Learning #17 : Time is money.

In an effort to reduce clutter and try to keep myself organized, I recently decided to convert all my photos to digital by sending off 2 extremely large boxes to sunny Red Bluff, CA, home of the magical photo scanning elves at GoPhoto.

This rad picture, at left, is me on a pair of homemade stilts that my Uncle Bob gave to me one Christmas.  There is also a picture of my sister with a yellow pair of stilts, wearing the exact same powder blue Levi cords and fly OP shirt with the wood buttons, but I'll spare her by leaving that to the family archives.  I actually remember taking this picture, so it was fun to find it again.

It took me about 20 minutes to find all my old albums, find 2 boxes big enough to fit everything, print 2 labels, pack them in a semi-orderly fashion (emphasis on "semi" – good thing GoPhoto does negative scanning, because there were a fair amount of random envelopes full of mystery memories), find the packing tape, and tape them up. Then I drove them over to the UPS store, and off they went.

All told, I spent under an hour on my photo scanning project, and I had around 3500 photos and negatives that I needed to convert to digital. (While slide scanning is a pretty popular service 'round GoPhoto, I'm just slightly too young to have any of those.)

As I drove home from UPS, I did the math:

3500 images x $.37 = $1300 - 20% off (hey, I have a coupon) = $1040 if I keep all the scans, which is unlikely. Since you only pay for the scans you keep, I figure I can probably delete at least 500, so now we're at

3000 images x $.37 – 20% off = $888

Which seems like sort of a lot, except that I've literally just digitized and preserved my entire life's history. Which is, seriously, very cool once you're looking at it all on screen. Plus, if I want to spend less, I can delete more scans. Do I really need 4 different versions of essentially the same picture of me and my freshman year roommate wearing our sweet '90's sweaters and hats, looking vaguely Punky-Brewster-like, drinking some light beer swill?  Not really.

But I digress.  After doing the $$ math, I did this math:

3000 images x 3 minutes = 10,500 minutes = 175 hours

Now, keep in mind that 3 minutes each is a low estimate, because realistically I’m going to get distracted looking at photos and I’m going to have to take them out of albums and put them back and color correction/dust and scratch removal takes time, and I’m also probably going to get bored and space out and take even longer due to being generally annoyed with the project. But even at 3 minutes each…

That’s twenty-one 8-hour days of non-stop scanning. Which is 2.5 months of weekends.

And I have to buy the scanner anyway, so now we have to factor in $250 for a good scanner (which still isn’t as good a scanner as GoPhoto has), and suddenly I’m actually only paying myself $3.64 and hour (or $4.90 without a coupon). Do I want to pay myself less than $4/hour to miss 3 full weeks of weekends wherein I’m spending 8 full hours a day doing nothing but scanning photos?

Um, no. No, I really don’t.

And that’s the thing about photo scanning that people don’t realize: you think you can do it (and technically, you can), but you’re probably not going to. Because it’s a bigger project than you think it is, and you most likely have much better ways to spend your time.

So: although I’m a serial DIYer, when it comes to converting my own photos to digital, I’m really glad that I outsourced to a team in not-so-far-off Northern-Central-ish California. Because I only have so many weekends, and spending 10 of them curled up with a scanner isn’t the best or most enjoyable use of my time.

(This is, incidentally, the same reason that I’m not going to dig up the freaking oleander stumps in my back yard myself. Anyone who’s tried to dig in clay soil knows what I’m talking about.)