The tenth item on my vaguebooking list was “10. Ten photos at a time”. (Yes, I know I jumped over #8 and #9 as I have another bit of timing stuff to do on those ones, be patient!). But this one is really, really simple.

When my mother died, I retained custody of all mom’s photo collection. Big pictures and stuff we already distributed, but the old photo albums, etc., are all in my office sitting in a bin under my desk. The collection of photos is immense. Terrifying even. Because I want to scan all of them. Digitize them, sort them, let some software package go to town on facial recognition. But it’s a LOT of photos. And the library science / archivist in me wants a complete copy before I distribute them back out to the family. No one is pressing me for them, heck most don’t even want them. But I’m going to give them a complete set on disk when I’m done. I just have to get back into it.

There are some digital scanning sites in Canada that will do it for you. $200, 1200 photos, ship them and get them back done. Great idea. Except there are absolute horror stories about each of the sites. Some don’t do the scanning themselves, they farm it out. And so the group of 5-6 up front services collapse to 2-3 actual scanner companies. With a few challenges of logistics in their operations. Some of the stories are relatively minor — photos that got missed in the scan, or were duplicated, or weren’t fully centred, etc. No big deal, although annoying of course. Of far greater worry, and this is the dealbreaker, some people not only didn’t get the scanned prints when they were done, they didn’t get all the originals back either. Some people even got 100 of someone else’s photos. I considered still doing it, with the small caveat that I would attach a sticker to the back of every photo but that still wouldn’t guarantee their return, and it’s just too risky to my taste to put the whole kaboodle in jeopardy to save the work.

So my commitment is to start doing it, 10 photos at a time (i.e. per day). At 50 a week, up to 2500 in the year, I should be done by the end of 2014. A perfect item to be tracked with the Seinfeld method. I just have to get started. That should keep me busy too. Oddly enough, the swapping and scanning is relatively simple — I can even do other things on my planning list while I’m doing the scanning. But I have to start somewhere. Soon. My goal is to start before Feb 1st, although Feb 1st could be the launch. Stay tuned.