Get rid of those shoeboxes of greeting cards, guilt-free!

We all have them tucked in some corner of our house—a stack of old greetings cards that we can’t bear to throw out because of the sentimental value. As a paperless warrior, you have at your disposal the tools to reclaim those corners of your home, with no guilt at all!

On my last birthday, I received one of the coolest cards from the kids. It was one of those cute cards that people give that are “from the cat.” In this case, however, they had chased down each one of our felines and subjected them to a forced paw-printing exercise, which you can see at the right, complete with each cat’s name.

Now that’s just too cute for words. Who can imagine ever throwing out such a neat card?

How about the card that my wife slipped in my luggage last October when I went to India on business? That really warmed my heart to read while I was unpacking my luggage in a Bangalore hotel. That one’s a keeper too.

The problem is not one individual card; as the saying goes, “No single snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche.”

Besides the sentimental value, quite often cards hold important information: names and addresses. In the treeware world, people have been saving the corners of envelopes for years in an effort to keep the important bits while tossing the rest.

You know where this is going, don’t you?

Scan it all in

Once you have accepted the fact that you have never actually sat down with your shoebox to read twenty years of cards, and that no one will be hurt at their loss, you can calmly sit down and begin scanning them in, so that you always remember them.

I found that a sheet-fed scanner works wonders, but I often have to snip on the fold lines and feed in the individual pieces, assembling the whole lot into a multi-page PDF when I’m done.

Some kinds of cards just don’t work in a sheet-fed scanner: lumpy cards covered in glitter with popups and stuff. I use my flatbed scanner for those.

No matter how I do it, I make sure that in the end I have a single PDF that contains the whole card, and no blank pages. I try to make the pretty part of the card be the first page, so in any thumbnail view I will see the card.

If the envelope has useful information, such as a return address, just scan it in as well and attach it as another page to the PDF.

Make sure to pick a good name for the file; I choose to use the date of the event followed by the type of card and maybe some special info about the event. Such as 20081225 Christmas card from Mom.pdf. That’s unambiguous and can be found regardless of what kind of document management system you use (if any).

Not just greeting cards

I’m certain that your shoebox has other flat paper items that aren’t greeting cards. Some are letters that you exchanged with your spouse when you were dating, perhaps others are letters from distant family members. Maybe someone sent you a copy of a photo of the eight of you on that fun rafting trip back in ‘92. The point is, you can go through all of this and handle it accordingly:

• Set aside anything that must be kept—things like stray automotive titles and precious letters from deceased family members.
• Scan in all the rest, creating PDF files that contain exactly one letter, in its entirety, with envelope.
• Don’t bother running OCR on it unless it is typewritten or the address is a printed label.
• You may wish to scan in any photos at higher resolution in your photo management software (such as iPhoto or Picasa).

Once you have everything checked and safely backed up, you can recycle all of that paper and use the shoebox for something useful like network cables and power supplies.

When you are all done, you will have plenty of beautiful memories on your computer (and backed up!) that you can.

[Update]

Last weekend, a friend mentioned that her mom taught her to always keep the most recent letter from a family member. This way, if the person dies, you will have the last letter they sent to you.

She still has the last letter her mother wrote before she passed away.

The message is clear: Don’t be a fool. Keep precious letters that have great sentimental value. You probably do want to scan them in, so that even if they are lost in a fire, you still have the scan.

But think very carefully before taking anything to the shredder.