Same here!
I have TONS of negatives, from back to the 80s when I was a kid, and tons of negatives from before I was born. Those pictures are EVERYTHING to me, because there's my granpa and my aunt in it, I lived with them till 2 years ago, when they passed away, and I couldn't stand to lose them. Plus all of my parents pictures, wedding an so on.
I bought a scanner,
this one. It's the Epson V500 perfetcion photo. It can scan negatives, slides and normal picture. It even came with a free copy of PS elements. There are better scan, from Canon, but really really expensive, and there's the v600 and v700 from Epson too, but I did lots of researche online, and the V500 it's more than enough to me, since I'm not goint to print those scanned negatives too big, if even.
I know there are online services, though, you send them your pictures and they do the job for you, like
Scanmyphotos.com.. Too bad in europe we don't.
If you can use them, I'd suggest to do so, buying the scanner and do the job it's pretty much the same as paying for them to do the job.
I figured that I wanted to have a backedup copy of those negatives because
- you never know, as you can lose your digital data, you can lose them too.
- In a few years, those may be too damaged to recovery, and I want my grandkids to see them!
- I wanted to scrap some of those!!
It's a huge, HUGE job to do, I have THOUSANDS of slides and negatives. But I'm not in a rush!