Save Memories, Reduce Fire Hazards
Do you have young kids? Do they like to draw? Do they draw a lot? Here’s an idea: scan their drawings into your computer and then play them back on a digital picture frame.
Our oldest daughter is seven, and when she sets her mind to it, she churns out a new drawing every couple of minutes. The paper piles up fast. Sometimes, it reminds me of the piles of newspapers we used to keep in the corner of our dorm in college — the ones for which the school fire marshals used to fine us whenever they came around for an inspection.
My wife does not like clutter (bless her soul). I knew this long before we got married, so I guess I should not have been surprised when one day I discovered that she was going around after our children and throwing their drawings in the trash.
“Wait — how will we remember what they did? How they improved?” I agonized.
“Well, we can’t keep all this,” she replied, holding up a half-inch thick stack of paper.
She was right, of course, we couldn’t keep all that paper. But I was right, too. If we threw it away, there would be no record of their progress, no opportunity to embarrass them on prom nights by dragging out books full of their artwork to show to their dates.
Then we hit upon an idea: why not scan the pictures and save them to disk? Then we could trash the originals, but we would still have a record of their work.
We had just bought one of those multifunction printers – the kind with the built-in fax machine/scanner/copier. The sheet feeder on top made it easy to scan in several drawings at once – just smooth out the pages, drop a stack on the scanner, hit the button, and come back in a half hour to save them all. Storing in JPEG format made it easy to import them to our photo organizer, where we could manage them right alongside our digital pictures.
Soon, we had the kids trained to deposit all of their drawings on top of the scanner – no more need for us to clean up. About once a week I take the pile and scan them, and then I recycle the originals. Perhaps one of the best things is that the files go onto the computer with a timestamp, so as long as I keep relatively current with the scanning, we have a general idea of when each drawing was done – something we would not have with paper copies unless we went to a lot of extra trouble to label them. And given the price of hard disks today (~$0.50 per gigabyte), storage costs about one hundredth of a cent per drawing – less than the cost of paper.
We had been going like this for a couple of months when, one day, our son discovered that we were throwing away his pictures. He was visibly hurt. “Wait a minute,” I said. Opening up the photo organizer, I quickly located a copy of the picture he had found in the recycle bin, and pulled it up on the screen for him. It was a lion he had imagined in a cage at the circus. Then I showed him a few other drawings that he had made – older ones that he had forgotten. Soon, his sisters were over at the computer and we were flipping through all of their artwork – and they were having a blast. No one ever worried about us throwing away their pictures again.
