Thursday, November 19, 2009

Thrifty Gifts - Treasured Photos

In the interest of keeping holiday spending under control and giving gifts with meaning, the Church Ladies will be posting a few ideas for free or very low cost gifts with a personal touch.

For example, last year I borrowed my parents' photo albums and scanned a bunch of photos from their early married and parenting years. I burned the photos to disk and gave one to each of my siblings and to my parents. Everyone loved seeing the old photos and they were delighted to get their own copies.

This idea could easily work with a more focused theme also, such as "Our Vacation to Yellowstone," "Family Birthdays," "Our Years Together in School," etc.

Directions:
  1. I used my desktop scanner/copier/printer to scan each photo.
  2. The default setting on my scanner is 200 dpi (dots per inch, right?) but I upped that to 400 for all but the biggest photos (and 600 dpi for some really small ones). That would allow them to make good quality prints if they wanted.
  3. I saved each image as a JPEG file, and gave it a name which included the year and information written on the back of the photo, if possible.
  4. I transferred each into a folder and just burned the entire folder onto a disk.
  5. The nice part is that I could work on this project at the same time as answering emails or reading the morning news online. The first photo took a little time but after that it was pretty routine; it did not take my full attention.
Cost: the price of the disks and my time.

1 comment:

Gianna said...

Another presentation option for those who want to take this idea a step further (but with a little more expense):
Websites like blurb.com produce custom-made photo books. You can add whatever text you want (if any) and print as many as you want (even just one). This isn't an ad or anything; I've just used the site before and been happy with the results.