Some people would be insulted to be called a techie, nerd or geek. But every family needs one.

Instead of having thousands of pictures on your phone that slip by the wayside, or dozens of photo albums collecting dust, I’m the guy that puts all those special moments together in a place that can be easily viewed, valued and kept for generations to come. Yup, I’m the family techie.

Photos, home movies, old VHS tapes, and all things related, I save, chronicle, catalog, and convert them for my family and yours. I admit, it’s a bit geeky, but in the best way!

We all take these pictures/videos to save a memory, a moment, a special event that we want to remember just as it was. If it was worth taking, it’s likely worth saving.

My wife has over 70 thousand pictures (yes, I’m serious) on her computer from her phone. Periodically I transfer them to a DVD or the cloud. We have become a streaming society (sorry Blockbuster!). Most computers aren’t shipping with CD/DVD players anymore, so the cloud is the safe place to be.

To do that, I put all the material on an external drive (and/or cloud) for easy access. I often use Amazon Drive and Dropbox; both are about $90 a year but they have tons of storage space to include all those precious moments, and it is easy to share the link with loved ones.

Here’s the thing, even if you are doing the archiving yourself, it’s important to include one of your children or somebody from the next generation in on the operation, so they know where and what everything is. They may not care very much now, but in time, it will mean the world to them.

My mother-in-law loves watching the family’s home movies, tributes and events, but she struggles with electronics. So, I converted all her videos to MP4s and put them on her laptop so she can watch them anytime she wants. I also show her how to get her videos from her computer to her TV screen. It makes for great viewing.

Life has taught me that when the people you love are gone, you would give anything to see and hear them again; to laugh at their shenanigans, hear their stories, share their jokes. Properly preserved videos do just that; they transport us back to a time that is no longer ours.

There is a LOT of caring that goes into what I do. If that makes me a techie, I’m totally good with that.

If you haven’t begun the process of saving pictures, archiving, converting videos to DVD or MP4, I highly encourage you to do so. If you don’t have the time or expertise, call me. I am more than happy to do it for you.

Because time waits for no one.

Mitch