How to Archive Christmas Cards on the Computer

Creating a Christmas card archive on your computer is a great way to store your cards in a safe, organized manner. It comes in handy for preserving memories you want to keep without having to worry as much about natural disasters such as flood or fire destroying the originals. Or perhaps you simply just do not want to keep the physical copies of cards, or want to recycle them into something else, but still want to have a memory of them. All of these are great reasons to begin storing your cards digitally.

All you will really need is a scanner OR a very high-quality digital camera (with a macro setting), your computer with any image software of your choice, and the cards themselves. Envelopes are optional - if you want to preserve these items along with the cards themselves, grab them!

First, I like to set up my computer for the archiving ahead of time. Pick out where you want to store your Christmas cards, and create a new folder just for that. You can also create mini-folders inside the main one, if you want to categorize the cards further. You can categorize by year, by holiday (yes, this doesn't have to be just for Christmas cards!), by sender, whatever you want really. Once you're finished with this, now it's time to get the cards on the computer.

I prefer to use a scanner for these things. As mentioned, when using a digital camera it needs to be one of very high quality, and overall it just takes more work (to set it on the proper settings, have it in the proper position when taking the picture, removing the media card to upload the pictures, etc.). So set your scanner on a high setting - it should be set to 300 DPI at minimum, but if you want an even higher resolution, go for it - and begin scanning the cards one-by-one. Then save them in a non-compressed format (to keep the high quality) and rename it to a preferable label to keep things even more organized. Then put the photos in their respective folders that you created earlier.

For further organization, you can use a photo software program of your choice such as Google's Picasa, Adobe Photoshop Album, etc. However, this is not essential to have a decently organized card archive on your computer. As each year goes by, just add new cards to the archive as you receive them.

I also prefer to have an external backup of my archive. I keep them all in an external hard drive, but you can also burn the cards onto CDs or DVDs. This will do even better to ensure that all of your holiday cards are kept safe in spite of any potential circumstance.