Why should I use the Family Photo History Project?

Posted on May 8, 2012 by joeb648

The Family photo History Project is more than just a place to store your pictures. It is also a place for family members to collaborate on family history. Over the years older photo albums often get split up among the relatives. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to collect many of those pictures together again and share with everyone in the family?   YES

The relatives that got the old family photo albums may not want to give them up and that is OK. The Family Photo History Project is about making digital copies to share and allowing the owner of the originals to keep them. Once you have the digital copy on your personal Family Photo History Project site it can be access by all member of the family to download and print or use in a personal photo album they create.

In addition other family members can add and/or update information about the pictures on the family site. Your cousin may know names and dates for pictures that you don’t. So share and collaborate to create a complete family history.

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What to do with the original pictures after scanning.

Posted on May 2, 2012 by joeb648

Once you have scanned the original pictures what should you do with them? Many people feel that the original is no longer needed, but I would not be too quick to throughout the original. Digital copies are great and can last a long time, can be moved to newer digital storage, can be easily copied to give copies to other family members. Like with printed pictures things can happen to digital files a well, CD and DVD can get scratched, lost or broken, hard drives on computer can be damages or stolen.

As technology changes you need to move your digital images to the current storage format. If you had data stored on the old 5.25 inch floppy diskettes you may find it hard to find a computer today that could read them to copy that information to current storage technology.

As scanning technology changes you may want to rescan some of the pictures and update the digital versions, to get a better quality digital image.

For all of these reasons I believe that you should keep your original photographs stored in a safe place as a backup of the digital version. The Family Photo History Project is a great way to organize, share, save and project your family pictures but you should still take good care of the original pictures.

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Why save your pictures.

Posted on April 18, 2012 by joeb648

After a fire or flood I hear people say “I wish I could have saved the pictures of my kids” or “If I could only save one thing it would be my family photo albums”.
It is unfortunate that people don’t think about the value of their pictures until they are lost.
The Family Photo History Project can help by giving you a place to organize, protect, save and share your important family pictures.  In addition to saving a digital copy of the picture you can store additional important information about the picture, like names, dates and any stories about the picture. When needed the original full size uploaded image can be downloaded for printing or other uses.

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Finding the pictures you are looking for

Posted on April 7, 2012 by joeb648

Over the years I have loaded over 4000 family and extended family pictures to the Family Photo History Project.  Recently we have been going through our stuff to start getting rid of stuff we no longer need. In the process we have found a large number of pictures in boxes, drawers, and other places. The first question is: “Do we have this picture loaded in the Family Photo History Project?”  Because the Family Photo History Project system has good search and organization functions it normally only takes a few seconds to search the system based on the name(s), locations and/or dates to find out if a picture we found is already in the system. If I find the picture I can then determine if the one I just found is of better quality then the one originally loaded. If so then I can scan this copy of the picture and replace the one currently loaded with better or bigger version.

I have also started writing on the back of pictures the scanned file name of the pictures so that I will know the next time if pickup this picture has already processed the picture. Having the scanned file name on the pictures also helps if you want to locate the image to email it to a family member or add to another project.

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How large an image file should I create?

Posted on April 2, 2012 by joeb648

To get a good quality print image from a digital image you the digital file (.jpg) needs to be large enough to create a printed image at a resolution of at least 300 DPI (dots per inch). That means that a digital image the is 1500 pixels wide and 2100 pixels will be able to print up to a 5″ by 7″ picture.  This is a .jpg file between 2.2 mb and about 5 mb depending on the compression/quality used to save the file.  It is best to save a jpg file at the highest quality without creating too large a file. For the Family Photo History Project we like to save jpg files up to about 6 mb. This will normally give you a good sized print image when you down load an original to print on your computer. When I am scanning pictures I normally try to get a digital image that is about  1500 by 2100 pixels that will create a nice 5 by 7 picture.

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Organize your pictures

Posted on March 15, 2012 by joeb648

I have been working on adding additional pictures to my family albums and have realized the value of the Family Photo History Project for organizing pictures. I have been finding pictures that I think I have already scanned and uploaded but don’t know for sure. So I have been able to use the search function to locate the all of the pictures for the person or persons in the picture to determine if that picture has already been scanned.  That has saved me a lot of work scanning pictures that I already have in the system. In a couple of cases I found the picture but the print size information displayed indicated that it was a small picture so I was able to scan and replace the picture with a better quality version.

With over 4,000 pictures in my family albums the organization ability of the system is proving to be of great value in locating specific pictures. Since I did a good job of entering complete information for each picture I can easily find almost any picture.

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Locating the old family pictures and albums

Posted on February 14, 2012 by joeb648

Where are the family photo albums from when you were young?
When your parents were cleaning house, who got the family photo albums?
Did they all go to one person? Were they split up among the children?
And what about the photo albums from your grandparents that your parents or Aunts and Uncles have where are they?
If you want to save the old family pictures for yourself, your kids or other members of the family you need to determine who has the family photo albums.
The more family photo albums you can locate the better.
You may find that the person that has them is not willing to give them to you. In that case you will need to get them to scan the pictures and upload them to the Family Photo History Project site for your family. That way you can get copies of them and the original owner will not have to give them up. Another option if you have a laptop and a portable scanner you can go visit them and scan the pictures yourself. I have had to do this a couple of times to get some old family pictures.

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Why should I convert my pictures to digital format?

Posted on January 24, 2012 by joeb648

When you scan your print pictures into digital format you now have much better way to save, protect and share your pictures. Digital pictures can be shared by sending to other people using email, they can be loaded to photo sharing sites, they can be printed on your own printer, they can be put into slide shows.

Digital pictures can also be protected from fire, flood, tornado and other disasters by keeping copies in different places. If you’re original photo albums and all your computer files are lost in a fire or other disaster the copies you upload to the Family Photo History Project web site or the “cloud” are still there and can be download by you or other family members. So even if the originals are lost you can still recover the digital backup copies and did not loose the only copy of a picture or an entire album.

In addition it is a good idea to make backup copies of the original scanned picture images on CD or DVD and take or send copies of these to other family members as another type of offsite or remote backup. If a copy of the pictures are located in another town or state the odds of something happening to both at the same time are slim. As we learned in 2011 tornadoes can take out a whole town so having a remote backup (online or in another city) is a good idea.

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Who is that person in the family picture?

Posted on December 19, 2011 by joeb648

Do you know the name of all the people in the family photo album? If not it may be time to start asking other family members to help identify them. The Family Photo History Project can help you to share your pictures with other family members and have them help identify family members by adding names and dates to the family photo albums.

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Your Family History in Photos

Posted on May 23, 2011 by joeb648

Every family has family photo albums they have created or gotten from their parents. When you look through them do you know the names of all the people?  If not maybe it is time to get some help from other family members.

If you wish to pass on this photo album to the next generation it would be helpful to get the names, dates and any other information you can about the pictures.

The Family Photo History Project can help you to collect and store information that can be shared with other family members. By sharing the pictures over the web you may be able to get additional names and information about the pictures you have. In addition other family members will be able to add additional pictures to the collection that you do not have.  For more information go to the Family Photo History Project web site.

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