How to Archive Family Photos: A Step-by-Step Guide to Organize and Share Your Photos Digitally

by Denise May Levenick

Organize and enjoy your family's memories!

You've captured countless cherished family photos of babies' first steps, graduations, weddings, holidays, vacations, and priceless everyday moments on your smartphone or digital camera. Perhaps you've inherited a collection of heirloom family photographs, too. But now what?

How to Archive Family Photos is a practical how-to guide for organizing your growing digital photo collection, digitizing and preserving heirloom family photos, and sharing your treasured photos.

In this book, you'll


Simple strategies to get your photos out of a smartphone or camera and into a safe storage space Easy methods to organize and back up your digital photos, including file-naming and tagging hints Achievable steps to digitize and preserve heirloom family photos Step-by-step workflows illustrating common photo organizing and digitizing scenarios Checklists for setting up your own photo organization system 25 photo projects to preserve, share, and enjoy your family photos
Whether you have boxes full of tintypes and black-and-white photographs, an ever-growing collection of digital photos, or a combination of the two, this book will help you rescue your images from the depths of hard drives and memory cards (or from the backs of closets) so that you can organize and preserve your family photo collection for future generations.

Genres: Nonfiction, Photography, Reference, How To, History

439 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 24, 2015

Reviews

[Deb Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great tool for any family history buff! Learned much and finally getting a handle on my photo mess.

[Nannie Bittinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to get a handle on organizing your digital photos, this book is very helpful. Most helpful if you buy a copy of your own as you will want to highlight tips that appeal to you, fold down pages to find certain subjects and add your own notes in the margins to make the most of all the information included.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent guide that breaks down an overwhelming task into logical, achievable steps. Levenick also provides an easy-to-follow process for organizing your physical photos, in preparation for digitizing. Everything is clearly spelled out, and the book's organization makes it easy to focus on the chapters that are most relevant to your own situation.

[Matt McCullough · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an excellent book! It provided clear steps and important considerations when archiving memorabilia including photos. With the current shift towards digital everything, the workflows, storage suggestions, and examples were very helpful. Definitely should be in your collection especially if you want to document family records.

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

One frequently heard comment about a great book is, “I couldn’t put it down.” With Denise Levenick’s How to Archive Family Photos, I was constantly putting it down – and that’s a good thing! This book is so full of practical ways to manage your photo collection that you will want to stop and put them to work right away. Denise sent me a PDF “review” copy which is a digitized version of the print edition of the book. The photos, graphics and tables in the print edition add visual support to the words, making it much easier to understand how specific programs work or better visualize a workflow. That being said, as soon as the Kindle version was released, I grabbed a copy. Why have both? The Kindle edition makes it easy to highlight text and add my own notes which are visible when reading the books, and those notes are also synched to my online Kindle library. It already has dozens of bookmarks, highlights and notes so that I can quickly find a specific item when I need it.


The book is divided into three major sections: Organize, Digitize and Create. Denise is an experienced organizer and uses the first section to share the lessons she has learned to help us develop a workable system of our own. From collecting to organizing and then managing our photo archives, she offers both ideas and tools to get us going. Protecting our collections from disaster – physical and technical – is an integral part of her strategy and her organizational workflows are designed to include backup steps.


Once our organizational system is in place and operational, we can then focus on digitizing older photos, family documents and heirlooms. The Digitize section is more than a primer for scanning. Even before getting into the actual scanning process, she discusses how to prepare our older photos and heirloom photos and how to handle them after they have been scanned. There is a discussion of storage devices and platforms as well as ways to estimate how much storage we will need. Another section looks at the growing number of scanners available. She provides tips on how to name the scanned files, appropriate file formats and discussions on scanning equipment.


Throughout the book, Denise provides a number of downloadable worksheets and checklists to help us insure consistency. These are wonderful resources for people like me who don’t do these tasks frequently enough that they are second nature.


At the moment I’m stuck in the Create section. I say “stuck” because this is where I keep stopping to try out the many creative ideas. I thought I knew all there was to know about photo calendars – until reading this book. I’ve got new ideas for cards too and am just getting started in the fabric section. I think I’ll be in this section quite some time.


How to Archive Family Photos is an essential reference for every family historian – and photo fanatic.

[Karen Roth · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first part of the book was excellent and gave practical information to get me moving on organizing my digital photos, how to back up, what sort of organizational set up to use, etc. I will most likely refer to the book again and again as it stays relevant. My only criticism is the section in the back that gives ideas for using digital photos to make digital projects. I would have preferred more photos of sample projects and less on what buttons to click on the websites as different provider websites change all the time. Overall was worth reading and owning.

[Deborah]

Fabulous! Talk about packed with useful information.......and information that I have already begun using! Very clear writing style, with great instructions. This is a book that I will reference time and again.

[Lynda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helpful and useful to those trying to get their digital photos organized. The author includes step by step instructions for different types of users and several project ideas. It even rates different photo editing and storage programs/sites.

[Hapzydeco · Rating 3 out of 5]

For those starting an archival project, this might be a useful book. But for me it did not provide any new information.

[Yycdaisy · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a novice in digital photography and anything to do with it, I found this book to be a bit of a tough slog. In a way, the book resembled a Gale course, like the Gale online course called Discover Digital Photography. The author gives multiple options and websites, but unlike the Gale course, you will have to research the sites yourself. Still, if you do the work you will find the resources. The book is roughly 200 pages long and the lessons on learning to organize and digitize take up the first 140 pages. After that are descriptions of 6 projects. The author uses a variety of software to create them, so the projects will only be useful to people who actually have the particular software or subscriptions to make them.

[Kyla Bayang · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fantastic resource for any Family Photo Historian, whether they are new to photo organization, or an experienced researcher. This book has lots of good charts that you can copy and use for organization purposes.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Resource for saving family photographs and it even provides helpful projects for your pictures.

[John Kidman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another wonderful book to have on your reference shelves.

[Vickie T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great directions on organizing and digitizing your photos.

[Rose · Rating 2 out of 5]

This version of Denise May Levenick's advice on preserving family genealogical keepsakes was geared towards an unorganized beginner with a need to be repeatedly told the instructions until the words haunt your dreams. It seemed like every chapter repeated the same information until the end of the book when it changed to project suggestions. The chapters are well organized and progress through a proper sequence for organization as well as providing web site resources. The book would be considerably shortened if the duplicated instructions were removed and I soon was skipping over pages where it was obviously the same information, just reorganized or reworded. I am glad I borrowed this book from my local library.

[Ellen Gittelsohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book about photo organizing and creative photo projects

Happy days are here again after reading this wonderful book. I'm emerging from the chaos of my print and digital photos as I follow the authors directions for organizing and am really excited about following her directions for the many creative photo projects. The printable forms, list of resources and blog are a bonus. This book is already turning into a bible. Thank you!

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now I have the background to make a photo and family history archiving process that I can begin implementing once I've got it created to fit my situation.

[Joy · Rating 3 out of 5]

745.593 MayLeven 08/2015 . Nonfiction our library has flatbed scanner for pubic use. One chapter on use of the scanner Provided an interesting background for my genealogy interests

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good Basic Info

Much of the details in this book is tied to particular companies and software, but the overall ideas and projects provide good information.

[Mhd]

Very good. I still want to finish it, especially the fine points of organizing.