I have spent the last two days working on some old photos.  My Grandma passed away two years ago, and my mom let me have all of Grandma's photos so I could put together a memory book.

Before I go any further, I don't think any of my family reads my blog, I only know of one sister who I accidentally commented on her blog using my Mrs. Accountability account. So dear sister, if you are reading my blog, maybe you could not read this post until after Christmas? Unless you don't mind spoiling your gift.

Okay, back to my mom's gift.

I wanted to scan all the photos before I gave them back to Mom, but I haven't gotten around to it. Every so often she'll ask me about the photos, and a few days ago she had an even more pleading tone to her voice as she said she sure wished she could get the pictures back sometime. Boy I felt like a bum!

That put a fire under me and I decided on this long weekend I've had, I would get those photos scanned. I read recently over at One Frugal Girl's how she scanned over TWO THOUSAND 35mm slides and put them into a digital frame for her Grandmother and how she was working on scanning more of them since her Grandmother turned 87 in October. Hey, I have one of the digital photo things, maybe I could load a few images into one of those, too!  (Bought from Target a couple years ago for something like $1.49 each).

Anyway, a few weeks ago when Mr. A and I went out on our cheap and fun date, I bought two of the large photo frames that hold 21 photos.  I'm going to put both together for my mom.

Actually, I got one done, shhhhh, don't tell momma!  This one has the oldest photos in it, photos of my Great-Grandfather and Great-Grandmother, and Great Aunt Elizabeth.  Lots of photos of my Grandma, and my momma when she was a little girl, and photos of my Grandpa, too.

I scanned all the photos, so now I can get those back to my momma. There were 81, and I scanned the back sides as well, so what Grandma printed on the backs is included.

Once I got them all scanned, I uploaded them to Walgreens, which has the closest photo developing place to where I live. Serendipitously, AJ decided to take a spontaneous trip into town to bring home a pizza (we are too far away for any delivery) and then I got an email from Walgreens that said my photos were ready!  He was able to pick them up and bring them home.

Walgreens had a special going, ten cents for 4×6 photos if you ordered 50, code JOY10. This is good until Saturday, December 5th, 2009.

I am really glad that I went ahead and ordered these prints to get them right away from Walgreens, because I realized that before I went ahead with my second gift plan*, I needed to alter the photos.  Like, every single one had to be cropped, resized and photoshopped.

After I got all that done, I found this other place I've never heard of, winkflash 😉 They have two specials going on right now, but you can only use one code at a time. If you're new, you can get 50 free photos and the shipping is supposed to be 99 cents.  Code for that is  50FREE. Okay my order showed that I was charged $2.98 for shipping, but I did order 81 prints.  Maybe you have to order exactly 50 prints to get 99 cent shipping? Or, you can get as many photos as you want for 6 cents each, code ONLYSIXCENTS. It is the first time I have used their site, so I will report back when I get my photos.

A couple of other perks for winkflash 😉 as of this post, they are offering unlimited high resolution photo storage and you can share photos with friends and family. They also have an option where you can type in some text for the back of each photo, and this is free. I believe the limit is 30 characters, but this is a nice feature. They do all the standard things that most photo places offer like photo books, photo gifts, posters, cards, holiday cards and canvas prints. No, they didn't pay me to say these things, I just found them today and thought I'd give them a plug.

I'm going to put together not only the framed sets of photos for my momma, but I'm also going to put the 80 photos into a photo album, so she can look at them closely, you know instead of having to stand and look at the wall.

She's going to be so excited. The original photos are unfortunately, pretty messed up.  I had to use Despeckle and Dust & Scratches on many of them. Also, some of them are very tiny, like 1 inch wide and 2 inches tall. By scanning at a resolution of 600dpi, I was able to get them to a big enough size that I could get at least 4×6 prints from them.

*The other part of this project is that I'm going to burn DVDs for all five of my siblings.  They all have computers, so they can view the photos. I'm also including the print photo friendly versions, along with the straight scanned photos. So all they have to do is go to one of the photo printing places, upload the photos and order them. No cropping or photoshopping necessary.

I am so happy that I finally completed this project, even though it took about 20 hours of my life.  Well, I'm sure my momma was in labor for at least 20 hours (since I was her first) so she's worth it.  Not to mention I have all these other gifts now! I figure the cost of these gifts will cost under $30, and there's no way to calculate my time in there, lol.  At least these family memories are now immortalized and everyone can have a copy of them instead of just being a pile of grody photos.

I learned a LOT this weekend about cropping photos so they will print at the correct size.  And I'll let you know when I get my winkflash 😉 order back.

Oh yes, and I also have to put together a True Confessions post on what I bought on Black Friday (if you follow me on Twitter you would already know about it).

What kinds of gifts are you getting together?

Yours Truly,