As you’ve been perusing around Kodak’s digitization website, you’ve probably seen that you’re responsible for choosing your digital delivery method. Your options are a thumb drive, DVD, or digital download. You probably know what a thumb drive is, you almost certainly know what a DVD is, but you might be scratching your head at the digital download.
Fear not, reader! We’re here to help.
A digital download is a completely over-the-air (if you use WIFI, otherwise it’ll be over-the-wire) method of getting your digitized photos, videos, and recordings. Once we’ve run all of your home media through our digitization machines, we’ll add it all to the cloud and share access with you.
OK OK, that got a bit technical there at the end. Let’s back up a little bit.
At its most basic, a digital download just means that you click on a link from your computer, and you’ll be able to transfer everything from our computers to yours. You don’t have to worry about thumb drives, DVDs, or any of that. You’ll just click a link, and your media will transfer onto your computer.
But since we have you here, let’s go ahead and explain what some of those other techno-jargon words mean. First, we’ll talk about the cloud.
The internet isn’t a specific place or thing. The internet is just a big connection of computers. When you look at websites, download music, or purchase Kitten Mittens on Amazon, you’re just accessing information that’s stored on a computer in a different place. You’ve probably heard of servers before. That’s what servers are. They’re just big stacks of computers and hard drives that store information.
For the first while that computers existed, if you had files that you wanted to keep, you had to save them on your own computer. Because the connection between computers was really slow (anyone remember dial-up?), it wasn’t really feasible to share information very quickly. As computers got faster and the connection between them improved too, folks figured out that they didn’t have to store everything on their own computers anymore. Since the internet is basically just a bunch of connected computers, big companies like Google invented a service that they called the Cloud.
The Cloud is where you can store your files on big computers and access them through the internet instead of having to save them on your own devices. Google Drive is a great example of what a cloud service looks like.
That’s basically how the digital download option works. We have a bunch of storage capacity here that we can share with you. That means we can upload your memories securely to our servers, you get a sign-on and password so that only you can access them, and you can look at them over the internet any time you’d like. If you want to download your media onto your own device, you can do that too.
The awesome thing about digital download is that it’s the most environmentally friendly version that we offer. Digital downloads don’t require any plastic, electronics, or transportation costs. All that’s required is computer access.
Digital download is the perfect option for folks that want a simple, instant delivery method without the mess or hassle of actual storage devices.
