Family Photos - Priceless Memories at Risk

Family photo collections contain priceless images that bring back vivid memories of family joys, milestones, trips, and other moments deemed worth preserving.

With changes in technology, the "bad news" is that many families now have combinations of photos in older acidic and deteriorating albums, loose photos and transparencies in multiple boxes, and a ton of digital images on a hard drive or CD. This mix of formats is enough to lead many of us to inaction, which places many of these family photo images at risk.

The "good news" is that these very same advances in technology have created the means to easily consolidate, organize, and more broadly share your priceless family photo images.

Clearly a well organized digital image library of family photos provides the greatest opportunity to take advantage of online services and software that can easily and inexpensively create slide shows, photo books, collages, image gift items, and a dozen other satisfying ways to share family photo memories.

As a first step to consolidating older prints or slides into a digital image library, it is necessary for someone to scan the print or slide. Many families hold the view that this is something they should do at home. They then become challenged with the lack of technical expertise, or by not being able to find the time necessary to get organized and to actually complete the scans.

It is clearly easier to have someone perform the scans for you, and there are well established services that will complete your scans for you with little preparation required on your part. A little culling of bad or duplicate prints can save you some money, but you can simply send a shoebox without any sorting or culling. The cost of these services is very reasonable when you consider the benefits of preserving your priceless family memories and the value of being able to creatively use the digitized images in a multitude of image projects in the future. The cost of having your scans done professionally is very inexpensive when considered against the potentially high cost of doing nothing.

To get started, it is not necessary to send your entire collection to be scanned. Although volume discounting is available, it may actually be easier to get your head around sending a few old prints to a professional scanning company to satisfy yourself about the level of service, the quality of scans, and the reasonableness of pricing. To better understand the services and pricing of a couple of the major scanning services, visit ScanDigital and ScanCafe.

It is likely that once you get started, momentum will build. I am confident that once you have begun to create a consolidated family photo digital image library, you will see a range of expanded sharing possibilities that will excite you.

For more information about organizing, preserving, and sharing family photos, visit http://www.localarchiver.com/.

Family Photo Framing - Easy and Inexpensive

Most of us have some place on a wall in our home that would be perfect for an arrangement of family photo images of special memories or places. Finding the right frames to properly display these images can be intimidating as there are so many choices at the local framing shop and on the Internet.

Many museums use frames with simple clean lines when displaying collections of images in order to focus attention on the images themselves and to provide a sense of unity with other matching frames.

This approach can be used very effectively in creating a wall grouping of favorite family photos. Reasonably priced archival quality frames are available with pre-cut mat openings.

To develop ideas and explore the possibilities, visit the framing area at Blick Art Materials. When exploring the framing area, be sure to take a look at Blick Art Materials' selection of Nielsen Bainbridge Archival Gallery Frames. Another good source of reasonably priced ready made and custom frames is ArchivalMethods.com.

For more tips and ideas on creating a wall grouping of favorite family photos, see the article on Using Family Photos in Stunning Wall Displays at LocalArchiver.com.

Family Photo Sharing in The Digital Age

There are now so many creative ways to share digital family photo images. If you have not yet tried some of the popular online photo image services, you likely can not grasp the range of possibilities.

In days past, we would ultimately remember to take that roll of film to be developed and perhaps order double prints so that we could share photos with at least one friend or another family member. Less often we would take a negative to have additional prints made. This is the reason many of us have older one-of-a-kind prints that others would like to have as well.

Now most of us have more recent subjects as digital image files on our computers. Many of us send downsized copies via email or post these in an online album and send a link for a quick look by friends and relatives.

Older relatives without easy access to email or the internet, and those who simply can not be bothered, are now often left out of the image sharing flow.

By easily uploading your images to an online gallery, you can then order inexpensive prints for hard copy display and sharing, create photo books, and access a broad range of other image based products.

My favorite online printer is Shutterfly.com based on its breadth of products and cutting edge services, including its share sites. Uploading and storing your digital images is free. Then you or others ordering prints and image products pay only for orders placed. Your relatives who want a print can place the order and pay themselves. If you know a relative without access to the digital photo album would want a print, you can order one for them and have it delivered directly. Prints are typically shipped within two days, and there is an option to pick up 4x6 prints at local Target stores.

It is also easy to take your best older one-of-a-kind prints and turn them into digital files that can then be added to your online gallery and/or used in other family photo projects.

If you do not have the time, energy, expertise, or equipment to scan your older prints, check out the services of ScanDigital.com.

If you are hesitant to create an online album because you have so many old prints and digital files on your computer, try one of the online services such as Shutterfly with just a handful of images. Once you realize how easy the process can be and experience the flexibility and convenience, you are likely to become more motivated to grab a second handful. You will also begin to see the many sharing possibilities more clearly.

For more family photo sharing guides and project ideas, visit LocalArchiver.com.

Now is a Good Time to Plan Off-Season Photo and Document Preservation and Sharing Projects

The summer months always seem a bit busier than other seasons of the year.

Families travel, vacation, attend reunions, and participate in a broad range of other seasonal pleasures with friends and extended family. The end result is likely an increase in the many photo images that are already on the shelf or in the computer, and the number of photos that you hope to organize and share someday. Families may not have time to take on a major photo organizing and sharing project during the hectic summer. However, thinking about your off-season project goals now can be helpful later.

As you capture memories of a trip, you may think about how to best caption and arrange a photo book to tell the story of the trip. Keeping a short journal of the trip may be helpful. As you attend reunions, you may want to talk to other family members about how to coordinate the sharing of one-of-a-kind photos held by others. You might find out that a particular family member has a growing interest in starting a genealogy project, and another is already interested in organizing and sharing extended family photos. A family discussion of such things can lead in interesting directions.

Volunteers at community historical societies are often quite busy with summer season fund raising fairs, extended collection viewing hours, and perhaps building or display renovations.

However, chances are that volunteer interest and participation are at a peak, and some discussions about off-season projects can be very fruitful.

When extended family and historical society member interest in photos and other images is at a peak, establishing some preliminary photo and document preservation and sharing project plans for the off-season can provide some momentum into the slower off seasons.

For additional "HowTo" information, and family and community historical society project ideas, visit LocalArchiver.com.

Photo Preservation and Sharing - Any Step is a Good Step

Families and volunteer dependent community historical societies can easily become overwhelmed with the range of photo and document image preservation and sharing possibilities. Technology and the Internet have fostered many competitive services all willing to help you store, preserve, and showcase photo and document collections.

At the same time, professional curators and archivists are scrambling to keep up with the growing volume of materials to preserve, and the setting of standards that will make it possible to globally share all of this information.

Professionals who are being paid to find ways to connect their collection to a global network of libraries and museums must be mindful of the avalanche of information. Non-professionals are often simply blinded by this volume of information about what can and should be done.

Non-professionals simply do not have the time, money, tools, or training to undertake preservation projects in the same way as paid professionals in a library or museum preservation department.

Therefore, families and community historical society volunteers should become comfortable that any step toward preserving and sharing photos or documents in their collections is a good step.

Volunteers and families can accomplish much by starting small and taking modest steps by using inexpensive and readily available services to preserve and share their most treasured images. A worthy objective may be to digitize and index an entire collection. However, simply finding 25 or so treasured family or community images and sharing them with a broader audience on a free share site will provide meaningful enjoyment to all involved.

Organizing Family Photos

As I poke around the Internet, I see plenty of advice on how to organize older photo prints. Clearly, this is a personal decision and any step that helps you locate a picture and improves storage/organization is useful. Common suggestions are to place the prints in archival quality storage containers by date or to organize the prints in albums or scrapbooks. Fine suggestions and viable alternatives.

However, if you want to supercharge your ability to preserve, locate, and share images, digitizing the prints by scanning before properly storing them will increase your near and long term flexibility tremendously. You do not necessarily need to scan the prints yourself as there are professional scanning services that can do the job for you at a reasaonable price.

With older prints available as digital images, you can consolidate your image collection with your more recent photos, which you likely already have in digital format.

Now the fun begins. As online image services continue to expand and become easier to use, you can accomplish many satisfying and creative projects easily and inexpensively.

• Upload some of the digital images to a free online album so that extended family members can order prints or gift items of the images.


• Create a free family share site for family members to share images, schedules, ideas, favorite links, genealogical updates, recipes, etc.


• Upload some themed images and add captions and text to create a photo book of a family trip or a portion of family history to mark a significant birthday.


• Take those digital images and organize them using software like Photoshop Elements. With such software, you can create your own album categories and searchable keywords or "tags". Now you have a searchable digital image library and you are able to find all photos of uncle Pete simply by typing Pete into the search field. You can also find all photos in a given category such as "ancestors", simply by clicking on the category name.

Yes, there is a cost in having photos scanned professionally or in time to do it yourself. However, those old prints are probably one of the most valuable things you own. If you are planning to organize your older prints, the added step of digitizing them is one that will provide you many aditional ways to share the images in the future.

For detailed guides on how to scan, organize, and share family photo and document images, pay a visit to LocalArchiver.com.

Family Photos - Share Sites are a Great Way to Start Sharing

I recently spent some time at Shutterfly to learn more about their free share site service. I was so impressed with the ease and flexibility of their template that I decided to create a sample family share site so that visitors to LocalArchiver.com could better visualize how they might benefit from creating one of their own. No web design experience is needed, and Shutterfly has made it easy and relatively intuitive to build a very customizable share site.

These share sites are much more than a place to park some photos for sharing. The many useful and powerful features will allow you to be very creative in customizing the share site for your own interests and needs.

Features can be useful to share images, thoughts, schedules, favorite links, and much more among members of many types of communities. These might include extended families, youth sports teams, and special interest clubs and organizations.

Want to post thoughts or articles and allow community member comments? Might it be useful to see current weather at multiple locations? Would a community benefit by sharing a handy list of favorite and relevant web links? Could a youth sports team roster or organization membership list be useful? Might a detailed calendar of events or project tracking be useful to an organization?

A Shutterfly share site may be just the thing for your family or organization. Learn more and access the sample family website by reading LocalArchiver's article on Building a Shutterfly Family Share Site.