essential technology tools for your photo projects...cloud storage cloud storage differs from online...
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Essential Photo OrganizingOld Photos - Real Solutions
Essential Technology & ToolsFor Your Photo Projects
Copyright © 2019 Maureen Taylor All rights reserved.
Layout Composition & Design: Mike Bronner
Maureen Taylor Providence, Rhode Island https://maureentaylor.com
Organizing Your Originals 1 .................................................Archival Quality Supplies 2 ...........................................................
Labelling Tools 2 .......................................................................
Miscellaneous Supplies for Photograph Care 3 .....................................
Conservation Help 3 ...................................................................
Digitizing Your Photos 4 .....................................................Scanning Terminology 5 ...............................................................
Scanners 5 ..............................................................................Flatbed Scanners 5 ..................................................................................
All-In-One (AIO) 6 ...................................................................................
Flip-Pal 6 .............................................................................................
Smart Phone 6 .......................................................................................
Online Scanning Services 7 ...........................................................
Organizing Your Digital Photos 8 ...........................................Photo Organizing Software 9 .........................................................
Digital Storage Solutions 9 ...........................................................Portable Hard-Drives 9 .............................................................................
Online Storage & Online Backup 9 ................................................................
Cloud Storage 10 ....................................................................................
Online Printing Services 11.................................................
Organizing Your Originals
This chapter provides you with resources for the tools to help you preserve and organize your original photographs.
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Archival Quality Supplies
Museums and historical libraries often use the vendors listed below:
❧ Hollinger Corporation: https://www.hollingermetaledge.com
❧ Gaylord Archival Supplies: https://www.gaylord.com
❧ University Products: https://www.universityproducts.com
Special retail stores often have more budget-friendly options that are of tine quality that you can trust. Be sure to look for acid-free and lignin-free items:
❧ Blick’s: https://www.dickblick.com
❧ Michael’s: https://www.michaels.com
Consider local art supply stores, too!
Labelling Tools
Labelling your images is an important preservation step. Use the right writing implements to prevent new damage to your pictures. Soft lead pencils for paper-based heritage pictures, and pigment ink pens for resin-coated snapshots.
❧ Hollinger Corporation: https://www.hollingermetaledge.com
❧ Gaylord Archival Supplies: https://www.gaylord.com
Be certain to look at the pencil’s grading system (see https://pencils.com/pages/hb-graphite-grading-scale for more information).
Art supply stores are good sources of appropriate pencils and pens.
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Miscellaneous Supplies for Photograph Care
Some tools that you will find handy for the care, organization, and preservation of your original photographs, are:
❧ Hygrothermograph: used to monitor moisture and temperature. You can find these on Hollinger’s web site, as well as on amazon.com.
Conservation Help
The American Institute for Conservation https://www.culturalheritage.org has further resources on preservation, including a directory to help you find a conservator.
✏ Note, that if you are using any type of sleeve or envelope for encasing individual photos, be certain to mark them before inserting each photo, to avoid pressure mark damage.
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Digitizing Your Photos
This chapter provides guidance for digitizing your photographs. Solutions can range from having your own in-home scanning setup to hiring scanning services.
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Scanning Terminology
Learning the language of scanning is like being tossed into an alphabet soup. There are several different picture formats: RAW, TIFF, GIF, and JPEG. These formats can be a little confusing at first. After all, what do they mean? In order to understand the basics of scanning, you need to become familiar with a few acronyms for terminology:
❧ DPI - Dots Per Inch: The more dots per inch, the higher the resolution of the image.
❧ PPI - Pixels Per Inch
❧ RAW: This format contains all the data related to an image. It must be converted to be viewed. There are many different flavors of the RAW format, some proprietary to manufacturers.
❧ TIFF: Uncompressed TIFF at 1200 DPI, or higher, is considered to be the preservation standard.
❧ GIF: This format used to be a web standard for graphic files, and is sometimes still used.
Factors to consider when choosing a format:
❧ Compression: Does the format compress the image? If so, then choose another format for preservation purposes. For sharing pictures casually with friends and family, compression is preferred, because of the reduced file size. A higher compression rate also means reduced quality. You will notice this as blurring.
❧ Printing: If you want to print an image, then you will want to scan your file with 300 DPI or greater. If you want to enlarge your photos, scanning at higher resolutions will yield better results (less blurring and pixelation).
❧ Web: Images scanned at 72 or 96 DPI are ok for the web, but you generally cannot get good quality pictures at this low resolution.
Scanners
Flatbed Scanners
For dedicated photo and document scanning, the two consistently highly-rated brands are Epson and Canon:
❧ Epson Perfection line of scanners.
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❧ Canon CanoScan line of scanners.
Both are widely available online or in local office stores. Be sure to shop around for prices, as they can fluctuate.
If you need to digitize negatives and old color slides, prepare to spend approximately $160 to $200. Try the “jumbl” scanner for slides and negatives.
All-In-One (AIO)
This still has the flatbed scanner, but also often includes a document-feed tray for multiple pages, and features copying, printing from your computer, and faxing. If you are looking for an all-purpose device, these can be cost-effective.
❧ Canon PIXMA series: Canon has high-quality scanning lenses, and newer models often include AirPrint for use with Macs and iDevices, often priced below $100.
Flip-Pal
This is a portable scanner that is unique because it has a flat-bed design, but can scan your photos and documents on the go without being attached to a PC. Find out more on https://flip-pal.com.
Smart Phone
There has been a recent rise in scanning apps for your smart phone, as smart phone cameras have increased in quality. Some include:
❧ Evernote Scannable
❧ CamScan
❧ Google Scan
Be sure to search your App Store to find current apps, as new ones are always being released with new features.
Depending on your phone, the quality not meet preservation standards, but they work great in a pinch.
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Online Scanning Services
Professional scanning services can save you time. Their cost-effectiveness is possibly best realized in terms of time and quality results. Some services also offer the option of online storage (covered in more detail in the next chapter). Make sure that you scan at a minimum of 600 dpi.
❧ ScanMyPhotos: Slide Scanning https://www.scanmyphotos.com/slide-scanning/prepaid-slide-scanning-box.html
❧ ScanDigital: They are known for their versatility of services. https://scandigital.com
❧ ScanCafe: They have online storage options available. https://www.scancafe.com
❧ ScanMyPhotos: https://www.scanmyphotos.com
❧ iMemories: https://www.imemories.com
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✏ Tips for choosing scanning services: ❧ Look for services that are clearly using flat-bed scanners, as
the potential for damage to your photos will be greater with automatically-fed scanners.
❧ Remember that these services will not have same-day or overnight turn-around times.
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Organizing Your Digital Photos
This chapter provides information on what’s available to help you organize your digital (and digitized) photographs for handy access. Included is material on digital photo-sharing, cloud storage, and external hard-drive storage.
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Photo Organizing Software
These software programs are powerful tools that can help you organize your collection and often have editing tools that allow you to enhance the images. These would be used by those of you who have an interest in putting additional effort into your collections.
❧ MemoryWeb:
https://memoryweb.me/pd
A photo organizer created by genealogists for family historians. It includes metadata embedded into the image file, export feature that includes metadata in an image format for uploading to social media sites, front/back linking, and syncing with Facebook, Instagram, Dropbox, Google Drive, Flickr and FamilySearch. Only Memory Web and Adobe Lightroom embed metadata into your image. Try it and see!
Digital Storage Solutions
Portable Hard-Drives
Western Digital and Seagate are the top names in external, portable hard-drives. They all offer varying lines with varying capacities. You can generally find very good hard-drives with plenty of capacity under $100. Be sure to shop around in places like Amazon.com, Best Buy, and other brick & mortar or online retailers.
Online Storage & Online Backup
Even with a physical storage drive, it is recommended that you have some form of online backup as well, in case of catastrophic failure or act of god renders your physical drive inoperable.
❧ BackBlaze: https://www.backblaze.com
❧ iDrive: https://www.idrive.com
❧ Carbonite: https://www.carbonite.com
Personal plans usually have some form of free trial. Be sure to also have local backups of your files in addition to the online backups, as these service providers are not guaranteed to stay in business forever. Also, be sure to research your options, as the competition keeps growing in this field.
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Cloud Storage
Cloud storage differs from online backup services in many ways. Most importantly: they are not guaranteed to act as a full backup solution, and may delete old files, or not back up files, if you run out of space. Often they come integrated with your operating system or software.
❧ iCloud: offered by Apple for Apple customers, comes with a free tier, and has additional storage available for purchase, at very reasonable rates.
❧ OneDrive: offered by Microsoft to customers who buy a computer with Windows, and upgrade pricing is available.
❧ Google Drive: comes free when you create a Google account, and has various upgrade options.
Some of these services are less secure than others, so be sure to research and consider what information you upload.
There is an app called BoxCryptor (https://www.boxcryptor.com) that will encrypt selected files for your cloud storage providers. While using it might add additional steps to storing and retrieving files, consider the headache of your photos being compromised or your data misused.
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Online Printing Services
Sometimes you really want to have a prized photograph or series of photographs printed for sharing with family members.
We are talking about services that offer little more than a simple print creation. This is certainly something you can do with your digital photos if you take them to your local pharmacy to have them printed.
However, these services offer fine reproductions in the form of books, calendars, holiday ornaments, and more:
❧ SnapFish: https://www.snapfish.com/home
❧ Shutterfly: https://www.shutterfly.com
❧ MyMemories: http://www.mymemories.com In addition to offering prints, MyMemories sells a digital scrapbooking app that you can use to organize your scanned and digital photos into new albums.
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We hope you have found this guide helpful in getting started using tools and technology to help you save your valuable family history. If you have any suggestions for additions to this guide, please send them to [email protected].
✏ For further reading on photograph care and organizing, check out Maureen’s books athttps://maureentaylor.com!
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