Keeping memories to yourself is boring. It’s also selfish. But mostly, it’s boring. The main point of getting your old pictures and videos digitized is to be able to use and share them with the world! Before you shipped your stuff to Legacybox, you probably just had a bunch of mostly worthless VHS tapes, picture slides, and photo negatives. Now, you have neat little digital files of all of your most cherished life’s accomplishments--and probably some things that you’re not so proud of--and it’s time to unleash your memory-filled media fury onto the world.
But how to do it?
That’s where we come in. These are our 5 recommendations for getting your memories into the collective human consciousness and stake your place in history where you rightfully belong.
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Social Media - If you work in the marketing field, you’ll know all about how to coordinate a social media campaign to drive real, meaningful engagement with your follower-base by infusing current media with past content. It’s a tried and true method of creating sustainable growth in our economy’s fastest-growing marketing medium. Or, instead of all of that, you can just post your stuff to Facebook and Instagram for the enjoyment of your friends and family like a regular human being. Marketing is so boring.
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YouTube - In another blog post, we taught you how to make a highlight reel. Well, what good is a highlight reel if nobody ever sees it? The great news for all of us is that YouTube is a pretty far reaching, video viewing platform that can reach literally billions of people. If you want everyone to get a feel for how awesome you were in the 70s during your disco fever phase, and you can’t think of any way the human race could survive without experiencing your dancing genius, this might be the best choice for you.
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Viewing Party - The equivalent of major rock stars playing acoustic sets in small venues, viewing parties are a much more personal way to interact with folks face-to-face while reliving your glory days. We’ve written some helpful articles about how to throw a rad viewing party. No matter what kind of viewing party you choose to have, I’m a big believer that a party is always the correct decision.
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Banksy-eqsue Guerilla Artwork - If you are so inclined--and if you have a slight predilection for minor vandalism--you can use your digitized pictures to create vector drawings in Photoshop. Then, using those images, you can saturate them, create a stencil, and go to town crafting some sort of political message with your college pre-selfie-era mirror selfie. Whether it will have the social impact you imagine, I can’t say, but spray painting your face on the side of a building is definitely something you can do.
- Make Stuff for Gifting - I’m a softie for sentimentality, and some of the best gifts I’ve gotten are custom calendars with family pictures on them. The internet has a bunch of different sources to create custom swag with your mug on it. Heck, you can probably even get custom mugs with your mug on them. With digital images, you can easily upload them to a printing service, get a bunch of copies, and use them as gifts for Christmas, birthdays, or whatever other celebration calls for a gift.
So there you have it! We think these 5 suggestions--well, mostly four, because we don’t necessarily condone defacing public property officially--will be great ways for you to share your newly digitized memories with the world. There are probably a ton more, and if you have any awesome ideas, we’d love to read them in the comments! Until then, I’ll be working on custom CTR t-shirts to send to my family for Lief Erikson Day.
