By now, many of you have moved all of your picture taking to a digital camera, and probably have a nice big library of digital photos of your loved ones and friends. Yet, since your move to digital happened in only recent years -- starting perhaps as long ago as a decade back -- you still have a basement full of photos in boxes, albums or even strewn all over your home. The problem is that as these paper-based photos get older, they lose their luster and get mangled. They also are at risk of being destroyed by natural or other disaster, such as a flooded-basement, fire or ornery 2-year old with a burning desire to rip papers.

You really do need to get those old photos into digital format, where you can keep multiple copies in multiple locations and reproduce them when desired.

Many people turn to their desktop scanners to digitize their photos and store them on their computers; but in most families, that also means fighting over the computer to get the project done, because everybody needs the family computer, and turning years of family photos into a collection of digital bits is a time-consuming process. It would be nice if you could just scan them in while watching TV, not tethered to your computer, and not fighting over it with your children.

Doesn't it figure that it took a company that markets digital photo frames to come up with a nice solution? Such a company would want to give you a better way to get your favorite photos into digital format so you can show them off in your digital photo frames. So Pandigital came up with the Photolink one touch scanner.

The biggest difference between the Photolink scanner and most consumer oriented scanners on the market is that the Photolink can work stand-alone. It doesn't need to scan your photos onto your PC's disk drive (although it can). Instead, you slip a common SD card into a port on the front of the Photolink, and the scanner stores your scanned images right on the SD card. Then, you can move them to your computer at a convenient time by removing the SD card from your Photolink scanner and inserting it into the SD card reader that is standard on most PCs -- the same way that you might move your photos from your digital camera to your computer.

The Photolink is so simple that you can start using it within 2 minutes of taking it out of the box. You plug the power cord into the AC wall outlet, press the power button on the scanner, insert the SD card (one comes with the scanner) and start scanning. Within minutes you'll have a your old photos ready to store, e-mail, backup or duplicate.

The Photolink is housed in a sturdy black plastic case, not much bigger than a superdog that you might buy at the ballpark. And it comes with everything you need to get started, including an SD card (1 GB), power adapter (something that doesn't come with your iPod) and accessories to calibrate, clean and protect beaten-up photos as you scan them. It scans photos up to 5 inch by 7 inch in either 600 dpi or 300 dpi resolution. That should scan most of the photos you printed from full rolls of film; but unfortunately won't do much for larger format prints. It also includes a USB cord, just in case you want to scan directly into your computer. (You can do this with standard Windows software or an application Pandigital includes on the SD card.)

The Photolink sells for $78 to $107 online and in stores.

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