Downsizing

Computers can be a big assist for seniors downsizing to smaller quarters.

Books take up a lot of space and are expensive to transport.      Most of your books are probably accessible with Overdrive from your local library.     Ebook collections can be found for Kindle on Amazon for as little as $0.99 for both genres and collected works.     Then,  the Internet Archive is a major source for books at no cost.    You can also sell your old books on Amazon.

I simply sold and discarded most books, keeping only those not available in digital versions or frequently used.  Regional book are frequently in demand and can be sold.

Color slides also take up a lot of space,  including those you may have inherited. It is a nuisance to view them with a projector or viewer.   I hear of many seniors simply throwing them out.     I found it worthwhile to digitize selected slides with the Jumbl device.    It is worth noting that when previewed using a TV, the image was nowhere near as good as the final digitized image.

I then scrapped most of the slides but did keep the best of them as a backup.

Shoe boxes full of photos also take space.     Here a lot can be stored densely so that digitisation is optional.    Scanning them with the computer is cumbersome.   It is much more efficient to scan them with a smartphone using an app such as Google Photoscan.     The results can be  beautiful.     

The same smartphone process can be used to digitize documents in either image or text form using an OCR scan app.

LPs take up a lot of space but now can sometimes be sold.      I digitized mine years ago with a turntable designed for the purpose and now available for a fraction of what I paid for such a device years ago.   I just threw out the original LPs.

I also converted audio CDs to MP3s end back from MP3s to data CDs which hold five or six times as much music, as well as DVDS.    But most of my music is now on Amazon music and accessible instantly and everywhere.    

Know that a Prime Membership gives access to a huge library of music not in your collection..    Additionally Spotify offers similar access to almost all music, not to mention Pandora.   

I found wonderful recordings from the thirties also in the Internet Archive, along with books by authors from the same period.

So now you can take it all with you no matter how short on space--until you also move to the cloud!