Scrap your slides

With a scanner and a presentation or multimedia program, you can replace slide shows of your vacation with multimedia events that tie together your photos, music, and a narration. That's no guarantee you'll interest everyone, but it does make for a more entertaining account of your travels.

Morph magic

Family photos can take on a new life when you scan them in to your computer and use a morphing program to combine them. Blend together photos of a child at different ages to watch him grow, or project how a child will look as an adult by morphing pictures of his parents together. The results may or may not be accurate, but they're sure to be entertaining.

Paper over the past

Do your family photos include someone you'd rather forget? With a scanner and an image editor, you can easily alter your pictures to reflect the way you wish they'd been taken. Add a high-quality color printer to your setup, and you'll even be able to print out replacements for the original.

Frame the family tree

Most genealogy programs on the market these days allow you to scan in a photo to go along with each member of your family tree. Whether you have historic photos from the beginning of the century or instant prints from yesterday, this is a great way to add personality to your genealogy. You'll be amazed at the family resemblances!

Scan a story

If you have children who enjoy reading storybooks or following along with software stories, you can provide a real treat by scanning them into their favorites. Simply scan illustrations from the book into your computer, then replace a character's name with the name of your child, or add a photo of your child to an illustration using an image editor. Output the result, paste it back in to the book, and your child becomes the star of the story.

Extra! Extra!

Another great project for families with lots of news to share is a family newsletter for grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives. Get everyone involved writing stories about the news in their lives, then spice the whole collection up by scanning in photos of the writers at the events they're writing about. Most word processing software now offers the kind of page layout features you need for a simple newsletter, so this can be an easy way to communicate with everyone in your extended family.