North - Northwest Austin Edition | August 2023

BUSINESS FEATURE

BY BRITTANY ANDERSON

BEFORE TOUCH UP

Founder and CEO Laura Woolsey (center) works along side a team to restore and organize media.

AFTER TOUCH UP

PRESERVING THE PAST Memory Forward oers several dierent types of services to clients.

Physical organization Sorting photo prints, negatives, slides and various documents Scanning/digital conversion Producing digital, high-quality scans of physical media Photo products Creating custom photo books, albums, slideshows or displays Video conversion Digitizing VHS, Hi8 and MiniDV tapes and Super8 lm

Memory Forward uses professional-grade equipment and software to carefully restore and digitize photos and videos. (Photos by Brittany Anderson/Community Impact)

Memory Forward Photo restoration service brings memories back to life S orting through shoe boxes full of photos, stacks of old VHS tapes or piles of historical

spent helping her mother organize photographs. Client operations specialist Tom Hensle said that many times, clients are looking to downsize, have inherited the items from family members or are simply wanting to use and store their media more eectively—tasks that can undoubtedly be overwhelming. “A lot of our clients come to us in a place of anxiety because they’ve had a closet full of stu that they’ve been avoiding for a couple of decades,” Hensle said. The process is also oftentimes emotional for clients as their old photos come back to life, senior photo operation specialist Cassandra Dowman said. With some clients, she

said, images have gone unseen for decades because they no longer have the proper tools to view them with, such as a projector for photo slides. With the business being local to Austin and serving clients from the area almost exclusively, the Memory Forward team has the opportunity to get to know their clients’ stories as they restore, digitize and archive generations worth of their memories. While Woolsey has seen many changes in the 15 years she has been in the industry, the heart of her business has stayed the same. “We’re not a shoe box scanning service,” she said. “We care. We want you to have permanent, good images.”

family documents can be daunting— but for the meticulously organized and attentive Memory Forward team, it’s what they’re best at. Memory Forward is a local photo restoration service that turns these media collections into a usable archive through physical and digital organization, photo scanning and digital conversion, color correction and other restorations, video tape and lm conversion, and more. Founder and CEO Laura Woolsey created Memory Forward in 2007, drawing from her background in computer science and childhood

Memory Forward 12401 Hymeadow Drive, Ste. 1A, Austin 512-766-5393 www.memoryforward.com Hours: Mon.-Fri. 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

MELLOW MEADOW DR.

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