When David and I got married last fall, there were a number of people who played a huge role in the outcome of our big day, but only one device made a singular difference in how our wedding turned out and how we relive the memories today. For that, we have to thank our ScanSnap S1100.

Living quite a distance from both sets of our parents created a constant stream of challenges throughout the planning process. Shortly after we got engaged, one of my bridesmaids offered to put together a slideshow of chronological photos that would be displayed for our wedding guests. We were lucky that our parents had diligently documented our respective childhoods and that my friend gave us plenty of lead time to dig up fading photos from dusty family albums. However we didn’t anticipate how hard it would be to convert ancient prints into digital files, especially since our mothers were adamant that we return the photos to their proper album slots post-haste.

Transporting all of the albums to the nearest office supply store for scanning would have been a costly and time-consuming endeavor, probably resulting in misplaced and disordered photos. The answer to our prayers came in the form of the ScanSnap S1100, which scanned our family photos in a snap and could be transported easily to our parents’ homes in Pennsylvania and Florida. The device could be slipped into our carry-on bag, connected to our laptop, and zip through a pile of photos in no time. The wondrous powers of the ScanSnap didn’t stop at those albums.

My mother and I had amassed a mountain of magazine clippings, contracts, charts, receipts, brochures, and business cards related to the wedding and gradually compiled a binder of these materials. However, there was one problem: only one of us could access the binder at any given time. I lived two thousand miles away from both the wedding location and my parents’ house but it made more sense to keep the binder close to home, where my mother could easily look up inspirational ideas or past wedding expenses. At the same time, I needed access to that same information since the two of us were consulting with our contacts and checking to-dos off our long list simultaneously.

My solution was to feed each piece of paperwork into the ScapSnap and store all of the documents in Evernote, which allowed me to have electronic copies of everything and made browsing our wedding-related information even easier than paging through a binder. One time, my mother was in disagreement with one of the wedding vendors over the price quote and neither party could locate the original contract. I was able to track down the documentation instantly in Evernote and settle the dispute (fortunately, in our favor). If I had a dollar for every time I referred to those materials in Evernote throughout the wedding preparations, our wedding bills might be paid off by now!

The photo slideshow was a popular highlight of the wedding weekend, because it not only told the story of the bride and groom, but it also incorporated many memories of our family and friends. The quality of the pictures being projected on the big screen matched the originals in their albums perfectly. Even though we had a professional photographer following our every move on the big day, lots of our wedding guests took photos on their own cameras. It was a pleasant surprise when, months later, several envelopes arrived in the mail with prints of these photos. A few of them actually captured moments that the professional missed. When I began thinking about how to preserve all of our wedding photos in a bound book, ScanSnap came to the rescue once again. I was able to transfer some of the prints that our friends sent into a digital format and add them to the image folder from the professional photographer. The final photo book that we created and ordered online managed to encompass every special moment from every single angle.

From the early days of planning our wedding to the honeymoon period, the ScanSnap S1100 didn’t just simplify our chaotic lives and facilitate endless preparations; it gave us the gift of digitizing memories old and new

Copley, Consultant
Everybody ScanSnap Entry – Runner-up