This was my mother when she passed. She left me so many many boxes of cables and equipment. Sooooooooo many power supplies.

After a 2 ton truck worth of gear later I realised that I couldn’t do the same to my son. It would be criminal to leave him my garage worth of gear on top of his grandma’s.

I’m proud to say I’m down to two boxes (20 litre containers) worth of active day to day stuff (jugs cables, hdmi, usb, gpus and about 80TB of storage, probably more) .

And 1/3 of a garage filled with tapes and digital tapes (one day I’ll go through them. Ideally upload them to YouTube so people can see her work (she worked in film and television)

I recently digitized my family’s (and extended family) VHS and new to me 5.5 VHS camcorder tapes. Now I have my grandfather’s cassette tape collection of accordion recordings. Have yet to fiddle with losslessly digitizing those but I’m sure I’ll figure out out. My mom also has my other grandfather’s Super 8 camcorder she claims has their wedding video on it. Need to eventually get my hands on that and figure that out as well.

Scanning pictures however is the worst. You can use a 3rd party, but many of them dispose of your physicals after the fact and don’t guarantee the scans came through without error.

Some years back I embarked on a project to scan my parents pictures. I think there were over 4,000 until I was done. I don’t remember the ratio, but there were some negatives and some prints. Oh and trying to unduplicate (this picture is a print of this negative) was a bear, because the prints and pictures had sometimes gotten separated.

I set up the scanner in the living room and worked on it while we were watching TV. It took months, but I did it.

Then I did my in-laws’ pictures, who didn’t have nearly as many, fortunately. And they were better organized to start, so that felt like a walk in the park by comparison.

I noticed my parents took a ton of pictures of my older brothers, but very few of me… But there were a ton of pictures of the bridge construction next to their house… Hmmm!

I did the same with my own photos during the lockdown years. Started by scanning physical photos, then got hold of any old negative scanner which supported APS. I’ve scanned everything except I seem to be missing one of my APS negative cartridges. I now can’t get rid of my negative scanner because I know I’ll find that missing cartridge as soon as I do. I also can’t do much with the old PC as it’s the only full size one which will take the SCSI card that I have.

Damn, aps support?! I assume you have to take the negatives out of the cartridge.

There’s a seller on ebay that 3D prints negative holders for the scanner I have, so for example I could scan the 110 cartridge (not the really old roll film) negatives I have. I wonder if he makes one to do APS.

But on the other hand, the APS camera I had was cheap, point and shoot, and the prints came back with a note that they were severely overexposed, so it probably wasn’t even working correctly. Not much point in spending money to save some forgettable shots of a local river.