Digitally Archive Your Holiday Cards

If you are like me, then you love the holidays. Christmas is a time of cheer, good-will, friendship, and family. It's always a season to remember, even if you don't have pictures, the human brain works as such that you can remember fine details only through association. I do this myself by saving all of my greeting cards each Christmas and looking back at them from time to time. By viewing the cards I received each year, I can remember vividly each holiday season. The problem is that now after 36 years and boxes full of these card-stock memories, it is getting harder and harder to find the cards from years back quickly and easily.

In this digital age, such physical archiving is no longer necessary and seems slow and sloppy by comparison to archiving everything digitally on your home computer. With only a minimal investment, your Christmas cards can be right at your fingertips for viewing at a moment's notice.

The smallest investment is really in the hardware and software required for digitally archiving your Christmas cards. You may, in fact, already have everything that is necessary. First you will need a scanner. If you don't already have one, I would suggest buying an all-in-one device that includes a photo quality printer, a scanner, and a copier. Personally, I use an middle-line Epson CX8400 that I picked up on sale for only $55.00.

With your scanner, the software will be included at no extra charge. This will be sufficient for all of your archiving needs. I don't really like the software that came bundled with my scanner, so I use a third party program from ArcSoft called Photobase. I find it simple to use with quality results and custom photo albums.

The bigger investment is in your time. You will need to set aside several days to archive your old cards and then only a few hours each year to keep it your collection up to date. The scanning is very easy once you go through the initial learning curve. Your first scans may take awhile to get right. Whichever software you use, there will be options to either scan or import images from a scanner. In scanning the images, you will want to make sure that your scanner is set for full-color scanning at a minimum of 300dpi resolution. This will produce large and detailed images for your archive. If this is larger than you require, you can go as low as 100dpi, but I prefer the slower process of creating large original pictures and then reducing them later for easy sharing, if you wish.

You will need to make two scans per card, one of the front and back and another of the inside. I always do the front/back first at the top of the scanner. Once done, don't save the image yet, but place the card at the bottom for the center image. Your software should be able to merge them together into one image and then you can save them. I use the old standby of saving the images in JPEG (.jpg) format. Sometimes, however, I like to use Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) because Acrobat provides a lot of extra options.

Whichever method you choose, you will then be able to create custom folders on your computer's hard drive for each year that is needed. Soon you will have your entire Christmas history on your computer and you will be able to view and reminisce any time you wish. If you need further instruction, everything you will need to know will be in the instruction manual or help files of the software you are using to scan.