One of the great things about technology is the chance to preserve old analog photography. So with this in mind, I embarked on a project to collect, preserve and restore many of our family's old analog photos. Thus far the project has resulted in the transfer of over 1300 photos to digital format.

Throughout the process I have visited many family members and borrowed many precious and rare photos. Ultimately, I've found the end result to be very rewarding and enjoyable. Photos that were either damaged, fading, or never-before seen by most family members were now saved and available to anyone with an Internet connection.

My findings included photos that were assumed lost, to photos that ranged as far back as the early 1900's.

Once saved in .TIFF format (to avoid any potential loss of quality during the saving process) the images were backed up and copied over to a new location for immediate conversion to .JPEG. To do this I made use of the excellent FREE unix command line application, Mogrify (a component of the ImageMagick package available for most unix-based systems including Cygwin, for Windows users).

Here's an example of the command line usage I used to produce my web-friendly images:

%> mogrify -quality 86 -format jpg -resize 640x480 *.TIF

The project will undoubtedly be an ongoing one as long as there are still photos out there to be collected. Beyond this, there are still many analog photos in my own collection that await being transferred.