Imagine all the non-digital photos and memorabilia. Forget Airbnb and driving for Uber. Boomers with creativity, organizational skill and some technology can follow multiple small business paths that have large emotional implications for the customer. Consider the large and small albums of photos, cassette tapes, home movies – not just from the boomers aged 51-71, but from their parents, and even some from their parents’ parents. Will anyone want it? Cynics contend that not only will the old content be lost due to disinterest, but that current content (selfies, group photos, Facebook and Instagram shots of that great dinner) will also be lost, some say, to collective disinterest – the photo only mattering in the moment.
The memory media movers – a multi-tier industry. But some care enough to act while they still can. As older adults study the albums in their studies, some hire a service that can help them organize and cull the photos. Not unlike the profession of Senior Move Managers helping to clear out and downsize the house, there is an Association of Personal Photo Organizers (APPO), complete with certifications, who help family cull and cut through the duplicates and clutter.
Making material digital – maybe to be forgotten in another source format. The Photo Organizer helps the client decide what to scan. Then the scanning firm pulls pictures from plastic to be scanned, converted and saved on digital media. Then once it is digitized, the customer can record a narrative track describing the content. For example, hidden away in the The Velvet Mill in Groton Connecticut, is a shop called Charter Oak Scanning. Scanning everything – buying old projectors and cameras to get the job done. Paper photographs, 35mm slides and negatives, 8mm and 16mm film, VHS, BetaMax, audio cassettes, and reel-to-reel.
The memory mill – a multi-tier market – now nationwide players. The demand for this has grown, naturally, given the ever-taller stack of media types and the blooming of. So now the web searches turn up more players. Consider Newton, MA EverPresent. And more reviews. Then there’s top-rated Minneapolis Memories Renewed, with its 3+ month backlog, ScanCafe in Indianapolis, even outsourcing detail work to India for lower price/higher volume (naturally). And so the cycle of media movement continues, compounded and confounded by the easy smartphone camera shot – the websites for sharing/storage like SmugMug, Flickr (to be part of Yahoo/Verizon), and Shutterfly (now a public company).
Consider the memory – yours, theirs, and future. After the wedding, families expect an album. The coffee table demands it, and there it is – before it is too late -- the beginning of a cycle many years later to rescan the album because the photographer and his-her files are gone. Who matters most in the distribution cycle of memories (besides the original creators)? The Personal Photo Organizer – unlike Uber and Lyft or Airbnb – the level of risk is low, and the customer emotional satisfaction is high. Yet, of course, there’s a problem. Would anyone really throw away the originals? And so the original problem begets a new, now-sharable, storage format and keeps the old, to be stuffed away in ever-smaller closets.
from Tips For Aging In Place https://www.ageinplacetech.com/blog/content-our-lives-who-cares-enough-save-it
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