Millions of digitized print photos unlock countless memories
This may seem like a sad story because it begins with a boy with few memories of his father, who died when he was 7 years old. It’s why Mitch Goldstone cherishes his only picture with his dad — a snapshot at Disneyland taken during the late 1960s, when the concept of people reflexively reaching for smartphone cameras in their pockets could only happen in Tomorrowland.
But this story, and the personal stories that follow, aren’t sad at all. And a half-century later and more, Goldstone has done something with that memory.
He is pursuing a career focused on the joy of rediscovery. He and his longtime partner, Carl Berman, run Scanmyphotos, part of a niche industry that specializes in turning the billions of analog slides, undeveloped negatives and printed pictures taken in the pre-smartphone era into digital treasure chests filled with memories that had been forgotten.
“There’s nothing else like it, there are so few businesses doing something that makes people cry when they get the product back,” Goldstone says. “Fortunately, they are usually happy tears.”
Giving analog photos new digital life can resurface long-buried memories and make them feel fresh. It can bring back the roar of the water in old vacation snapshots, resurrect long-gone relatives in their prime and rekindle the warmth of a childhood pet’s unconditional love. It can remind you of the intricacies of family relationships, summon forgotten moments and — perhaps best of all — make them easy to share.
It happened to me. I finally ended several years of procrastination and entrusted professionals to scan thousands of Kodachrome slides that I inherited from my 81-year-old dad when he died in 2019.
I hadn’t been able to look at them — not from an emotional standpoint, but because I didn’t have the proper equipment to peruse analog slides. Converting them into accessible digital media launched me on a journey back to my own childhood and the pasts of my parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. That, in turn, is giving me a better understanding of how I became me.
It’s a phenomenon shared by other people who have taken the steps to preserve analog photos that were painstakingly shot in the decades before smartphones enabled people to routinely take pictures of everything.
It’s not cheap. But if you have the $200 to $300 that it will likely cost to pay for the process — and if you can find the time to dig through musty boxes, drawers and garages — you may find a gateway to experiences like these.
An actor’s final encore
During his award-winning acting career, Ed Asner became famous for playing crusty yet lovable characters, with the most famous being Lou Grant — the newsroom boss in two popular TV series, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” from 1970 to 1977 and an eponymous spinoff from 1977 to 1982. Asner also provided the voice for the curmudgeonly Carl Fredricksen in Pixar’s 2009 animated film, “Up,” that included a poignant scene about photography’s power to rekindle memories.
After Asner died in 2021, a similar scene became real. His son, Matt, found hundreds of undeveloped negatives. He decided to get them digitized along with a storehouse of printed pictures.
“I honestly didn’t know what I was going to get back,” Matt Asner says. “It’s kind of overwhelming. It’s like you get this treasure back that opens your eyes to a past that you sort of remember. But a lot of it you don’t remember.”
Looking at his dad’s photos rekindled memories that Matt didn’t realize had been buried in his subconscious. One day, Matt was gazing at some photos taken of him when he was 3 or 4 years old at a Southern California beach house that his father would rent for the family during the summer.
The digital conversions of Ed Asner’s old pictures also produced troves of other visual baubles, including one of the actor as a young man gazing introspectively at himself in a mirror — perhaps as he prepared for a role. Matt now shares some of his favorite pictures of his father on his Twitter account, but what he likes best is sending them around to relatives — something the digital format makes easy.