WHO WE ARE . . . AND WHY WE LOVE PHOTOS

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN About Digitizing Photos

• Best practices for preparing photos for scanning

• Types of equipment to use

• File formats to use

• Tools for enhancing photos

• How to label digitized images to aid organization

TIPS FOR HANDLING DELICATE MATERIALS• Non-latex powder free medical

exam/food service gloves

• Cracked cardboard based images should be placed on a supportive acid and lignin free cardstock. Use stitching software to correct the breaks

• Flaking tintypes. Rather than place them on a scanner, photograph them then store in an acid and lignin free envelope.

• Use a portable photo studio like shotbox to photograph albums and fragile items.

• Photo negatives and slides

• Loose photos

• Photo albums/framed photos

• Vital records (e.g., birth and marriage certificates)

• Other records, such as ship manifests, deeds and census reports

• Mementos, like theater programs, recipes, news clippings and wedding invitations

TIPS FOR SORTING Separate by:

PREPPING PHOTO ARCHIVES - KEEP THOSE NEGATIVES!

Pro Tip!

• Negatives can give you the best digital output

• Dots per inch (dpi) can be as high as 4,000 for negatives

• Photos digitized on a scanner are 300 to 1,200 dpi

NEXT, GROUP BY COMMON FACTORS

• Events and activities like weddings, reunions, picnics

• Family line and/or person

• Location

• Timeframe

• Etc.

Add a labeled card before each group and scan this too!

● Scan at a minimum of 600 dpi but 1200 dpi Tiff is considered preservation level

● These huge files will require a portable hard drive and/or a cloud service.

● Create a private family archive on permanent.org

● Scan in color even if the image is sepia or black and white for image quality.

● Scan negatives and slides too, but for the latter consider a scanning service.

SELF SCANNING TIPS

SCANNING SERVICE TIPS

● Usually best pricing from high-volume places where you ship your photos to them, like scanmyphotos.com

● Check out the reviews of companies before sending!

● Some offer custom services, such as saving your scans into separate folders.

● Sorting/labeling done ahead of time extremely helpful for tagging photos later on.

● Some places will scan print details on the back of photos (as an image, not as text).

● Worth spending a little extra for higher resolution

• Vivid-Pix Restore

• MyHeritage Enhancement and Colorization

TOOLS FOR ENHANCING PHOTOS

MYHERITAGE.COM PHOTO TOOLS

● Patented technology to colorize and enhance your pictures with one click

● Tweak colors in settings

● Download and share your fixes

● Works in your Complete subscription

● Automatically tells you if the file size is too small

● Compare the before and after

MY HERITAGE.COM ENHANCEMENT AND COLORIZATION

VIVID-PIX RESTORE TOOLS

● Patented artificial intelligence restores images with 1-click. Fine-tune with easy controls.

● Improves JPEG, TIFF, PNG and BMP images. Windows--RAW

● Automatically creates high resolution JPEG and/or TIFF images – without affecting original.

● Automatically creates sharing file size for posting on genealogy sites and emailing.

● Autosaves to a Vivid pix folder within the same folder as the image

● Download the app

VIVID-PIX RESTORE

LABELING PHOTOGRAPHS TO AID ORGANIZATION

● Number on back upper right corner

● Use soft lead pencil ex. ebony

● Write softly and small

● Sequential 1, 2, 3….

● Computer numbering 001, 002, 003…

FILE NAMES

● Keep it simple and meaningful

● Name/ birth year/date of picture

● Use a photo organizer with the power of metadata

001 Wilson Eliza b1892 photo 1912.tif

TIPS FOR SAVING ON YOUR COMPUTER

Mom and Dad’s Wedding

December 21, 1963 - Macon, GA

LEARN MOREThe Photo Detective Podcast

Available on:iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Amazon Music

www.memoryweb.me

MyHeritage.com Photo Tools

•Patented technology to colorize and enhance your pictures with one click

•Tweak colors in settings•Download and share your fixes•Works in your Complete subscription•Automatically tells you if the file size is too small •Compare the before and after

Vivid-Pix Restore

•Patented artificial intelligence restores images with 1-click. Fine-tune with easy controls. •Improves JPEG, TIFF, PNG and BMP images. Windows --RAW

•Automatically creates high resolution JPEG and / or TIFF images –without affecting the original. •Automatically creates sharing file size for posting on genealogy sites and emailing. •Autosaves to a Vivid pix folder within the same folder as the image

•Download the App

FILE FORMATS AND METADATA

File Type Release Inventor Quality IPTC EXIF

JPG 1992 Joint Photographic Experts Group Lossy Yes Yes

RAW/Bitmap Lossless Yes1 Yes

TIFF 1986 Aldus (now owned by Adobe) Both Yes Yes

PNG 1996 PNG Development Group (W3C) Lossless Yes Yes2

GIF 1987 CompuServe Lossless3 No No

PDF 1993 Adobe Both Yes Yes

1 "For IPTC: there is a ‘sidecar’ file that travels with the raw content. The content of the photo is directly from the image sensor within a camera and is not yet processed."

2 "As of 2017, there has been updates that include an EXIF ‘chunk’ in PNG file formats, adoption is yet to be seen. http://ftp-osl.osuosl.org/pub/libpng/documents/pngext- 1.5.0.html#C.eXIf"

3 There is still a compression algorithm implemented but it is a lossless algorithm.