Category: Photo Organizing

Can someone please do it for me?

3/9/2016

Your old print photographs hold part of your family’s history and memories. Quite often, you only have one original print of each moment that is gradually taking up dust in a shoe-box and that no one is able to enjoy or share.
A client recently came to me a year after losing her grandfather. She had started looking for family pictures and was startled to discover that she only had a few hundred prints.

Her uncle and aunts who each lived in different countries in Europe and America had inherited a few pictures as well. Their photographic heritage had been scattered among family members. The photos she had were starting to fade away along with the captions that her grandfather had thoughtfully written on the back.

She could hardly identify the people in some of the prints and her mother couldn’t jog her memory either. Some photos were tearing and fading away. The memories left behind by her grandfather could disappear if she didn't consolidate their photographic heritage. Scanning the photos would help her share them with the rest of the family and perhaps identify those she could not recognize. It will allow her to have backup copies of all the photos and to restore the prints that are deteriorating. But most importantly, it will strengthen her family history.

Today thanks to scanning, you can create second copies of your precious prints and safeguard your entire collection.
Scanning print photos take a tremendous amount of time and effort to do. It requires a specialized know-how in digital archiving and proper scanning techniques and tools. What should be an enjoyable trip down memory lane could turn into a bit of a chore.

You can always opt to send them to the nearest copy center and have them scanned for a cheap pricing package. They will most probably give you an unorganized folder filled with misnamed photos that aren’t scanned according to preservation standards. The result will be quite as messy as that shoe-box you wanted to get sorted.

Having your print photos scanned is not a luxury, it’s a necessary step if you want to safeguard and protect your photos. So why not let us do the tedious but necessary work while you sit back and relax?

As Professional Photo Organizers, we have a strong passion for organizing and simplifying your photo collections. With years of training behind us, we’ve mastered the proper scanning techniques that allow us to render high-quality scans of print photographs. We’ve also developed a proper file naming method to name and tag each scanned picture with all the information that you will need to retrieve these photographs.

Scanning your photo and slide collection offers several valuable benefits:

Protect your photo prints and slides:

By having a digital archive of your originals, you will feel relieved to have another copy of each and to know that you can reprint scanned images at any time.

Restore them back to their former beauty:

All photo prints fade over time and images get washed out. Slides and negatives decay. Loose photos get scratched, bent, or ripped through years of mishandling. Professional tools such as Photoshop can reverse the years of decay and damage in your originals and make them look as clear and vibrant as the day they were taken.

Share them with family and friends:

If you’re hoarding one or more shoe-box of family photos, then it is your duty as the unofficial family archivist, to take the initiative to get those photos scanned, organized and backed-up into several copies that you can share with your family members.

Get creative with your photos:

Once your photos are properly scanned, we can help you create photo books, video slideshows, and fine art prints to tell the stories of your best moments.

Memories are meant to be shared with loved ones so preserve precious images of your family history by turning them digital so you can pass them on to future generations.
Book your free consultation session with us, and start preserving a lifetime of memories.

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The Blue Elephant in the Room

5/13/2015

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At the beginning of the Lebanese war, this family had to flee their home in a rush; they threw all their photos in small suitcases and hid them in a warehouse before they fled the country. Thirty years later, the eldest of the family discovered those suitcases and asked me to help him get those memories back to life.

When I’m asked what I do for a living, I answer “I’m in the family connection business. I get your family photos organized so you’re able to share the stories they hold with loved ones and pass them over safely to future generations.”
The person I’m addressing spontaneously starts talking about his photos and how he would love to get them organized. Then come the practical questions: “But how will you be able to do the work if you don’t know my family?” new clients ask me anxiously. “I will have to sit with you for hours and I don’t have the time for this!” they worry. The burden of what seems like an overwhelming project start to take over again.

So, how to overcome the anxiousness of starting a photo organizing project?
It’s easy: just lay back and enjoy the ride!

Photo-organizing is a personal and intimate business.
During first assessment meetings, clients rarely talk about photo organization. They start by telling stories: people that matter, places they cherish, trips that changed them, etc. I listen carefully because I know it’s those people and these stories that matter and I’ll find them again in the photos. The trust-building process between me and the client starts with storytelling.
I then follow-up with a more systematic questionnaire where I ask my clients about the key people in the family, milestone dates such as birth dates, weddings, graduations, places they’ve lived in, their contribution to community and social services, their political involvement, etc…

This is the basic working kit of a photo organizer. A photo organization project involves a lot of archeological and detective work in order to find hints and clues that help identify the people, places and events. I use sticky notes on the back of photos I have questions about. Dates and events can be written on the back of a photo with a photo safe pencil. The internet helps tremendously when you need to identify landmark places and buildings and I always wear gloves while manipulating the photos!

To the left, the box as my client handed it to me at the beginning of the project. To the right, the content of the box after the first round of sorting.

It is discouraging to look through your own photos when they are stacked in a storage box like this but not to me! Armed with the initial information I’ve been given, I start going through the stacks of photos and themes start to emerge: family vacations, summer houses, ski trips, graduations, weddings, birthdays, etc… I make sure to reorganize the photos according to the themes, and then go through them once again to separate poor-quality and duplicated images.

Now I’m able to show my client an overview of his entire collection, classified in themes and only then are we able to make decisions together about what photographs to keep and display, what albums we want to create, and what we can archive and backup.

Armed with my detective hat, I look for additional clues that help me identify the situations occurring in each photograph.

In this example, my client wanted to remember where he took a specific group of friends to dinner back in 2003. Looking closely at the tableware, I was able to distinguish those blue elephant designs and voiced it to my client; he jumped up of his chair and said: “Yes we took them to the Asian restaurant the “Blue Elephant!”

Photographs are among the most prized possessions we have, nothing connects us to our history like a photo. But they also cause a lot of stress and anxiety for people that don't have the time or the patience to organize them into books or boxes. Working with a photo-organizer helps envision the final result, and break down this project into small, easy and manageable tasks. As I progress with my clients and get their photos sorted, I notice that their feelings of anxiety are replaced by the satisfaction of knowing that their memories can be enjoyed and are safeguarded.

So round up your family, their photos, book your free consultation session with us, and start preserving a lifetime of memories.

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Will you be remembered?

3/2/2015

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One day, while going through your old family photographs, you come across this odd and blurry snapshot of a couple in a rowboat. You try to recognize the faces in the photograph but no name comes to mind. You ask your mother, and she tells you the story of your grandfather who missed the boat that was taking him and your grandmother to their honeymoon in Antwerp and had to take a rowboat to catch up with the ship off the coast of Beirut.
Now the photograph has meaning. It tells a story; the story of your grandfather who was renowned for not being punctual.
And when you show this to your children, you can tell them a story too.
And this odd little photograph can keep your grandfather’s stories and memories alive.

So what will you do with the shoeboxes filled with prints and negatives that you don’t know how to organize?

Do you actually know what images you have on your phones, computers, cameras, memory cards and hard disks?

Most importantly, what stories do your photographs tell if there’s no one to offer a narrative?

forget-me-not is a unique photo organizing service that is dedicated to organizing, preserving and sharing your photographic heritage.

“A photo organizer helps their clients find solutions for organizing, protecting, and enjoying their photos, videos and other important keepsakes and memorabilia,” said professional organizer Cathi Nelson (APPO). “By doing so we bring a sense of relief and reassurance to our client’s lives, as their feelings of guilt and anxiety are replaced by the satisfaction of knowing that their memories can be enjoyed and are safe-guarded.”

As photo organizers, we are committed to highlighting the stories you want to tell through your photographs. We help you:

●             Organize your photo collections.
As we go through the process of organizing your photos (sort, categorize, label, scan and archive), we ask you questions to capture your stories.

●             Share your most cherished memories with friends and family.
Once your photos are properly organized, we get creative with photo books, video slideshows and fine art prints to tell the stories of your best moments.

●             Protect your photo heritage — by creating back-ups of your photos and storing them securely online (in the cloud), digitally (on external hard drives) and in print.

At forget-me-not, we help you manage a lifetime of photos, providing you with a professional level of services and support that will give life back to those photographs, the precious memories they hold and the stories they tell.

Organize your photographs and preserve your memories with forget-me-not. Make sure you are remembered for the generations to come.

Start today by scheduling a free consultation session with us.

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Can someone please do it for me?

The Blue Elephant in the Room

Will you be remembered?

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Organizing Your Photographs, Preserving Your Memories

Can someone please do it for me?

The Blue Elephant in the Room

Will you be remembered?

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Archives

Categories

Organizing Your Photographs, Preserving Your Memories