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I’ve found a new use for an old smart phone.
We’ve probably all experienced it. You upgrade your smart phone and find that you’ll only get a $25 credit, if you’re lucky, on the newest model that can cost you around a thousand bucks. We have at least four old smart Iphones and even a few other brands in a box – we chose to not take the measly trade in for our upgrades…and no, we didn’t throw them away.
So what can you do with these old phones?
Here’s one idea. We all probably have hundreds, maybe thousands of ‘photographs’ around our homes, in boxes, in photo albums or hanging from every wall we can possibly hang a frame on.
Have you thought what would happen to those photographs if, heaven forbid, something tragic were to happen to your home? We see it all the time on the news. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and fires destroy thousands of homes every year. Along with that destruction, all of those photographs are likely lost also.
During the current crisis we are all facing as a nation, I, like many of you are playing catch up around the house and may even have caught up. So now what?
So grab an old smart phone – has to have a camera. 
Start by deleting all unneeded apps on the phone. That’s probably all of them except for the ones built in that you cannot delete. In any case, you now have a camera and gigabytes of storage room. You can digitize thousands of your old paper photos and save them forever.
I’ve been doing this and must admit it does take a long time. And you may have to do some cropping, but you’d at least have your photos saved in a format that is safer and easier to reproduce. I doubt if anyone has many ‘negatives’ of their paper photos anymore – we sure don’t. Besides that’s just too cumbersome to manage these days.
I took my latest project a step further and bought a Sentry firebox. I’ve stored my new photo storage devices in it along with some other items such as wills and passports since there is some extra room. You can get these at any Wal-Mart or on Amazon for $30 or so. They’re small, fireproof and nearly indestructible. I know there is a chance that this, too could be lost in a tornado or flood or other disaster, but the chances are now at least better than they were before you went through this trouble.
So while we are all being asked to self quarantine, make some good use of this time, grab an old phone, clear the apps and start taking photos of your photos. Hopefully it will never matter that you have backups of your precious photos, but if for some unfortunate reason, you do, then you’ll be happy you went to the trouble. Besides, it’s fun looking at the old photos anyway every once in a while.
Hope this gives you some ideas on how to manage your time at home.
Thanks for reading…..
Paul
