I had this idea one day last fall when I was driving home from a mom visit…to take all the old pics we had in photo albums and Ziplock bags and photo boxes and have them scanned. Then I could make photo albums on my iPad and take it with me when I visit mom. We could flip through the pictures, hopefully helping mom to remember and relive some of the good memories we’d captured on film. With her vocabulary shrinking, and her saying less of her own thoughts and more parroted thoughts, it’s hard to know what she remembers. Maybe this will help me.

I asked my friend and amazing photographer Kim Baker, click here to see here work, where I should go. She reached out to her network of photographer friends and came back with the recommendation to go local. There are horror stories of the mail order places that you send your photos to who in turn ship them overseas to scan. That notwithstanding, I’m also a big fan of supporting local businesses when I can. So I went to Ritz Camera in downtown Bethesda with two shoeboxes full of about 2000 photos to be scanned. They were great and in a week’s turnaround I got two DVDs with all my photos digitized.

So now I’m working on the iPad photo albums and I have plenty of great new images to go along with the stories yet to tell on here…