USA
• 100% Satisfaction Guarantee

We hope you take advantage of these prices which make us the highest quality and LOWEST priced scanning service that process in the USA

Happy Cleaning

There are certain images that are forever remembered and perfectly encapsulate the total emotion and circumstance of an event, time or place. Sport has always been a classic example of such moments captured on celluloid.

One of the great pleasures I have had personal experience with is doing sports photography and I am pleasantly surprised by the volume of slide scanning and negative scanning that we do at ScanDigital. Now that we are offering film and video transfer services it has been great to see the amount of sports material that has been coming in. From amateur home movies to collegiate game film, the importance of these materials to the owners is clear.

Sports have become as emotional and as big a part of our lives as holidays and other gatherings with friends and families. They have a unique way of uniting people of all different backgrounds with a shared experience. Sometimes a sports photo resonates so greatly because of this connection.

Whether it’s Michael Jordan hugging the championship trophy and weeping after the death of his father to Brett Favre running around with his helmet off celebrating with all the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old, these images stir up memories and emotions within all of us.

Such great moments were on display again this month, with March Madness captivating the nations’ attention. From the baby-faced Stephon Curry and the Goliath-slaying DAVIDson Wildcats bursting upon the scene and becoming the Cinderellas of the tournament to the uber-athletic Memphis Tigers, there was no shortage of storylines or indelible images from the last three weeks of the college basketball season.

An amazing season that culminated with the most telling image of all and on the cover of Sports Illustrated no less; Mario Chalmers firing the improbable game-tying three in the championship game to cap-off what seemed to be an impossible comeback. The shot proved to be a game-winner as Kansas rode the emotion into an overtime win, capturing the first national title for the Big XII since it became a conference as well as becoming only the second school ever to win both a national title in basketball and a BCS bowl game in the same year. The joy they brought to the great people of the Midwest was unmistakable but with that joy also brought hope for many fans and players of other Big XII schools like Missouri, who hope to one day match the amazing, magical and historic year by the University of Kansas.

Rock Chalk. Jayhawk. KU!

President’s Note: In addition to serving as ScanDigital’s VP, Operations, Matt Stone is our resident sports expert. For nearly a year, he has successfully managed ScanDigital’s Operations while managing multiple fantasy sports teams and reading nearly every article written on the Los Angeles Lakers. As a long time Kansas fan, my influence is apparently wearing off as Matt enjoyed the KU Victory almost as much as I did. All ScanDigital employees were greeted Tuesday morning by a newly modified admin console which looked like this:

As some of you may know based on my bio at ScanDigital, I was a history major at Dartmouth and spent a number of years working in commercial real estate investment banking. So when the City of Pasadena called us to bid on a large historical architecture preservation project, I was particularly excited and honored. From a business perspective, this was obviously the type of call we love to receive. From a personal perspective, this type of project is particularly interesting to me. In my free time, I enjoy reading about architecture, both old and new.

For those of you who may not live in Southern California, Pasadena has one of the most active historic preservation societies in the country and the City is home to numerous famous residential and commercial properties. The bid process involved scanning a small group of slides and about a month ago ScanDigital was pleased to learn that we were awarded the project.

Our team recently begun scanning slides that document many of the historic properties in Pasadena. In addition to the slide scanning work we are performing, we will optimize the images digitally and, perhaps most importantly, we will be tagging the images with metadata in order to create a searchable database of images. The conversion of these slides to digital, to me, represents a new trend in historical preservation and archiving. Prior to our work scanning the slides they sat relatively useless in the basement of Pasadena’s permit office. Once the project is complete, residents of the city will be able to enjoy an easily search-able and usable version of these historic slides. It will be a great way for residents, old and new, to gain better access to their City’s history.

We look forward to working on projects like this as more and more cities across the country seek to move into the digital age, clear their offices of old materials and preserve this historic material for future generations. In times past, discovering historical information involved a lot of digging and searching, with new digital capabilities the future of history will be far more manageable and accessible. I am truly proud to be working on the Pasadena project and excited to see the end result of photographic database we will help them create.

Greetings!

It is our pleasure to introduce The Digital Insider, ScanDigital’s monthly publication highlighting new and intriguing offers from ScanDigital. In addition, The Digital Insider will serve as a forum to present other topics of interest to our valued customers and digital photography enthusiasts. Enjoy!
ScanDigital’s Gift Cards are here! Ideal for the Holiday Season!

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ScanDigital orders come with an unlimited,free gallery for storing and sharing your photos

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Click Here To Order Gift Cards

New and Enhanced Affiliate Program Features

Due to the overwhelming success of ScanDigital’s pioneering Affiliate Program, we are excited to announce the release of a fully upgraded and enhanced online affiliate interface. The new, unique console provides unprecedented tracking capablities for our affiliates to view their progress and earnings. The program is free to join and provides numerous highlights including:

20% commission on all revenue generated plus $2 for all user registrations

Average order size over $200

Real-time statistics and monthly payments

Perfect for online and offline partners through the use of both custom referral links and trackable coupon codes

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Perfect for traditional photo labs, online photo services, webmasters, graphic artists, scrapbookers, photography lovers and online marketers!

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ScanDigital Featured in The Los Angeles Business Journal and The Daily Breeze

ScanDigital has recently received some exciting press coverage. These articles, as well as other ScanDigital press coverage can be found at: www.scandigital.com/news

Enhancements to ScanDigital’s Online Gallery Create Friendly Functionality

Major upgrades to our online gallery released last week provide all registered users with access to the most user-friendly online photo gallery. The latest upgrades include:

• Multiple views (thumbnail, album, full view) for easy navigation through large photo collections
• Built in photo slide show functionality
• The ability to rearrange albums using ScanDigital’s proprietary drag & drop technology
• Enhanced ability to add titles and comments to photos, providing users greater flexibility for online photo organization
• Optimized Qoop integration allowing faster access to order prints and print products

Click on the image to view an enlarged version:

The Digital Insider Online Blog

In addition to the monthly newsletter, the Digital Insider is also online. Each week we post several articles of interest to our valued readers. To read and subscribe to the online version of the Digital Insider, please visit: www.scandigital.com/blog We are constantly looking for exciting and relevant topics for newsletter and blog articles, if you have any suggestions or would like see specific subject matter please email us at digitalinsider@scandigital.com Best Wishes!

I wanted to share with everyone a great site that I discovered this morning. Earthshots.org is a website dedicated to digital photos from around the globe. Every day the site receives photos from hundreds of photographers and then each day selects the best image to post. Most of the photos are of animals or beautiful scenes in the wilderness, but the requirements for the contest are not particularly stringent. According to the site:

Earth Shots is looking for photographs that exhibit the beauty and diversity of our planet. Any subject matter goes. The most important requirement is that your image is interesting and striking.

They have done an fantastic job of compiling amazing shots from all over the globe. Keep up the good work. This four minute video slideshow is amazing and will give a good idea of the winning shots over a 100 day period.

Along similar lines as yesterday’s post, I came across another project from a team at Carnegie Mellon. The team has created a project called fotowoosh which works to create a 3D image out of a 2 dimensional digital photography. The program attempts to recreate the way that humans extract information from a 2 dimensional photo, using our knowledge of the physical world to interpret the 3 dimensional nature of the photographed scene. We instinctually use our knowledge of the world to create a 3 dimensional view in our mind.

The team’s approach is to write a program which learns the structure of the world and the appearance of geometric surfaces from a large set of training images. The knowledge is then applied to other photos. If the program can determine where the vertical surfaces contact the ground in the image, the depth of generating a 3D model.

The video below demonstrates the power of this new program.