It’s Time To Tell Your Family’s Story
Just about everyone on the planet has time on their hands and for many, this is with your family. It’s time to hunt down the old family photos and start archiving them and saving family stories. Young people love to hear stories about their family's past. We’ve all heard that question, “tell me about how you and daddy met.”
Save Your Family Stories
Gather your family around and open up any box of old family photos. Questions and stories will just naturally flow. We all want to know “who’s that with uncle Jack”, or “where was this one taken”? Families can spend hours happily engaged in these stories. What’s important is that you don’t lose these stories. Take time to write some of them down. Document who’s who in the photos so future generations can appreciate their heritage.
Yup, that’s yours truly. I’m the cute one on the left. We had school uniforms in Australia. I would have been in either 1st or 2nd grade.
After my mother passed away in 2005 we found several boxes of old family photos but between the four brothers, we couldn’t identify many of the people or explain the events. It’s sad to say that these are memories that have now faded away.
Digitize Your Old Photos
A printed photograph is priceless. But a digital image makes it so much easier to share and it’s also a great way to document the story. Digital images contain more than just the image data. They can also store information about the image such as a Title, description, and much more. This type of information is called metadata.
There are several ways you can “scan” your old photos. If you have a whole lot that you want to digitize then it may be easier to use a service. I’ve used ScanCafe.com several times and been very happy with the results. They can scan prints, slides, and negatives, all with great results.
Old photo scanned using Google PhotoScan on an iPhone X.
If you want to DIY the scanning then you may need a scanner. You can find reasonably priced scanners that can handle prints pretty easily. Scanning slides and negatives is a little more of a challenge. The problem is the size of the original film. To get a good quality scan you have to have a high-resolution scanner and they can get expensive. Just about any scanner has a film adapter but without the higher resolution, your digital image suffers.
Another option today is a smartphone app. There are several apps that do a very good job of scanning your prints. One of the newest and most popular is one by Google called PhotoScan. When you scan a photo, you do it by actually taking five different images. It uses Google pixie dust or something to meld them all together so you have an image free of any glare. It works pretty well.
Photo scanned with Photomyne app on iPhone X and colorized.
The only downside to Google PhotoScan is there is no way to add metadata with the app itself. As you can imagine, it integrates well with Google Photos. You can add metadata with Google Photos - I’d suggest using the web version to minimize any confusion.
In the past, I’ve also used a great app called Photomyne. It has a few more features than Google’s app - some are paid features - but they may be worth it. One of these features is the Colorizer that will take a B&W image and color the image. For a smartphone app, it does a great job.
The other benefit (maybe) of the Photomyne app is that you can add descriptive information right into the app. But there’s a problem. That information is only available within the Photomyne system. You can’t export your images with the metadata included - and that’s a problem.
So, I’d really suggest using a separate app to manage your images. Mac users can use Apple Photos, and I’m sure there’s something like that in Windows. I just don’t know. But you may want to look at an online service like Forever. It’s a great online storage and organization service for your photo. And, they have all kinds of printing services too. Definitely worth a look.