Lesson #3 in the Series…
It’s kind of amazing that many of us have photos of ancestors born in a different millennium than we were. We may only have one 100-year-old photo of a great-grandfather, but we know what it looks like and probably know where it is stored. Our ancestors put a LOT more thought into their photos than we do.
The principles we will cover in the next few lessons will help you develop processes that will make you a respectable photo archivist—one your family will thank someday. Using these processes as you organize the photos in your collection, you’ll be helping future generations with their family history work. There is a workflow and a few organizational skills involved, but you can do this! Learning these tricks will save you many hours of searching for photos in the future, but best of all, it will help ensure that your photos will not be lost or destroyed.
I’ve chosen the number 50 randomly. 50 decent photos of yourself should cover a significant chunk of your life. And it’s also a manageable number to work with as we learn the basics of photo preservation. Once you learn the process, you can apply it to all of the important photos in your collection. We are only worrying about photos of you right now, because this project is about you. Once you’ve taken care of your own photos, you can go back and worry about other people’s photos.
Eh, I Don’t Really Have Time For That…
If you don’t have time today to archive some nice photos of yourself, that’s OK. There will probably be someone in your family who will preserve photos for you. Almost everyone has an Aunt Martha in their family who is happy to do the tedious preservation work and has a great photo of you from the year before you got your braces. The one in the orange jumpsuit on a bad hair day. Thanks, Aunt Martha!
If you’re not comfortable leaving your legacy up to Aunt Martha (see the photo below), let’s get going.
This is my least favorite family photo. The photographer insisted it would be enormously funny if everyone made a face. If you aren’t choosing which photos of you are preserved forever, someone else might try to do it for you with less-than-desirable results.
1. Go on a Photo Scavenger Hunt – Gather 10 Printed Photos
First, let’s gather some printed photos of you. Can you walk around your house and do that right now? Try it. Set a timer for five minutes and go on a photo scavenger hunt and gather up ten photos of yourself that are hanging on walls, preserved in albums, or in shoeboxes. (Choose printed photos for now, not digital photos you can access from your phone or computer).
Did you find ten? Did you find more than ten? Was that easier or harder than you thought?
If your home were to burn down tonight, would you lose these photos forever or have you preserved some of them?
2. Gather Digital Photos of Yourself That Span the Last 20 Years. (It Will Not Be as Easy as You Think).
Next, let’s gather some digital photos. I’m going to assume that your digital photos date back 15-20 years. Can you even get to the digital photos of you from 2007? Do they still exist?
If that reminded you that you actually don’t know where your photos from 2007 are at the moment, then let’s think about the photos that are on your computer hard drive or stored in your smartphone right now. Imagine your hard drive gets corrupted or you drop your phone in the toilet. Will every photo you’ve ever taken vanish?
Unless you’ve already put some backup systems in place, your digital photos are at greater risk than your analog (printed) photos!
3. Check Digital Photos on Your Device. Do You Have Any of Yourself?
For step 3 of our photo scavenger hunt, go to where you store the bulk of your digital photos and scan through just the last year to see if you can locate 10 photos of yourself.
If you are like most of my clients who try this experiment, you might be a little shocked to realize that you have hundreds of photos and almost none of yourself. And if you found a few, a surprisingly small percentage of them are the kinds of photos you’d consider preservation-worthy.
That’s because your photos of you aren’t on YOUR device. They are on someone else’s device. You were using your device to document your day. Your lunch, the receipt for your lunch, your grandchildren, your friends, the places you visited, everything except YOU.
Unless you have already done some photo preservation work, most of the last 20 years of your life are recorded in digital photos, and your descendants are not going to have any way to access those, because you have not made the effort to be certain that they can.
Today, we change all of that.
So that’s your assignment for this week: Gather 50 absolutely great photos of yourself (print or digital). In the next post, we’ll learn how to preserve these 50 photos so your descendants can still see them 100 years from now.
The number 50 is just a benchmark. But if you can create archival-quality preservation of your 50 favorite photos, you will have made significant progress, even if this is ALL you ever do to preserve your own story. Once you’ve conquered the process, you can apply it to your photo preservation work from now into the future, and someday, you will be the hero of your family’s photographic story.
Lesson #4 is coming next week. In the meantime, watch the first week’s live course here.
