Photo Tips and Tricks - Part 2

With so many options available to manage photos, what works best?  There is the traditional practice of printing them out, followed by the storage of them electronically, and then there's online storage.  Whatever option you pick for photo storage depends on your purpose in using the photos.

Personally, my goal is to print and/or reproduce only the very best photos for framing and physically sharing with others.  With so many sharing options and a large volume of photos, I do not print much in the way of individual photos these days.  I do love making photo books via Shutterfly and find the process and end result quite satisfying.  I must admit that even in the face of the top quality photo book, nothing beats an actual printed photo on appropriate photo paper.

Storing photos electronically on a CD, USB drive, hard drive or the like is a great way to stay organized and manage a large volume of photos.  I find this task to be daunting at times and must continue to persevere in order to backup my photos.  As most people would agree, electronically storing anything that you value requires a duplication of it to protect from loss.  So...Backup!  Backup!  Backup!  This so definitely applies to your photos, especially old photos of your ancestors.

With my genealogy projects, printing and producing a physical book or album kind of defeats my overall purpose of sharing my family tree experience with whomever wants to read about it in the here and now online but also with my family near and far.  Don't get me wrong, at some point I will produce a bound book for my own family.  In the meantime, I work hard to not hide my family tree research away in a drawer or closet in my home for my children to find when they are old and gray.   Sharing photos and information online is my way of preserving this information including photos in an open forum.

While my blog is wide open to whomever reads my genealogy journal, my Shutterfly photo share site is exclusive to family members associated with my genealogy.  I set this share site up many months ago.  To be honest, I have not added many photos recently but will soon.  It is just sitting there for now.  In the future, I plan to continue loading photos in accordance with my overall family tree project.  That way sharing a photo becomes quick and easy.

When I upload a photo to my blog, Google places it into Picassa.  Picassa is yet another photo sharing site.  This is done by default so it really is a no brainer for me to use Picassa.  I have not used the site for separate uploads in an effort to keep that storage location exclusive to photos posted to my blog.

Storing photos can be a big deal.   What about fixing a photo?  See my next post for the results of fxing the following photo:

William Ross