A Unique and Memorable Valentine’s Day Gift

I was recently shocked by something my husband shared.

He said he’s never seen most of the photos I’ve taken over the past several years. I was genuinely surprised, until I thought about it.

I had gotten a DSLR camera 11 years ago and took tons of pictures of our boys as they grew. I would offload the digital images to a backup storage drive. Very occasionally, I would print and frame a few, but mostly, they just stayed on my hard drive, with no ability for anyone else to access. What a shame.

In the same way, clients come to me with reels and reels of old home movies that need to be transferred – not only for archival purposes – but to be able to watch. Who still has a VHS player, much less a film projector?

But after the films are transferred and put onto a big hard drive, who watches them?

I recently worked with a client who had such a genius idea about what to do with the archiving of her home movies that I had to share it.

We transferred hours of footage she had taken of her kids as they were growing up. She knew it was unlikely they would sit and watch every video, so she selected sections of the films and we pieced them together into a one-hour long highlight film.

But she went a brilliant step further. Many of the films from the toddler years had no audio. They had traveled a lot and there were things they didn’t know. She decided to narrate the film so her kids and future generations could not only learn more about their own history but had the bonus of hearing their mom tell those stories in her own words, preserving her voice for the future.

The result was tremendous. Her kids and grandkids had the powerful and bonding experience of watching those memories together. We also put the individual raw movies on a private YouTube channel so anyone in the immediate family can access them any time they want. It was such an expression of love from a mother to her children. (Valentine’s Day is coming up – what better gift to give?)

Which now brings me back to my husband and a solution for our stored photos, in case you have a similar situation in your home. The answer – a shared drive in the cloud where all those photos can live. Some options – OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox and Forever. Who knows – maybe that will be my Valentine’s Day gift to him?