Do you have any old photos or videos lying around the house and you don’t know what to do with them? Have you ever considered getting them digitized to make it easier to share them with family members?

Sasha Golding of Silver Frame Productions can help as she offers digitizing services to preserve your photo and video memories.

“Pretty much any type of photos or videos, I can help with organizing them, downsizing a little bit if they have a multitude of albums, for example. And then digitizing, which is typically scanning photos or converting old movie tapes or reels to a digital format,” she said.

There are a few reasons for doing this, Golding said, the most important of which is to have backup.

Tapes will deteriorate over time, she said, or photos and videos can be lost in the case of a fire.

“So, in my opinion, the number one reason to digitize and go through this process with an old collection of family photos would be to have a backup,” she said. “Once they’re digital, you can save a copy somewhere else and you can always recreate that if you need to.”

It is also a great way to have your memories organized, Golding said, which makes it easier to share with your family. A lot of the older formats of videos, for example, cannot be played on today’s equipment and finding a working VCR is a challenge.

“You certainly can’t find projectors very easily anymore and if you do, they’re not very gentle on films,” Golding said. “Converting videos, for example, to a digital format means you can easily watch them on a memory stick, computer, TV, an iPad, anything like that.”

Once photos are digitized, they can be shared with the entire family.

In 2012, Golding wanted a job which allowed her the flexibility to spend more time with her children, while getting out of the typical nine-to-five grind.

“And to something that I really enjoyed more,” she added.

When Golding first started, she thought she would simply be creating slide shows for people.

“I thought they would bring me everything digital and ready to go and I would just make the slide show,” she said.

Instead, people would bring Golding their old shoeboxes, scrapbooks or photo albums and tell her which photos they wanted used.

“And so my first step would have to be to digitize those so I could do something with them,” she said, adding people would also bring her a stack of VHS tapes.

Over the next year or two, Golding realized there were more people than she thought that needed help organizing and preserving their memories before anything could be done with them.

“So over the next few years, it evolved into a business where, I was still doing slide shows for people, but also doing a lot of the scanning work, as well, and converting,” she said. “From there, it turned into sort of the opposite. I was still doing some slide shows and keepsake work for people. But now It’s a lot more help with organizing and preserving and helping them share.”

Converting video tapes is done in real time. If a VHS tape is two hours in length, then it runs for two hours and is recorded on a computer.

“So there’s no way to speed that up,” Golding said. “Likewise, if there’s a 400-foot eight-millimetre film reel, in real time, the scanning is half an hour, but then there is some work afterwards to do the editing.”

Originally a home-based business, Golding moved Silver Frame Productions to its current location at 107A Main Street N., last fall.

“It has been absolutely great,” Golding said. “It’s right on Main Street, of course. It’s definitely a larger space, which lets me have more equipment. But more importantly, it’s a lot more accessible. It’s nice and bright. It’s been a really positive move, for sure.”

The business has been growing steadily, Golding said. The pandemic resulted in people going through their old photo albums or videos.

“I think a lot of people started realizing passing memories through generations and stories through generations is really important,” she said. “Over the last couple of years, the business has been growing because a lot more people are coming in.”

Some people, Golding said, aren’t aware of what the options are when it comes to preserving their photos or videos.

“So when they find out that there is somebody that’s a photo manager and has training in this, they’re relieved,” she said, adding people often don’t know where to start, which is something she can help with. “I can help them decide whether they want to tackle a project themselves or have help with it, or a combination of both. Sometimes people don’t have the time or the interest or computer skills or the equipment to actually do the digitizing. But they like the organizing part,” Golding said, adding other people just want to hand everything over and let her do the work, while other will scan the photos themselves and leave the videos to her.

Golding can digitize any size of negative, any size of slides, any type of photos of any age.

“Sometimes we get old photos from the 1800s in here,” she said, adding she has a wide range of equipment to handle photos or videos in any condition. “I invested a couple of years ago in a very, very specialized $10,000 scanner for digitizing old super 8 and eight-millimetre films. A lot of people don’t know that old films can be scanned and so we’re now doing a lot more of those this past year,” Golding said. “It’s really, really nice to be able to hand someone back their films from the ‘50s that they have never seen and they’re a child in them. And they’ve never seen that footage before.”

The technology, Golding said, has changed over the years. It used to be that people would use an everyday, photocopier scanner to try to scan photos.

“But now, we have a rapid scanner that scans the front and the back of the photo in the same pass and very quickly,” she said, adding thousands of photos can be scanned in a day at the good quality and the film scanning technology is much different, as well.

The company’s website can be found at silverframeproductions.ca and Golding is also on Facebook and Instagram. The business hours are Tuesday to Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Golding will also take appointments on Mondays.

“I’m really excited to be downtown now. I think that more businesses are opening and bringing people downtown is really important to me, as well,” she said. “Having an accessible store front ow where people can just drop in is really nice.”

Golding has one part time person working with her, but she hopes to add more staff as the business grows.

Golding appreciates when people support small businesses in the Parkland.

“As a small business owner myself, I know that when customers bring me their photos and videos, I’m not shipping them out to get digitized, which is what a lot of larger businesses do that do this business,” she said. “Here, nothing is shipped out. I do the work here. There is no risk of your things being lost. I’m here to answer questions, to help people with their tech help if they need. So when people help support small local businesses like this, it makes such a difference. It keeps money in the community, which then we can turn around and donate to local organizations and fund-raisers.”

People are sometimes surprised at the quality of work Golding is able to produce, receiving a lot of positive comments from her customers.

“People seem to really appreciate sitting face-to-face in the shop talking about their photos and explaining why they’re important to them and knowing that they’re going to be taken care of really well here, handled carefully. I think people appreciate that,” she said, adding everything is kept private and confidentiality is important to her.

“Those memories are going to be treated with respect. That’s really, really important to me. It’s a lot of trust that people place when they bring their, sometimes very private memories, and knowing that they can trust me with those here is really important to me,” Golding said.