I have been a poor college student for several years now. How little disposable income do I have? I went to my first full-price movie in almost a year last night (The Avengers, of course), because I had won a raffle for a gift card at work. So when it comes to buying presents for loved ones, I’ve had to get creative. For example, since I haven’t been able to afford anything really worth getting my mom for Mother’s Day (and even if I could, most of the money I’d spend would come from her anyway), I’ve instead hit on the idea of putting to work my increasingly valuable skills I’ve learned as a result of her sending me to college in the first place. As a result, I’ve given her a present worth more, both in cash and in sentimental value, than most other kids at the same point in their life as I am.

See, my mom has several shoeboxes squirreled away in her room that are stuffed full of hundreds of photos she’s taken over the years (obviously from before the digital photography era). In her spare time she used to work on sorting and storing these photos so that they’d be catalogued and preserved for many years to come- but when her free time vanished due to juggling my siblings and I, while also juggling an increasingly paperwork-heavy job, the photos sat in those boxes, gathering dust and slowly fading and degrading away. Coincidentally, one of my skills I’ve improved the most in college is my Photoshopping ability- so when I found those boxes of worn, faded photos while helping clean around the house, I knew I’d found a perfect way to make sure I’d be able to give my mom a Mother’s Day gift every year for a while.

I borrowed my cousin’s batch photo scanner, and set to work scanning in the hundreds of photos. Once I had them safely digitized I was able to sort them, then go in and start restoring all of them, one by one. It takes a good 10-15 minutes to work on each image (depending on the level of deterioration), and several hours to make any sort of dent in the digital pile, But the time-money tradeoff is well worth it: every Mother’s Day I’ve been able to send my mom a good couple dozen new additions to add to her digital photo “shoeboxes” on her laptop, complete with date stamps, tags, and folders for each set of images. Quite literally a modern version of the project she began attempting almost 20 years ago.

Here’s a before and after shot of one of my mom’s photos (that’s my sister in the middle chair). The batch scanner’s green light shows up on the photo film, so there’s a decent amount of color distortion on top of the fading of the photo’s own colors. I also had to adjust the image levels, and remove tons of dust particles which found their way onto the glossy surface and came along for the ride.

Unfortunately, Mom still doesn’t have the free time to sit back and enjoy all the photos I’ve accumulated on her hard drive over the past few years- but since I’ve hooked them all into her screensaver as a slideshow, she doesn’t have to. Whenever she leaves her laptop alone for a few minutes to wash the dishes, do the laundry, or work on the perpetual mountain of paperwork she brings home from work every day, when she comes back she’ll be treated to a hilarious snapshot of our old, fat cat Tiffany just chilling in the bathroom sink, or a family photo from my cousin’s bar mitzvah, or a candid look at my sister Carolyn as she ponders why her spaghetti is splattered against the wall next to her high chair (that one was actually taken about a year ago, when she was 18). As it happens, Mom just had surgery on her left eye to repair a complication from her diabetes. So when her vision comes back in a few days, she’ll get a post-Mother’s Day treat in the form of some newly-added memories to her digital shoebox.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom!!!