save photos Archives - Save Your Photos

Aug 16 2017

Save Your Photos: Collect Your Photo Organizing Supplies

The proper photo organizing supplies are an important part of your photo organizing project. A Photo Organizer’s kit includes many different items that make the job of handling, identifying and storing your precious lifetime of photos.

What the Experts Use

Before you get down to the business of organizing your photos, you’ll need to collect some photo organizing supplies. We polled Professional Photo Organizers for their supply list; these are the ‘must haves’ when they begin any photo organizing project.

Cotton Gloves

Fingertips contain an oily residue that will further deteriorate your delicate photo.

Face Mask

If your printed photos smell musty, or they were stored in an attic or basement they may contain mold spores that you could find irritating during the sorting process.

Gather these helpful #photo organizing supplies that the experts use. #saveyourphotos Click To Tweet

Soft-lead Blue or Black Art Pencil

As you sort photos you may want to include a date, year or name on the back of a photo. This pencil is not permanent, and will not indent or harm your photo until you can capture the details digitally once scanned. Never use a pen to mark the back of your photo.

Index Cards

Jot down more details, facts, stories and dates on index cards and group them with printed photos. Index cards can be scanned with printed photos, so important details remain grouped together.

Archive Quality Photo Safe Storage Box

Choosing a good quality photo box will keep your photos safe, and aid in the sorting process.

Dental Floss and Hair Dryer

If you have peel and stick albums, some of your photos may be difficult to remove.

Smartphone Camera

If you have old albums with details on the page, you can take a snapshot of the page to keep the details with the photos.

Sticky Notes or a Notebook

These come in handy for creating a timeline during the sorting process. Some organizers use apps like Evernote or OneNote to curate information or create timelines.

External Hard Drive

Choose a high capacity drive according to the amount of images you have.

Garbage Bags

You’ll come across toss-away pictures, artwork and meaningless ticket stubs that will help reduce your clutter. Let’s set a goal to fill a bag!

These are the essentials, but you may have some more ideas too. Whatever makes your job easier, add it to the list.

What are your must-have photo organizing supplies?

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.

Jul 26 2017

Save Your Photos: Set A Goal

The first step to getting your photo life organized is picturing the end result. In other words, set a goal for yourself and your photos, videos and memorabilia. Just like any goal, you need to have a concrete vision with a timeline for completion.

Having an end-goal and a deadline will help motivate you towards completion. Think ahead to when you have your entire photo and video collection organized and accessible.

How would you like to share and enjoy these pictures?
Do you want a family yearbook with highlights?
Do you want a photo gallery on your wall with milestone events?
Do you want online photo albums that other members of your family can access?
What about a video slideshow to enjoy with some popcorn?

Choose a few fun ways you plan to celebrate and share your photos – this is the fun part!

Next, think about who you plan to share your photos with and let them in on your plans.

Create a goal and timeline for your #photo #organizing project. #saveyourphotos Click To Tweet

You are more likely to achieve your goal when you tell someone who can hold you accountable.

You can do it! Once you’ve set your goal, let us know what it is. Maybe you can inspire someone else’s goal.

Jul 19 2017

Save Your Photos: Get Set Up for Success

Any good organizing project starts with a good workspace and a plan. This week we are discussing how to find a great workspace to ensure your photo organizing project is set up for success.

Set Up for Success: Find a Work Space

Let’s get down to business. Remember the saying “out of sight, out of mind”? Depending on the size of you photo collection, you may be working on this for a while. (And you probably have a lot of photos because, remember we are all overwhelmed!) If everything is tucked away or hidden in closets and on computers, it will be easy to forget. You’ve made a commitment to organize your photos, so let’s get them into an area where you can work on them.

Set yourself up for #photo #organizing success with a great workspace. Click To Tweet

Designate a temporary workspace in your home that is visible and allows you to spread out. A large table in the corner of a room or a separate room is ideal and causes the least amount of disruption. When you’re project is visible, you’re more likely to remain focused on completion. If you set yourself up on your dining room table, then you may have to pack it up again when you want to sit the family for dinner! If space is an issue, take a photo of the locations where your photos are stored so you can create a vision board of what you are dealing with.

Set Up For Success: Hunt and Gather

Next, gather your memory collection into your workspace. Locate all photo albums, loose printed photos, memorabilia, kids artwork, negatives, slides, undeveloped film, memory cards, family artifacts, home movies (ex. VCR tapes, miniDV’s, film, etc.). Determine the devices where you have photos stored, such as your smartphone, computers, and tablets. Resist the temptation to start sorting yet or reminiscing! There will be time for that later.

Ready, set, GO!

Jul 12 2017

Save Your Photos: Why Are You Overwhelmed?

Photos are the memory keepers of our personal story. They are reminders of love, laughter, good times, vacations, family, friends, and traditions. They help us reflect and remember a life well lived.

Today we are at risk of losing our visual inheritance to natural disasters, technological obsolescence, and digital overload. The ability to take and share thousands of photos in an instance has lulled us into thinking that these pictures will always be available to us, but too often, that isn’t the case.

No Wonder You Are Overwhelmed

The statistics are staggering.

In 2015 people took 1 trillion digital photos and that number is expected to grow to 1.2 trillion by the end of 2017. There are currently an estimated 3.6 trillion photos stored on computers, and devices and those numbers are expected to grow to 4.7 trillion by 2017. It’s also estimated that there are over 1.7 trillion paper photos stored in albums, attics & shoeboxes, waiting to be digitized and backed up.

In 2017 we will have 4.7 trillion #digital #photos stored on our computers & devices. #saveyourphotos Click To Tweet

What about your old home movies? Video tapes, like VHS, were very popular, and some 6 billion tapes were sold in the US with an average length of 2 hours each. That’s 12 billion hours of footage of new babies, first steps, weddings, barbecues, and graduations. But videotapes were never meant to be a permanent medium, and deterioration strikes them in as little as 20 years, even when stored under optimal conditions. Less than 1% of these memories have been transferred to digital, a much more durable and lossless format. Also the ability to view these 6 billion tapes in not an option any longer since most devices have become obsolete.

Is it any wonder people are overwhelmed with their memory collections?

How To Save Your Photos

Take a deep breath; we’re here to help. Continue to follow this blog and we are going to share tips on how to organize your backlog of printed photos, digital photos, media, and memorabilia. Our goal is to help you choose the pictures, stories, and memories that matter the most and safeguard them for generations to come. And most of all, we want to help you get them back into your life now so that you can enjoy them today!

Sep 23 2016

Why Print Your Photos?

This is a Guest Contribution by Chari Pack, Founder of PersnicketyPrints, who believes you should print you photos.

We are taking more photos than ever before, but what about preserving them? What happens when today’s high-tech data storage systems become tomorrow’s floppy discs?

In today's digital world, do you print your #photos? #saveyourphotos Click To Tweet

Entering A Digital Dark Age

Vint Cerf, Google VP and Father of the Internet, warned us last year of a “digital dark age”.

Why Print Your Photos? | SaveYourPhotos.org — “If we don’t find a solution our 21st Century will be an information black hole. We think about digitizing things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artifacts that we digitized.”

Image Credit : http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/google-boss-warns-forgotten-century-email-photos-vint-cerf

The Library of Congress expresses the same concern with Digital Preservation when it comes to digital memories and provides the following Archiving Tips:

Identify where you have digital photos
Decide which photos are most important
Organize the selected photos
Make copies and store them in different places

Not only should we be printing our most treasured moments, we should also be aware of preservation. Will that inkjet printer you have next to the laundry room process images that will actually last?

Print Your Photos To Preserve Them

We live in a time of instant gratification. We want it now. At Persnickety Prints, we understand this; however, when it comes to printing, archival longevity is just as important. All Persnickety orders are processed in-house and shipped within 12 hours. Lab techs look at every single image as it’s printed and again once it’s completed. At Persnickety Prints, we still use a dark room. No ink. Silver Halide printing is still the most archival, fade and water resistant printing medium available.

How do YOU print your photos? Or do you?

After a long search for high quality affordable printing, Chari saw a need and created her own; Persnickety Prints.
Completely bootstrapped, Chari went from zero to hero and continues to grow each year without funding or investors. She is passionate about the customer, striving to educate and serve each one in this new digital age.
Before founding Persnickety Prints, Chari helped numerous organizations increase their online presence and revenue through her creative services. Chari graduated top of her class & received a Business Management degree from UVU. Her hands on retail knowledge and expertise comes from over 10 years of service at the retail industry giant, GAP.
When Chari is not working on the next innovative business idea, she is calling a customer about their low resolution image, driving one of her 3 boys to a soccer game, or racing her mountain bike.

Chari is Persnickety in all things.