Together, We SYP: 8 Photo Organizers, Family History Experts, and Photo Professionals Share Their Tips for Save Your Photos Month
By now, you’ve taken the pledge, rallied your community, and started sharing your favorite digitizing, organizing, and genealogy tips for Save Your Photos Month! The good news is – our quest to save our photos together in September is far from over.
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n August, we gathered submissions from willing and expert photo organizers, family history sages, and photography professionals who, together with our entire APPO and “Save Your Photos” community, have shared excellent, helpful photo saving tips on their blogs and websites.
To keep you inspired, here is a list of blog posts by organizers, enthusiasts, and professionals just like you, who take you on their journey of saving photos and preserving memories. We hope their triumphs and even regrets inspire you to save, and help your clients and community save as well. Here are our 8 curated blogs from some of the Save Your Photos finest:
Andi Willis at Good Life Organizing is a photo organizing expert and urges you to join the Save Your Photos movement. She shares a bit about the history of SYPM, including helpful information about online events going on right now and throughout September, so that you can join the party.
Diana Urrichio @ OXO Digital Organizing shares 5 tips and ideas you can get started on right now for Save Your Photos Month. Not only is it important to scan old photos and keep a back-up copy, but exactly how you organize your digital photos is equally important. She also shares some great resources for where to get started with metadata and organization.
Genealogy Jen of Repurposed Genealogy encourages you to take the time to search for distant relatives. You may not personally have inherited many photos, or perhaps there are some gaps in your family history that you’d like filled in. There’s a good chance that a distant cousin has a whole box of photos you’ve never seen before. Jen has some great tips for getting started in finding photographs of your ancestors online.
- How Quickly You Could Scan Your Entire Photo Collection — What I Discovered from My First Week of Scanning
Curtis Bisel of Scan Your Entire Life takes us on the first steps of his journey to scan nearly 10,000 prints and old slides from his family’s collection. He discusses why he decided to scan himself, and how he committed to scanning small batches every single day. Curtis’ dedication and determination to conquer a mountain of memories will definitely have you or your clients itching to get started on your own photos.
Frank Arnoth of Save Family Photos gives us 10 cheeky but serious reasons why you need to digitize your old photos. Like, yesterday. Everything from the dangers of photo decay to the joys of having a bottomless stack of Throw Back Thursday material to torture Aunt Lucinda with. Frank makes some excellent points about saving your photos.
Sherrie Jenkins of Sher Your Scraps takes us on a labor of love to create a special scrapbook about her grandparents. Gathering photos and details from her Grandmother, she puts together a wonderful history of her grandmother and grandfather, scanning and archiving important family documents as she goes. The result is a beautifully crafted treasure for her family with many saved and digitized photos along the way.
Megan McCourt of Picture This Photo Solutions stresses the importance of gathering our family photos and histories before it’s too late. Sadly, her grandmother passed away before she had a chance to collect details and stories for an album. Because of this regret, she shares 6 tips for helping our seniors downsize and organize their photo collections.
Cita Sue Cox of Photo Organizing Scoop works with National Disaster Photo Rescue, an organization that comes in after a natural disaster such as a tornado to find, clean, and rescue photos that have been displaced and damaged. It’s an interesting and gracious organization committed to saving memories after the unthinkable. Cita stresses the importance of not only digitizing old photos, but keeping a copy off-site, such as cloud storage, in case of the unexpected.
As we’ve seen from some of the examples above, there is no time like the present to start scanning, preserving, and saving your photos. You never know what tomorrow will bring – and photo organizing and preservation experts know that better than anyone else! Our pictures are so important to us. They are snapshots into another world, capturing a moment in time that we never want to forget and that we want to share with the generations after us.
Don’t put it off any longer! Check out the links above and visit Save Your Photos for more information and to take the photo saving pledge. It’s a big job, but there are many resources out there for you, your clients, and community to help.
Get inspired! Haven’t started receiving daily photo saving tips in your inbox yet? Don’t delay! Take The Pledge today and get free photo organizing tips all September long.
Interested in participating in our next photo organizer and photo pro round-up? Send us a Facebook message with your contact info, blog link, and idea. Click here to visit our page and message us. We look forward to hearing from you!