Feng Shui Your Photos

(NewsUSA) - Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese art that arranges homes for energy, or Chi, creates positive living spaces. Americans’ stuff-everything-in-somewhere tactic leads to stress and lost objects.

De-stressing homes doesn’t need to cause stress. Americans can tackle one small issue at a time, like finally donating long-outgrown children’s clothes or tossing out old magazines, until their homes look less like disaster zones and more like serene spaces.

Paper photographs can create clutter and disrupt Chi. The average American home contains over 10,000 photographs, slides or negatives.

Pounds - yes, pounds - of family memories end up piled into closets and stuffed into spare corners, where they can suffer damage from humidity or temperature changes. No one wants to search through shoeboxes of hundreds of photos to find just one picture of Grandpa fishing.

People can’t callously toss out their photographs -; their pictures record vacations, events and first days at school. But no one looks at photos stuffed in attics, either.

The solution? Americans can convert their photographs into digital formats. Instead of years of photographs crammed in closets, basements and attics, those same photographs take up a
few inches on a desk or bookcase.

“Digitizing photos is a great way to get rid of unnecessary clutter while protecting those memories from fading and deterioration. It allows people to access and share their photos easily while creating a much more organized environment for themselves,” said Danielle Liu, Certified Professional Organizer (CPO) and president of the Oregon Chapter of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO).

One service, ScanCafe (www.scancafe.com), scans photographs, slides and negatives into high-resolution digital images.

ScanCafe’s process is in keeping with the art of Feng Shui, taking the stress out of the task of digitally converting old images. Customers can send an entire archive for scanning without spending hours presorting photographs. Once the scanning is complete, customers can securely review the scans online and discard the photographs they don’t wish to keep.

ScanCafe returns to customers both the DVDs containing their new scans and their original photographs. The scanned images also remain in a secure online gallery that allows the customer to share the new digital image with friends or family. Once returned, people can dispose of their old bulky photographs and