One of the most common questions we get asked is, “Can you make this photo another size?” It could be making a 3”x5” into a 5”x7”, or a wallet-sized photo into an 8”x10”. And our answer is always the same:

VHS technology is fragile. Those tapes can get damaged, belts can get worn out and cracked, and drums can stop spinning. Sometimes, the markings on the tapes become so faint and weak that not even the strongest, high-end S-VHS player can display them anymore. When that happens, whatever is stored on those videos could be presumed to be lost forever.

That presumption, surprisingly enough, MIGHT NOT BE TRUE.

In an earlier blog post we covered how to properly store your photos, so they’d stay in the best possible shape until you can have them digitized. But what about your bin of old VHS tapes? Unlike photos, VHS tapes are extremely fragile, and were only designed to last 10-25 years before needing to be replaced.

An in-depth editor’s review of PhotoPad photo editing software, produced by NCH software.

An in-depth review of the ClearClick Photo2Digital scanner.

If we’re staring at the same photos on the same part of the wall, day after day, we might not notice when the dyes in the photo start fading.

We’ve all got that old box of photos sitting under our bed, in a closet, or in the basement. Some of us have several of those boxes! We keep them with good intentions. “We’ll go through them someday, I’m glad to just have them around.” But time doesn’t wait.