Most thrift store tapes are junk anyway, so getting 11 minutes of some guy pitching a kidney is way better than another blurry birthday party you would toss after five minutes. A family reunion recording has zero value unless it is your own family, while a weird tape like this actually has a story behind it and could even be worth something to the right collector. Your buck fifty bought you a memory nobody else has, which beats the usual moldy wedding video any day.

My first digital edge finder died after 3 months, went straight back to the manual one.

The tags are the easy part, but the searching is where manual really pays off. I spent a whole weekend tagging my late dad's old slides, and the auto stuff kept grouping "beach" with "vacation" so I'd lose track of which trip had the funny crab photo. Doing it by hand, I started adding little notes like "dad's laugh" or "the year we got lost," which no algorithm would ever catch. Now when I search, I get the story, not just a category.