Jackie Lyals, Author at Save Your Photos

Aug 25 2016

Timeline of Our Family

This is a guest contribution by Rhoda Gordon of Sunflower Photo Solutions.

Are you searching for one more excuse to print out your photos? This is it! I have a great idea that my sweet husband gets all the credit for. When we got married, he suggested we take a family picture each year to hang in our home. This is what we have done for the last 26 years which have become a timeline of our family.

These pictures hang in our study about 6 inches below the ceiling and span all four walls. They march in progression from the first, which is our wedding photo, to the last, which was taken only a few weeks ago. We chose the study because, at the time, this was a room that would be used by all family members. Remember the days of one large, desktop computer? Well, our study still gets a lot of use.

These pictures not only tell the story of our family, but they also are an insight into how capturing images has changed over the years. The first ten years or so we had professional photos shot, then we began to shoot our own because taking quality photos became easier. Hmm, it was either because the digital cameras were introduced, or the fact that we no longer had squirming children. The only thing consistent about the images is the people in them, but I defined a collection by giving them the same look and feel with simple black framing and a consistent size.

It is a wonderful feeling to look back and see how our family has grown, to see the progression of the kids and how my husband and I have aged. Some of the images are posed but as we all have gotten older, more of them are casual and some downright silly. This reflects the personality of our family and how we live our life. This is the timeline of The Gordon Family and I am so happy my husband thought of it!

Rhoda Gordon is the founder of Sunflower Photo Solutions, a photo organizing, scanning, and preservation firm. Photography is in her blood. She comes from a long line of photo and photo equipment enthusiasts going back several generations. She has been organizing photos, creating slideshows and photo books most of her adult life. Now she helps others do the same. Her services include print and digital photo organization, image and document digitization, slideshow and photo book creation, photo restoration, and personal training in all of the aforementioned.

Her career began as an electrical engineer working for AT&T Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, and more recently, Rhoda has been teaching at Brookdale Community College. She is a certified personal photo organizer and a member of APPO (Association of Personal Photo Organizers). Rhoda is dedicated to her craft and continually takes ongoing education to keep up with the latest technology. She was raised in Monmouth County, graduated from Rutger’s University and currently lives in Freehold, NJ.

Rhoda is a wife and mom of 3 beautiful children; one daughter in graduate school, another one in college, and a son in high school. She loves spending time with them, her wonderful husband and their basset hound, Rambo. She also has found the time to be a committed volunteer for CentraState Medical Center and its foundation since 1995.

Rhoda’s passion is helping others preserve their beautiful memories in a way that they can revisit them again and again. She believes that pictures tell the story of our lives, and that of our families.

Let her help you tell and preserve your story.

Aug 24 2016

Top 10 Reasons People Don’t Organize Their Digital Photo Collection

As promised last week, please enjoy this guest contribution by Bonnie Shay of Mariposa Creative Solutions where she shares her final installment of the Top 10 Lists featuring reasons people don’t organize their digital photo collections.

1. They are overwhelmed with the quantity of photos they have.

2. They don’t have the computer skills to deal with digital photos.

3. They think they will get to it someday when life gets back to “normal.”

4. They don’t have the time.

5. They can’t remember what cloud/online sites they have their photos stored in.

6. They can’t remember their passwords to log in to the cloud/online sites where they have stored their photos.

7. They have so many duplicates scattered over all their devices and don’t know how to find them.

8. They can’t choose what app or photo management software program to use.

9. They have photos on outdated computers and/or phones that they can’t access.

10. They don’t know a Photo Organizer like me that can help them.

Click here to read Bonnie’s Top 10 Reasons why people don’t organize their printed photo collections!

Did 1 or more of the reasons pertain to you? Please take a moment to comment!

We also invite you to visit our sister blog The Photo Organizers for more tips and in-depth knowledge from some of the top photo organizing industry professionals. To find a photo organizer near you, visit the Association of Personal Photo Organizers.

When I was a little girl, my idea of a fun activity was to organize my family’s kitchen pantry, cabinets and drawers. I discovered many years later that it wasn’t every girls’ idea of a good time. Who knew? But it planted the seed of an idea that underlies Mariposa Creative Solutions: that each of us loves and excels at different things and if we recognize that and do what we do best, we can make a difference in other people’s lives.

My clients often say that at the beginning of our work together they feel like some or all of their home is chaotic. The great filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola said, “Anything you build on a large scale or with intense passion invites chaos.” And so it goes whether you have built a family, a career, friendships or a beautiful garden, a certain amount of “chaos” has been part of the process while you’ve been living life.

And if you’re reading this, my guess is you’re not like me — one whose passion it is to make order. The important thing for you is to stop feeling bad about that. It’s about recognizing what you’re good at, what you enjoy, and how to relieve that which weighs on you.

Aug 23 2016

Get Started: Find Your Pictures

If you are like most people your print and digital photos are scattered. Andi Willis of Good Life Organizing gives us a jump start to help find your pictures.

The first real step to organizing and saving your photos to actually find your pictures and gather them all into one place. You might think that’s the easy part, but for some people it becomes a full-blown treasure hunt. To help get you started on this quest to find your pictures (both printed and digital), I’ve brainstormed a couple of lists to help you get started.

For Printed Photos

Some print photos are easy to find like the photo albums on the bookshelf, while others are a little more wily. Here are some places to start your search. As you find them, put the photos all together in one place like the dining room table or the guest room closet. Then you are ready to move forward with your photo organizing project, they will all be waiting for you…together.

Photo albums
Photo boxes
Framed pictures (even behind other pictures in the frames)
Scrapbooks
Relatives’ homes
Plastic bins
On refrigerator
Drawers – dresser, junk, kitchen, coffee table, china cabinet
Closets
Under or behind beds, couches, dressers and other furniture
In the nightstand
Jewelry boxes
Tucked between pages of books think favorite books, cookbooks, family history books)and bibles.
Wallet
File Folder
Memory boxes and hope chests
Yearbooks
Safety deposit box or safe
Undeveloped film
Unpacked moving boxes
Attic
Garage
Storage unit
Storage room
Secret hiding spot – under a floor board, inside the mattress

For Digital Photos

Digital pictures can be a little trickier since they literally hide inside our devices. As you discover these digital images, move them all into one central storage location like your computer’s hard drive or an dedicated external hard drive. Just be sure that you have that central storage location backed up. This is really important.

Cell phone (old, current, your phone, the rest of the family’s phones)
Computer hard drive (old, current)
Laptop (old, current)
Tablet
CD and DVD
SD card from digital cameras
Digital Camera with built in storage
USB drive
Cloud storage (i.e., iCloud, Shutterfly, Dropbox)
External hard drive

Let’s get searching for those photos. It’s time to find your pictures!

Then come back and tell us where is the most interesting place you’ve found a family photo?

Andi Willis is the owner of Good Life Organizing in Perry, Georgia, as well as a Certified Personal Photo Organizer, Home Organizing Expert, author and video host. Passionate about helping people organize their homes and preserve their precious photos, Andi can be found at Good Life Organizing, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and on Amazon.

Aug 18 2016

Capturing The Stories to Go With The Photo

This is a guest contribution by Kathy Rogers of Baltimore Photo Solutions

Saving family photographs is why I became a photo organizer. But a big part of that is recording the stories that go along with the photos. Photos without context and identifiers lose a lot of their value.
Recently, we’ve been cleaning out my mother-in-law’s apartment. We came across a few more photos I hadn’t already claimed, and sadly, many of them were stuck together. We couldn’t tell if there was writing on the back identifying who was in the images, and no one was left who could tell us the stories of the photos. So into the trash they went. I’m grateful that my father-in-law was into geneaology and wrote down many of the family stories.
I’m still trying to capture the stories that go along with the photos from my side of the family. I’ve tried to do this a variety of ways. Photo books are great. Lots of room for narrative, and easy for anyone to flip through them. You can even make extra copies for siblings or cousins. I’ve also tried to capture my parents telling stories. Sometimes about a picture, like the image below.

JERsr4generations — Four generations. The child is my grandfather. c 1903

Just looking at that image, you might think it was a little girl. Actually, it was my grandfather with his great-grandmother, mother, and grandmother when he was a few years old. He was born in 1899. It’s important to capture the names to go along with the faces, even though we have family tree(s) and Bibles that record the generations. This not only told me the fact that little boys wore dresses back then, but also gives a glimpse into austere Quaker styles in turn of the century Philadelphia.

PhoneMic-1 — Can be purchased on line or at the big box stores.

When there’s a longer story to capture, I like to use the app Saving Memories Forever. I can organize my father’s stories, my mother’s stories, and also collect tales from my friend’s mom all in the same app. One thing I have noticed while interviewing older friends and family is that they aren’t comfortable being videoed. Their posture and storytelling can get stilted and unnatural. They also don’t know what to do when you put a fancy microphone lavaliere on them, or stick a smart phone mic in their face. However, they’re usually very comfortable talking on the phone. So for longer stories that don’t work as video, I just try to get their voice. And I use this handy tool:

This microphone isn’t professional sound quality, but that’s OK. It looks and feels like a handset, and I’ve found that people of a certain generation are most comfortable with this kind of setup. There’s a button on the grip to start and stop the mic, so you have to watch that, but otherwise it works like a charm. Plugs right in to the jack on my iPhone, and away we go. I pick the story prompt from Saving Memories Forever, or create my own topic, and the oral history is recorded and filed away.

I hope these tips are helpful to you as we celebrate Save Your Photos Month. Having a backup plan is important, but capturing the stories that go with the pictures is a crucial first step in saving your family’s photos and legacy.

My name is Kathy Rogers and I am a certified personal photo organizer. Because so much of my life is digital, I understand how overwhelming it can be to deal with the thousands of photos we have scattered around on memory cards, phones, old hard drives, you name it. There are great systems out there for organizing, and backing up, your digital pictures. They are simple to learn, and simple to maintain. It takes some time to get everything set up but I can show you how to do that in manageable chunks of time, or you can hire a professional photo organizer (like me!) to do it for you.

I have always loved photos and the stories behind them, and have turned this passion into a business. I started out making my own scrapbooks as a teenager but really got into it after my son was born. Friends saw what I’d done for him, and asked me to do the same for their children. Add in some elderly relatives who needed to stay connected and a business evolved.

As I’ve learned more about photography, photo organization and digital scrapbooking, I’ve been amazed by the treasure troves of pictures tucked in the back of closets. It saddens me when there’s no one left who can tell us the stories in the pictures, but with a little detective work it’s amazing what you can piece together. I get the most joy out of taking those scary boxes away and coming back with a neat, organized (and safely preserved) photo storage system along with a beautiful custom photo book of the best of the best, with copies to go to other family members.

Bringing order to the photo chaos is my specialty, and my pleasure. Email me today for a free assessment.

Aug 17 2016

Top 10 Reasons People Don’t Organize Their Printed Photo Collections

Bonnie Shay of Mariposa Creative Solutions shares her Top 10 List of reasons people don’t organize their printed photo collections. Which one (or more) sounds like You?

1. They are overwhelmed with the quantity of photos they have.

2. They are embarrassed because they never did anything with the photos while their kids were young.

3. They expect it to be a bittersweet process seeing people in the photos who have passed away or who they used to be married to, etc.

4. They don’t know who many of the people are in the old photos so they give up.

5. They think they will get to it someday when life gets back to “normal.”

6. They don’t have the time.

7. Their photos are scattered all over the house, so they don’t even know the true extent of their collection.

8. All of their photos are well organized in albums, so they think they are all set, but they aren’t as shareable with multiple children and they aren’t backed up (which is what scanning photos provides).

9. They can’t decide whether to organize them chronologically or by subject matter.

10. They don’t know a Photo Organizer like me that can help them.

Did 1 or more of the reasons pertain to you? Please take a moment to comment and share with us which ones…

Click here to read Bonnie’s Top 10 Reasons why people don’t organize their digital photo collections!