Back when I was a kid, the “hip” thing to do was invite people over for drinks and subject them to “pictures of my trip to X.” Your poor innocent friends and neighbors would then spend the next hour trapped in your living room with gin and tonics clutched in their hands while you narrated the 29th slide of someone kissing the Blarney Stone. “And here’s Tony, he’s Steve’s second cousin removed...or is that twice removed? And here’s Tony’s second wife...”

Fast-forward 30 years and I now have HEAPS and PILES of my family’s slides. And I’m a third generation shutterbug.

What’s a person to do with all these slides? Get them on the internet!

Introducing the Legacy Project. I am digitizing and restoring all of my family’s slides starting with my maternal grandparents. (It’s slow going, cobbler’s kids and shoes and all that.) I’m putting them up on the ‘net in an archive so family members can comment, decipher the cryptic and faded script scratched on the back, and reminisce. Added bonus—they can order prints or canvases or DVDs of anything that catches their eye. No one wants 32 slides of the Blarney Stone, but that really great shot of the grandparents snuggling, that one we all want.

So what about you? Do you have HEAPS and PILES of slides, prints, or film, and you don’t know what to do with it? Would you want to try a Legacy Project of your own? I’m happy to talk to you about where to get started, or if you’d rather, I can do it for you. (You like how I put that soft pitch in there?)

We’ll start with your images: slides, film, paintings, whatever you’ve got, and then we’ll talk about what you want when the project is finished. Some families make books, journals of the best images with anecdotes and stories to go with them. Some want DVDs they can peruse at their leisure. Some want large prints, some want small prints. The glory of a Legacy Project is that the memories are available to everyone, and they can have them in the way that most makes sense to them. While one relative might not have space for 16x20s of the whole family and would prefer a photobook they can keep on the shelf, someone else might say, “Bring it on!” to four 16x20s. Each family, and family member, is unique—but everyone should have access to the memories.