#PreservingMemories with iMemories! {Review} #CBias

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Shane’s at such a fun age right now, where every day he’s learning something new and experiencing new things. This weekend was his first trip to the zoo; last month, he went to a pumpkin patch for the first time. Right now, these memories are fresh in my mind- but the memories of MY first trip to the zoo & first trip to the pumpkin patch, some 20-something years ago? Not so much.

For months now, I’ve been aching to watch the home videos that my dad took when I was Shane’s age, using his prehistoric, 30-pound camcorder that followed me everywhere from the room where I took my first steps to the epic first Disney World trip to the “music videos” I created to Spice Girls music in my living room. {You know you did that, too.} But everytime I’ve thought about calling my Dad to borrow the movies, I realized- I don’t have a VCR! I can’t even watch the movies & enjoy the memories my parents made sure to preserve for me on video tape.

And even worse? I’m not getting any younger- which means the videos aren’t, either. Did you know that the average lifespan of a VHS is actually only 10-15 years? That means the prime years have already passed on my home movies- so before they disappeared forever, I decided to take action to preserve them.

The UPS Store, where I already frequent, has a new service that they work with called iMemories. iMemories is a video transfer service that can take your photos, videos, and even film reels and preserve them for you by putting them on DVD.

The whole process is surprisingly easy:

1. You choose however many photos or videos you want to transfer. My Dad chose 3 of his favorite videos.

2. You take whatever videos or photos you want to transfer to your The UPS Store, and fill out a couple of quick & easy forms.

3. The UPS Store employees can package everything for you {wish is great because I was super nervous to ship something as precious to me as my home videos, but I knew they were experts at shipping!} and send it to iMemories.

4. iMemories then puts everything online- they’ll post all of your photos and/or video clips. They even go through and eliminate empty space and make each new memory into a clip. For example, one of my video tapes was 36 clips long, because there would be five minutes of Christmas, ten minutes of birthdays, five minutes of toddlerhood, etc.- so rather than make that all one great big clip, they made it into three so I could choose which ones to include on the DVDs I made.

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5. After they’ve made all the clips for you {this CAN take 2-3 weeks, by the way; It’s worth the wait but I did wait three weeks} you can log in to your free account & share your memories with your friends & family! You can choose to skip this part, but my favorite part of the whole process was being able to log in and then share them with friends & family via Facebook! For example, I found a short clip of my younger brother and I playing outside with one of my friends- and was able to immediately send it to her on Facebook, 12 years later!

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6. Then comes the fun part: You get to choose which clips to include on each DVD. I made copies for my Dad that were exact replicas of the VHS tapes, but since there was a lot of stuff on the tapes that I didn’t care about {like the hour and a half- seriously- of my Dad’s last day of work before we moved to Las Vegas 18 years ago} I didn’t include those on my DVDs.

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7. Then, you just order however many DVDs you want, and you’re all set! The DVDs shipped about 48 hours after I ordered them. I received them a couple of days ago, and the next day I got an email notification that I’ll be receiving my original VHS tapes back on Tuesday!

I love that I can now watch my own home movies with my son- he asks to watch them at least once a day. &I feel better knowing that those memories aren’t going to fade anytime soon. My Dad has already told me that he’s going to have me repeat this for him every few months until all of the movies have been converted. It’s a good thing using iMemories is so easy & fun, because my Dad’s got at least 100 videos!

What home videos do you want to save the most?

Susie’s Note: This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias. #CBias All experiences are authentic & all opinions are my own!

{Also, be sure to check out my Google+ album for more pics from my trip to The UPS Store & some cute screen grabs from my movies!}