MEMORY KEEPING 101 – PUT ALL YOUR MEMORIES ONLINE WITH FOREVER
Forever Boxes Make Digital Easy
Unless you’re quite young, you’ve watched the world go from analog to digital. One set of grandparents used a Brownie Hawkeye camera to take photographs, while another set grandparents opted for slides. An uncle wandered around all of your family gatherings filming reels and reels of movies. Then maybe your dad showed up with a huge camera on his shoulder to take VHS tapes and you may remember when he changed over to the Hi8 format. Then you went digital, but you’ve got photos on your computer, more on dvds, others on a hard drive, perhaps some on the cloud, but a whole lot on your phone, for sure!
A lot of that media you can’t even look at, because you no longer have the equipment it needs and if a photo you want to find is on your phone, then you might have to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll to find it. Last week I told you how wonderful Forever’s storage is and obviously moving all your digital images from wherever they are to your own digital storage space will be easy. But what about the photos, the slides, the movies and all the rest. Well, Forever can convert it all to digital – including the piles of photographs.
Well, that’s easy, too. You put it all in a box and send it to Forever. Not just any box, a Forever box and I’ll be happy to help you.
Your Forever Box
Here’s how it works. We decide which box(es) is/are going to hold all your stuff and order what you need from Forever. Forever sends you an empty box to fill up with all the items you would like to be converted to digital. When the box comes, you fill it up and send it back to Forever. Forever digitizes it and puts it online. Then they’ll send your stuff back to you, but if you don’t want it, you can just dump it in the trash, because all your stuff is online.
When Forever digitizes your material, it goes into a temporary storage account for 60 days, so you can decide what you want to do with it. They’ll also be happy to produce a dvd or thumb drive. But the very best thing you can do, in my opinion, is get your own permanent storage from Forever and put your memories there. Those memories will be there to be enjoyed by generations to come and you can rest easy.
Organizing Your Online Memories
Once you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of getting your memories online, you’re going to want to share them and Forever makes that easy, but somewhere along the way, you really need to do some organizing – or get me to do it for you.
Many Forever customers want to do the organizing before they send their memories off to Forever or they get me to do it for them. This is the most economical way, because you won’t be digitizing things you’re not interested in keeping. Your empty boxes will come from Forever with plastic bags and labels to keep your memories in order. If your memories have already been organized, at that point we can put notes on your bags and Forever will use those notes to name your online images. Your organized memories will be ready to share.
However, some of my clients say, “Jane, I don’t even know what’s on these videos!” Or they say, “It will be easier for me to sort through them once they are online.” Some even say, “Once they’re online, my family is going to help me sort them.” In this case, we can get your stuff all packaged up, as is, and send it off to Forever. Then you’ll have 60 days in your temporary account to decide what will go on Forever, what you’ll download and what you’ll just delete.
Curation for the Generations
Anything is better than nothing. If all you manage to do is send your stuff off in your Forever Box and move it over to your own online storage account once it’s digitized, then you’ve already done more than most people manage to get done. Too often, the next generation, faced with a cache of slides, reel to reel tapes, VHS videos and a pile of analog photos, will just toss them into the trash. And why wouldn’t they? If you haven’t organized your memories and taken the time to identify who is in them, then exactly how are those who come after you supposed to know what it’s all about?
Now, imagine notifying your family and friends they can peruse their memories online, at their leisure, with the click of a link. That will be great news for them, even if the images are helter skelter, but imagine how much more excited they will be if the memories are organized by date and event and tagged for cross-referencing by name. With a few clicks, your Uncle Joe can see all the photos you have of him in one place. You get to decide which of your photos you want to share, whether you want your family and friends to download from your cache and even if you want someone to be able to upload new photos or add notes.
I’m There for Whatever You Need
If you like, you can do all of this yourself. It’s easy and I am happy to show you how. Or, if you’d just like to turn it all over to someone and wake up one day with a totally organized online storage account, I’ll be happy to take over for you.
How much does it cost? Well, that depends on a lot of things. How much do you have, what does it consist of, is it organized or do you need me to sort it? Here’s the link to the digital conversion page, which has the cost of the various boxes https://www.forever.com/digital-conversion/, but first timers can find it very confusing. You’ll need to understand what an item is and how overages work, to begin with. So, give me a call at 972-971-5263, and we’ll get you started.
When it comes to pricing with Forever, there can be a little sticker shock along the way, but there are also a lot of different ways to save, save, save. During November’s Black Friday Sales, you could get $1000’s worth of storage for less than $400, but you needed to know all the money saving tools available from me and from Forever. So, while I encourage you to browse the Forever site and learn all the exciting things you can do with Forever, don’t let sticker shock scare you away. I’ve got offers you’ll be excited about.
In fact, why don’t we talk about those money-saving plans next week. You’ll love all the ways there are to save with Forever.
jane sadek 