At long last, I have completed the book based on articles at LocalArchiver.com. The name of the book is FAMILY PHOTO ORGANIZATION, A Guide to Organizing Family Photos for Improved Preservation and Sharing.

Visit LocalArchiver.com for a preview of the front and back covers, the preface, and the table of contents. Purchase links are available on the preview page as well.

If you do find the book of interest and order it, please take the time to place a brief review at Amazon and provide me with any feedback you may have.

I am a bit biased, but I do believe I did accomplish my goal of providing some useful information to families that need some basic knowledge and guidance about how they can better organize their family photo collections.

As it says on the back cover, if "unorganized and unshared" describes your photo collection, Family Photo Organization was written for you.

Usefulness of Digital Technology to Family Photo Collections

The ultimate transition to digital family photo collections is inevitable. Most original images being captured today are digital, many inherited print collections are being scanned and converted to digital as acquired, and digital files and new image services are opening a wide range of exciting preservation and sharing possibilities.

Even if a family’s primary goal is simply to better organize a collection of older paper prints, an understanding of digital concepts and possibilities is useful to develop a sense of what can be done. With this understanding, families can more confidently use digital technology to improve photo collection organization, preservation, and sharing at a separate pace chosen by each family.

Family photo prints, slides, and many older photo albums are simply prone to fading and deterioration. Converting these images to digital files can be a useful way of preserving the images well beyond the expected useful life of originals. This is particularly true for color photographs, which became mainstream about fifty years ago, and in many cases color photos begin to show noticeable deterioration after approximately forty to fifty years. Even when properly stored, original images will deteriorate over time and perhaps be lost to future generations, if not preserved by duplication in a digital format.

The above is an excerpt from Family Photo Organization, a book I plan to publish this fall.

Visit LocalArchiver.com now, or wait until Family Photo Organization is published, to learn more about organizing, preserving, and sharing family photos.

Online Albums - A Word of Caution

Many families post digital images to online albums, including the sites of major online printers. These free and easy to use online albums can be very helpful in sharing images with friends and extended families. However, it is important not to rely solely on these free online albums as your digital image library backup.

The fine print in many online album service agreements typically allows the provider to re-size and/or eliminate images, at their discretion. With the declining cost of storage, this is unlikely to become a problem. However, these online album providers can be subject to human, software, and hardware failures, and your family photos are simply too important to rely upon someone else as your primary backup.

As prices and sizes of memory formats, such as CDs, DVDs, and memory sticks, continue to decline, there are no good excuses for not having the bulk of your digital images duplicated and stored in a bank safe deposit box or other off premise location. It is just too easy, quick, and inexpensive to not make the effort to backup some of your most prized family possessions.

For more information on organizing, preserving, and sharing family photos, visit LocalArchiver.com.

Why Family Photos Are Important

Family photos and documents are often among a family's most prized possessions because they provide a tangible image link to the past.

At some point in our lives, most of us will come to realize that our lives are more closely connected to generations past, present, and future than we previously appreciated. Connections to our past are important to developing and maintaining a sense of place, a sense of personal and local identity, and often add to our individual sense of purpose and belonging.

Much discussion is currently centered on “social networking”. The family remains our most important and core social network. Shared family experiences, memories, heritage, and often values and interests are reflected in family photo collections and provide a sense of connectedness as well.

A well organized and effectively shared photo collection can promote a clearer understanding of how our family ancestors influenced our thinking, and provide reminders of our personal history and development. A properly organized photo collection allows the next generation to better appreciate these important photo reflections of the past, and can help them to understand their heritage as well.

It was not long ago that most family photos were limited to professional studio portraits. As photography became more affordable and mainstream in the last century, families have routinely captured more images of their family history. Digital technology has now made image transfer and sharing much easier, and online databases are making genealogy research more fruitful than ever before. With the evolution of these tools, developing family histories and coloring that history with photo images has become a growing interest of many families.

Preserving our sense of place and family history is at the heart of why it is important to both preserve and share family photo images. Special family photos and documents simply help us to remember and better understand the uniqueness of our families and our individual journeys.

For more information on organizing, preserving, and sharing of family photos, visit LocalArchiver.com. The above blog is an excerpt from a book being assembled for publication this fall and based on articles at LocalArchiver.com.

Older Family Photo Albums May Create Problems

Take a good look at your existing albums, and look for signs of photo discoloring and fading. The problem may be in the materials that were used to make the albums.

Many albums sold in the past were not made of archival materials and have damaged many older pictures. If you see signs of deterioration or have concerns, seriously consider upgrading to archival quality albums or scanning the album contents to make printed photo books.

Your albums likely contain the best of your photos, so the quality of the storage materials surrounding your very best photos should not be taken lightly.

The many older albums sold with black paper pages are often very acidic, and the laminated look "magnetic" albums widely available in the past are notoriously bad for photos. The picture above is an example of a bad magnetic album where air coming in on the edges has apparently fueled a chemical reaction with something used to manufacture the album. If the photos in such non-archival albums have not already been damaged beyond hope, it may be worth the effort to try to scan the pages or simply remove photos in these albums.

For discussion of what to look for in archival materials, see the article on Storing Original Photos at LocalArchiver.com. For replacement album solutions, visit the Photo Albums and Scrapbooks area at Blick Art Materials.

Make Your 35mm Slides A Part of The Family Photo Collection

In addition to photo prints and newer digital photos, many families have a bunch of 35mm slides that seldom come out of the closet. My family recently tackled the project of culling our slides and sending them off to be scanned in order to add them to the rest of the consolidated digital photo collection. Here are some observations and suggestions.

1) To be most useful for printing, scans of 35mm slides require much higher scan resolution than prints, as the image being scanned is smaller. Therefore, home scanning is more challenging and time consuming. For this reason, it is a relatively easy decision to turn to professional scanning for 35mm slides.

2) Slide scans are not cheap. Therefore, you can save a meaningful amount by waiting for a sale on these services, and by organizing the slides for scanning in order to take advantage of a sale when it comes along.

3) Professional scanning services like ScanDigital
and ScanCafe will typically place a short time frame on discounts, often a requirement to send the slides in the next two or three days. Therefore, you should have your slide collection culled and be in a position to send only those slides you really want to have scanned on short notice.

4) Many older 35mm slides are likely to show severe fading already. Over the years we had slides developed by several labs, many of which are no longer with us. It is probably a matter of different developing approaches that created a marked difference in longevity of the images. Some 25 - 40 year old slides look like they were developed yesterday, while others are faded beyond recognition. The older ones had suffered most notably.

5) The image above shows the roughly 600 slides we organized to be scanned. We pulled out the old slide projector and spent about an hour culling the slides that were not worth the price of a scan. This was easier than one might expect. The result was quick agreement to toss roughly two thirds (loose slides) and scan the remaining third (boxed slides). At a discounted sale scan price of roughly 50 cents a scan, this saved about $200. For roughly $100, we now have our favorite 200 slides consolidated with our other digital images.

6) My suggestion would be to carve out the time to preview and cull your slides. Then use these links at ScanDigital
and ScanCafe to register. You will then receive alerts relative to specials these professional scanners offer from time to time.

Anyone interested in a cheap GAF Anscomatic 660 slide projector with an extra bulb??

For a discussion of other scanning considerations, visit the Scanning Section at LocalArchiver.com.

Quick and Easy Photo Repair With Photoshop Elements

I was recently asked about cleaning old photos and whether spray cleaners can be used safely. I have not used these products and I suspect that improper usage could cause some real problems. Therefore, I suggested that cleaning of older original prints should be left to professionals, and suggested an alternative digital approach to "cleaning".

Blemishes, creases, minor tears, corner wear, and other common forms of damage seen in older photos can often be quickly "repaired" of "cleaned" in a scan by using digital image software such as Photoshop Elements.

Many people are very sentimental about originals. Although I believe we should protect originals as best we can, the memory reflected in the image is normally what is most important. By scanning and then repairing an image, we have an improved image that can be more easily shared, and is now digitally repaired and preserved.

Photoshop Elements or the equivalent is very powerful software. Unless you are quite serious about photography, you are unlikely to use more than a handful of "tools" made available. Photoshop Elements can be acquired for less than $100, and once you have become comfortable with three or four tools in the "toolbox", you can quickly and confidently cleanup and repair older images.

Below is a great vintage postcard image of Hampton Beach, NH postmarked in 1916. Wear and tear is evident, and the post office was clearly not careful with its postmarking ink.


Below is the "cleaned up" version of a scan of the image that used only two tools in the Photoshop Elements toolbox and took less than 5 minutes to complete. The tools used were the "Zoom" tool and the "Clone Stamp" tool.

I will briefly describe how the "Zoom" and "Clone Stamp" tools were used to "clean" this digital image.

1) The vintage postcard, which could have been a vintage photo, was "imported" into the edit area of photoshop elements by using file > import, and selecting my 3 in 1 printer as the source for the scan. I selected a 600 ppi resolution as I may want to print an enlargement one day, and this will provide plenty of flexibility.

2) Among the tools in the toolbox, the "zoom" tool icon is shaped like a magnifying glass. Clicking on this tool and then the choice to increase size, I can magnify the onscreen image to assess needed repairs, and make the repairs on a magnified image. I can easily increase or decrease magnification to see overall progress.

3) I then selected the "Clone Stamp" tool to make repairs to areas needing edits. The basic idea is to take a sample of an area in the image that is satisfactory and then to stamp a clone image of the sample onto the area in need of repair. The clone stamp tool provides a choice of many sizes and densities of samples with a windows right click.

4) In this example, most of the damage in the postcard image was found in the pinkish and blue areas of the sky. Using a windows version of elements, I would simply sample a pinkish area of the sky by using Alt Click, and then Click in the pinkish area to be repaired. Likewise, I would sample a blue area of the sky to "clone" that color onto a blue area in need of repair. This takes a bit of practice. However, by the second or third picture or image, you will be amazed at how easy the tool is to use, and how effective the "clone stamp" tool is in making smoothly transitioning repairs. Save the original scan before you begin the repair. If you make a mistake, you still have the original scan to open. You can then experiment confidently until you have the technique mastered.

To read more about features available, see the product description for Adobe Photoshop Elements 8. For more suggestions on scanning, printing, and other family photo topics, visit LocalArchiver.com.

Family Photos - Some Organizing Basics

Family photos are not ordinary clutter as they are often a family's most treasured and enduring possessions. However, the steps to getting a family photo collection organized are very similar to steps suggested by professional home organizers to address ordinary clutter throughout the home.

Step 1) Inventory/Assess - Pulling out your photos, slides, albums, scrapbooks, and related items allows you to size the project and can provide some momentum to get started. This may also help you to decide which part of your family image collection to tackle first. Perhaps you decide to set aside a project area to work with just prints and albums, and then put the rest back in the closet for another day.

Step 2) Sort and Cull - The initial sort should be to decide what should be kept and what can be tossed. It can be as difficult to downsize your family photo collection as it is to get rid of clothes that no longer fit in your closet. It is likely that your collection contains some photos that add little value to your collection, and probably should have been eliminated when you had the prints developed or downloaded. Among multiple shots of the same events or subject, there are often just a few true "keepers". Sorting and culling will make the next steps more manageable, and allow you to focus your activities on the best images in your collection. This will also reduce the expense associated with storing, displaying, and sharing your images.

Step 3) Organize - The goal of organizing prints, slides, digital image files, and other image formats is similar in that the ultimate objective is to be able to easily locate an image when you go looking for it. This requires some thought about categories and a filing system. Dates, subjects, events, places, and family are some of the common organization categories. At one extreme, the organization may be as simple as prints sorted by decades. At the other extreme, a consolidated and properly captioned digital image library provides the ability to search and sort images by keywords reflecting who, what, where, when, and why.

Step 4) Contain and Store - Archival quality albums, sleeves, and boxes will help to extend the useful life of originals and protect them from harmful environmental factors such as dust, light, and accelerated chemical related deterioration. Digital images can be stored in a variety of ways and distributed more widely to extended family. When storing, one should think about the best way to backup the collection. If you have a digital library, duplicate files can be shared with other family members and placed in a safe deposit box. If you have important one-of-a-kind prints with no duplicates, consider having a few of the best prints scanned and keep the digital files at a second location and share them with extended family.

Step 5) Keep It Up - Once you are organized, add new images to the organization system you have developed. It is a good habit to cull low interest/value images as you see them, and to simply apply your organization scheme to the best ones.

For more thoughts on organizing family photo collections and to find Tips for Sorting and Culling, visit the Organizing Section at LocalArchiver.com. For a discussion of scanning considerations, visit the Scanning Section, and for storage and containment supplies, visit the Preservation Resources Section.

Color Photos and Fading

Did you know that many dyes used in color photos as recently as 20 to 30 years ago were relatively unstable, and that color photography became mainstream about 50 years ago?

If you have some older color photos, such as the early '60s photo above, you will often notice that some are more faded than others, even when of the same era.

Depending upon the materials used to create the prints, many earlier color prints are quite likely to at least begin to show noticeable fading, even when they have been properly stored.

Therefore, if you want to preserve these color print images as best you can before more visible fading, you might want to consider scanning them. For a discussion of scanning considerations and options, see the Scanning section at LocalArchiver.com.

Storing Family Photos and Documents

Even when most of your family photos and documents are disorganized, and perhaps tucked away in shoe boxes, there are some simple steps that can be taken to help preserve them until you have decided about how to best organize and share them.

Understanding some of the major factors that impact the useful life of photo images can help you to take some very simple and inexpensive steps to better preserve your collection until you decide on additional organizing and sharing projects.

Temperature and Humidity - Museums strive to maintain stable and moderate temperatures and humidity levels to protect all sorts of items in their collections, including photos. Extremes can accelerate natural and harmful chemical reactions that lead to deterioration and discoloration. Although museums monitor and target for specific levels of temperature and humidity, the rule of thumb is to store photos and documents at temperature and humidity levels that are comfortable to humans. Therefore, attics, basements, and garages should be avoided. Rather, it is far better to store photos and documents in living spaces.

Ventilation - Certain natural chemical reactions result in chemical fumes that, if not ventilated, may accelerate ongoing reactions and overall deterioration. Therefore, storing collections in areas that have some level of ventilation can be helpful.

Exposure to Light and Pollutants - Clearly exposure to certain types of light can be harmful. Somewhat less obvious is the damage that can be done by pollutants including pollen, dust, mold, smoke, chemical fumes, and others. Some pollutants can scratch or damage surfaces, while others can react with chemicals natural to photos.

There are many additional factors to consider such as the acidity of the boxes in which photos or documents may be stored, and the potentially harmful effects caused by foreign materials often stored with photos and documents such as tapes, glues, rubber bands, paper clips, and other items.

For more information and quick tips on storing photos to delay natural image deterioration, and to avoid preventable deterioration, see the Storing section at LocalArchiver.com. The Preservation Resources section at LocalArchiver.com provides links to a couple of leading sources of archival quality storage solutions.

Family History and Social Networking

Now that LocalArchiver.com has a page at facebook, I feel a bit more confident in sharing some thoughts about the draw of social networking.

Most social groupings/networks are based on things we have in common. To name a few, these may include such things as ancestors, experiences, interests, nationalities, or sets of beliefs about religion or politics.

Social networking begins for most of us as children within a family, and an extended family often shares some common beliefs and interests.

Although social networks such as facebook reflect an incredibly wide range of interests, family plays a meaningful part in the selection of mutual "friends", and in other ways such as genealogy networking and research.

A wide interest in family and community history is in part based on a sensed need to understand how we came to be who we are today. This sense of identify is tied to sense of place, sense of purpose, and sense of belonging. Family and community is where much of this begins.

Many recognize that family photos are a big part of how family history can be captured, understood, and shared. A well organized and easily shared photo collection, either prints or digital files, can help you to stay connected to family, both present and past. This is why so many family historians seek information about how to organize, preserve, and share images of family.

I hope you Find Us at Facebook and join the discussions to share ideas there, and that you find the information you may seek about organizing and sharing family photos at the LocalArchiver.com website.

Organizing Family Photos - Step One

Whether you recently inherited a relative's collection or have simply accumulated a large quantity of your own photo prints or digital image files, the thought of starting a collection organizing project can be very humbling.

The key is to think big picture and just get started. No one says you have to complete the project in a single sitting. It can also help to stay focused on how important your photo collection is to you, and can perhaps be to your descendants.

Step One - Sort and Eliminate

Every photo organizing project, whether paper prints or digital files, can benefit from some thoughtful sorting and culling. It is a rare person who has not saved some really bad photos. Photos are often really hard to toss. However, the truth is that some photos do not deserve the space they take up in the shoebox.

In most cases, we would do well to get rid of the poorest shots of the same event or subject and simply treasure the best ones. With the passage of time, many photos simply lose subject value. Perhaps you want to keep some of the best pictures of your high school friends, but if you have not exchanged xmas cards for thirty years and live on the other side of the country, most can probably go or stay in the shoebox for your children to toss. My family had taken a ton of pictures over the years, and our thoughtful sorting and culling of both prints and digital files about a year ago resulted in eliminating well over half of the collection.

Subsequent steps in the organizing project became much easier, and less costly, with a more manageable number of prints and digital files.

Sorting and culling your collection may be all the motivation you need to keep going. Seeing all the wonderful and important photos remaining in your collection should bring a smile to your face and encourage you to take additional steps in organizing and sharing your collection. You will also have done a big favor to whoever may inherit your collection one day.

In a future blog, I will make suggestions about how to categorize and label both prints and digital files.

For more suggestions on organizing photo collections, visit the Organizing section at LocalArchiver.com

Family History and Photo Organizing and Sharing

Connections to our past are important to developing and maintaining our sense of place, a sense of personal and local identity, and often add to our individual sense of purpose.

A well organized and shared family history and photo collection are one of the most tangible ways of staying connected to our past.

LocalArchiver.com now has a page at Facebook. In addition to receiving blog feeds, the page includes discussion boards and posting by others interested in family history and preserving, organizing, and sharing photos. The discussion boards are organized around several related topics.

In just a few days, the "Fan" base has grown rapidly. This helps me to know that folks are finding the information useful.

I hope the discussion boards grow into a full and rich dialogue among the many, many non-professional family photo preservationists who seek advice and/or have advice to offer.

Approaches to preserving, organizing and sharing is not an exact science, so it is expected that we can all learn from the experiences and knowledge of others.

Find Us on Facebook, and start or join a discussion.

We also invite you to explore the many articles at the main LocalArchiver.com website relative to managing photo collections.

Scan Resolutions for the Family Photo Collection

Suggestions for scan resolutions vary widely.

The resolution needed for a scan is largely a function of the intended use of the scan. If one is scanning images primarily for digital archiving purposes and the scans are being made of roughly 4 x 6 inch prints, I would argue that scanning at 600 pixels per inch is typically plenty.

In most cases, a planned or potential future use of the scan is to create another print of similar size or a popular sized enlargement. The key here is to understand the general agreement that professional photo quality is regarded as 300 image pixels per inch spread onto the print area. It is also generally accepted that most people will be perfectly happy with printing results of 150 pixels per inch and perhaps lower. (Note this is different than dots per inch, which denotes a printer's ink laying capability.)

Using this math, if one scans a 4x6 print at 600 pixels per inch, one can then spread these image pixels over a printed area of 8 x 12 (two times the height and width of the original) at 300 pixels per inch or over a surface of 16 x 24 at 150 pixels per inch. Therefore, one retains plenty of future printing flexibility with scans at 600 pixels per inch of scan resolution.

Professional online scan services often offer a choice of 300 or 600 pixels per inch.

Another consideration is the file format of the scans and compression levels used.

For a more detailed explanation of pixels, pixels per inch, and dots per inch, visit the article on Digital Basics at LocalArchiver.com. For more information about scanning and a discussion of other considerations, visit the Scanning Guide at LocalArchiver.com.

Family Photo Organizing - Getting Started is the Hard Part

I constantly talk to people who readily acknowledge their need and desire to better organize, preserve, and share their family photos. However, many also express their fear of what appears to be such a large and potentially challenging project.

Much like routine visits to the dentist, family photo organizing projects are seldom as painful as we imagine, and most of us feel particularly good and/or accomplished when we have completed either.

Most people today have family photos in at least two formats. These are digital images taken with newer digital cameras and many photo prints from the days of film cameras.

The most versatile family photo collection is a consolidated and keyword searchable digital image library. Yes, reaching this goal will entail some work. However, with tools and online resources available today, this goal is within easier reach than many may imagine. The powerful ability to search and share such a digital image library opens a wide range of satisfying image preservation and sharing opportunities.

To reach such a goal, you only need two sets of tools.

1.) Tools to organize and store the digital images. All that is needed is a computer together with some image organization software. Several software packages provide the ability to attach searchable "categories" and "key words" to image files. My suggestion is to go with the affordable Adobe Photoshop Elements 8, available for less than $100. Photoshop is an image management software leader, and Elements is a powerful yet lighter version of Adobe's professional image software packages. Adobe Photoshop is considered by many to be the industry standard. Therefore, this software is most likely to continue to support your image library needs into the future.

2.) Tools to digitize your older printed photos. You can scan older printed photos yourself with an inexpensive home scanner or have them scanned professionally. Scanning services are made available at many local photo stores and by several reputable online scanning services. For consistently high quality scans, my suggestion is to use one of the online scanning services that make use of state-of-the-art equipment and often offer higher resolution scans.

You will quickly realize that getting started is the hardest part of the project. To make the task simpler, keep in mind that scanning older prints and organizing digital files can be done in incremental steps.

- You can start by sending a handful of older prints to be scanned to convince yourself that the quality of the scans and customer service is acceptable. You can then segregate the returned prints as backups and add the new scans to your digital library.

- You can start organizing your digital image library with a simple form of "categories", perhaps decades, family, travel, etc.. Then at a later date, you can add keywords describing subjects in more detail so that your searchable image library becomes even more powerful and useful over time.

Give it a try! Organizing your family photos, particularly in smaller steps, will not be as painful as you may think, and you will feel great as you make progress.

Once you have some of your digital image library organized, you will see the incredible possibilities to preserve photo images and better share them with extended family and friends. Themed photo books, collages, slideshows, gift items, and the list continues to grow.

For suggestions on sorting and culling older prints, using scanning services, organizing a digital image library, and other related topics, visit LocalArchiver.com.