David Tuttle, of Alpine, knows firsthand the time involved in digitizing and restoring both photographic images and videos. He spent the past three years scanning about 30 years of his family photos to his computer and then burning them onto DVDs.

Now, he's working on a project to digitize and edit his family videos. It's a more time-consuming process than scanning photos and requires patience, because although he has a new computer with a lot of speed, power and memory, Tuttle said he has struggled to find a reliable video-editing program that won't freeze up.

Still, he said his time scanning and also editing has been worth it, especially when the family gets together and views digital slide shows of the family photos he has created.

"Someone from my generation, who has raised their family, can have shoeboxes full of photos, and it can be daunting to just get started," he said. "It was a lot of work, but it is very, very much worth doing."

When Tuttle started work on his photo-scanning project, he took it one year at a time. When four years worth of photos were scanned, he would burn them onto a DVD for archival purposes and also arrange them in a slide show that could be viewed by family members.

Each of his children have copies of the DVD slide shows for their own records.

With companies that scan photos and videos for you, the work to prepare your images to be digitized is still tedious. With most companies, you must arrange photos in the order you want them scanned and burned onto a DVD, and they must all be facing the same direction.

At Larsen Digital Services in Pleasant View, if you do the work of arranging pictures yourself, they can scan the images and burn them to a DVD for as little as 14 cents a print. The company also will scan albums and boxes of prints, but the cost goes up.

Specialized scanning services, where photos can be touched up or edited, are also offered for varying prices. The company also can convert cassette tapes to MP3 files and VHS video to DVD.

"We have some customers come in with one or two photos and other people where we quite literally scan 20,000 slides of their entire family history," said Kristin Harding, part-owner of the company. "We can pretty much convert almost anything a person has."

For people looking to hire someone to digitize their photos and videos, Harding would advise two things: One, research the company to be sure it doesn't outsource its work, and two, be sure you actually do get around to submitting your images and videos to be digitized, restored and scanned.

Larsen Digital does all its work in Pleasant View, which is located in Weber County. But other online companies ship photos to places such as India and Costa Rica to be scanned.