My husband was right...I had way too many pictures on the computer but not enough time or money to print them all and even if I did, where on earth would I put them? I'm the world's slowest scrapbooker and I certainly couldn't delete any..they are masterpieces, every last one of them! That's when my obsession with thumbdrives began. I discovered 4GB, 8GB and even 16GB, then came folders and my type A personality was in heaven. A way to catagorize all those pictures so to be able to pull up and print off any of them in a single moment. I bought one each time I went to the warehouse store and before long I had one for each kid, Christmas & other holidays, and grabbed an idea from one of my scrapbook idols Stacey Julian and made 3 drives labeled "Places We Go", "Things We Do", and "People We Love". I found that any picture I take can fall into one of these categories, hence be saved on that thumbdrive. Then I discovered that you could copy any one picture onto multiple thumbdrives by clicking and dragging. So, I drop our beach pictures in the "Corolla 2009" folder on the "Places We Go" thumbdrive, then save copies of individual pictures onto the corresponding thumbdrive of the kids. When they get old enough to fly the coop..I'll take thier drive to one of those machines, burn a copy, and give it them to keep. I also keep a copies in the safe and upload to Costco photocenter for printing out enlargements for scrapbooking/framing/photobooks etc. I have also scanned all those treasured black and whites from past generations and saved them under "People We Love". I tie a piece of ribbon (that reminds me of what it is) to the thumbdrives then connect them all with jump rings and hang them on a hook in my craft room. Got old slides? There are gadgets to convert to DVD. I had this done through Costco as well, but I'm sure there are other places. Just know it takes FOREVER to get them done. I had picture CD's made from my grandparents old photos for Christmas gifts (priceless!) It took 6-8 weeks for 270 slides and I was in the line on Christmas Eve for 2 hours waiting for them to finish up! Once they are converted, use your picture editing software to clean them up! Voila!!
