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.

Holiday Gift Ideas for Family Photo Sharing

As in holiday seasons past, many of us will struggle with finding "the perfect gift(s)". This is often difficult and many of us will default to spending money on a gift that someone does not really need.

Here are a few ideas for unique gifts that can be long remembered and perhaps even treasured. The gifts relate to helping others maintain and share their special family photos.

The two large and reputable online professional scanning services, ScanCafe and ScanDigital, both offer gift cards for their services. ScanCafe also offers a pre-paid gift box that the recipient simply fills with photos, slides, and negatives. What comes back is a collection of digital scan files and the originals.

The collection of scanned images can then be duplicated and shared with an entire extended family. With these digital files, each family member can add the scans to their own photo collection and creatively use the images in a broad range of their own projects.

You may be running out of preparation time to assembly images for a special photo book for the holidays. However, you could describe a photo book project you will commit to as a gift. For ideas and a sense for the process, visit Picaboo, Snapfish.com by HP , or Kodak Gallery. Photo book products at each are impressive. I believe Picaboo leads the pack with its range of themes, templates, and creative ideas to be found at its website.

If you have a special image that you would like to present framed, it is not too late to upload a scanned image to one of the major online printers and to order a ready-made frame from the likes of Dick Blick Art Materials. I suggest that you look at Nielsen Bainbridge Artcare metal ready-made frames at Blick. These are museum quality, attractive, reasonably priced, and come with everything you need to impressively frame a print (except for a bit of photo safe tape to attach the print to the mat).

For more family photo organization, preservation, and sharing suggestions, visit LocalArchiver.com.

Family Photo Organizing and The Holiday Season

In past posts, I have suggested that it becomes much easier to organize and share family photos when older print images are scanned into a digital format.

I have also suggested that many family members often have their favorite photos held captive by another family member who somehow wound up with albums or boxes of prints when someone moved or passed away. Perhaps the other family member has good intentions and plans to scan and share the images someday, but has not found the time.

What better time than the holidays to talk about sharing photos. Some of the largest and most encompassing extended family gatherings take place over the holiday season. Additionally, other family members are typically somewhat nostalgic, in a sharing mood, and of good cheer during holiday gatherings.

Perhaps you can recruit some other family members who would be happy to take part in a project to consolidate a family photo collection by converting it to digital format. Perhaps some family members would be happy to provide some funding to have older prints scanned professionally for easier and broader sharing.

If available older prints are collected and scanned, contributing family members could have originals returned and other interested family members could each have a consolidated digital collection on CD or DVD. If you think your extended family might want to use a professional scanning service, check out ScanDigital and ScanCafe, two of the largest.

Who knows where such a project could lead? Perhaps some family members would carry the project further and expand it into a genealogy project or develop an extended family online share site.

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