Save Your Photos Month

Save Your Photos Month

It is almost over but I recently learned that September is Save Your Photos Month. It is a reminder that it is time to take on that project to save your photos and create your family photo estate.

We all have an overwhelming mountain of photos. We have prints in albums and increasingly we have an enormous number of digital photos. Save Your Photos Month is promoted by The Photo Managers. Members of The Photo Mangers will help you tackle the task of organizing and preserving all of your photos from the search for photos to the organization and archiving of your digital images. The founder of the organization, Cathi Nelson, has written an excellent guide, Photo Organizing Made Easy: Going from Overwhelmed to Overjoyed, that covers the entire process from gathering, sorting, scanning, saving, curating, and archiving all of your photos. It is a major and time consuming process. Even with the help of a professional photo manager, it will be a major project.

I recommended an alternative approach. Start at the end. Select a few precious photos and upload them to their final destination where they can be shared with others. This will allow you to fully appreciate the value of selecting, preserving, and curating important photos. Once you complete this initial step with a few photos, I am confident that you will want to add to the collection and you will be motivated to search wider for photos that will be meaningful to others. You can then go on the hunt for other photos you would like to curate, preserve, and share. For most people, tackling their entire photo collection at once is just too overwhelming. I recommend this incremental approach.

Below is a brief description of the process. I will cover the additional steps involved in a best practices process of creating your family photo estate in subsequent posts. For now, we will keep it simple.

Select five to ten special family photos. Most likely these photo are already on a bookshelf or mantel. You will need scanned copies of the photos. If you have a scanner at home, make scans of the photo at a resolution of 600 DPI. You may need to look up how to set that resolution level. The easiest way to figure this out, is to Google or You Tube the question for your scanner model. If you do not have a scanner, find a family member or friend who does.

The next step is to create a free account at Forever.com. The free account will give you 2GB of storage that will allow you to upload a large number of photos before you have to upgrade to a paid account. You will be able to fully test the functionally of Forever.com. There are a number of photo archival sites. So far, I think Forever.com is the best option. As you will see, this site is specifically designed for archival storage and sharing of important family photos. I think it is superior to other cloud storage options such as iCloud Photos or Google Photos. One of the reasons I like Forever.com is that you can save information (metadata) to the online files and have the option to download that information when you download a copy of the photo from the site.

Contact me if you are interested in signing up with a referral link. We will both receive a $20 coupon for use at the site.

Once you have established your Forever.com site and have uploaded the photos, share the site with a few family members. This is the site for your important family photos and not the location for every photo you have taken. You want the photos you would grab if you lived in an area subject to wild fires or hurricanes and you had a few extra minutes to grab some photos before evacuating. There are other options for storage of less important photos.

You can curate the photos by adding notes to photos on Forever.com. Telling the story associated with the photos is very important. You may want to consider a life story legacy video as a way to further document your or a family member’s life journey. For more information including sample videos, see my website at LifeStoryLegacyVideos.com. Feel free to contact me. We can schedule a time to talk about the process.

Bryon