Preserving Your Photo Images

     Some folks may say "I just want to get all my photos scanned first, then I will organize them". That is certainly one option, but having personally been through this kind of scenario, I will tell you that it becomes a more difficult project as you try organizing hundreds or thousands of photos "later". It is much easier to create an organizational folder structure when you can visually see and touch the photo albums, boxes of photos, and such while they are right physically in front of you.

     A common scanning mistake as a beginner is to select incorrect scanning resolutions for their photos. Another is to not understand that software often tries to set certain "output compressions" to make the file size smaller. Many of our Center patrons have spent hours scanning their photos on a community scanner only to later discover that all their scanned images were overly compressed and are highly pixelated. I see these images posted on FamilySearch every single day, and wish that I could have helped those people properly scan their photos. It's sad, because they have the original photograph, but the "archived" quality is so poor. Those descendants will likely never see a good quality image of the originals they never will have access to.

     I served with an ecclesiastical leader years ago. After he passed away a couple of years ago, his wife probably spent a LOT of hours scanning his photo collections. Unfortunately they were all scanned with minimal resolution. All of their family group photos are limited to a 1" or 2" final photo size that can not be zoomed in on without a lot of resulting pixelation.

     Before scanning, think about what you are going to use the images for. Will you be scanning full size scrapbook pages? Are you going to want to extract or crop out some of the photos from those page? Depending on what you are going to be doing with those scrapbook pages, there will be differences in what scanning resolutions you will use.

Some things to consider before you start to scan your images.

     Most folks are probably quite happy just to get all their photos digitally scanned, an of course, organized. However, the original photos or slides that they have scanned may be of low quality due to scratches, or color changes, water damage, mold, etc. Digitally editing photographs can easily correct many of these problems to improve the quality of your photos.

There are basically two areas that poor quality images fall into:

• Color Tone Correction: Images with poor color tone (like a red, green, or bluish tint) and lighting problems such as being too dark or too light.
  
• Photo Restoration: Images that have been physically damaged with scratches, tears, water or other blotches, etc.

     Correcting poor light or color quality can be done fairly easily AND quickly with free software and without much of a learning curve. Removing the physical defects in a photo does involve a learning curve, and the use of better software to do so.

     I have a variety of tutorials to help you go through some of the more common editing issues.

     As your collection of digital files increases, consider how you are going to keep them safe. It is far too common to see months of work suddenly lost with a hard drive failure or accidental folder deletion without any recovery options in place.

     Backup strategies are one of the final steps in preserving your photo heritage. Don't forget about this very important step!! We want this heritage to last for MANY generations!

     An additional point that is important if you are using USB Flashdrives. These should NOT be used as storage devices. They are useful for transporting files from one location to another.