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.