Hi there. Welcome to the very first episode of live with Mollie. I'm Mollie, of course, and I'm so excited to be here with you this evening. If you're here, live with me on YouTube or Facebook. Go ahead and say hi in the chat and feel free to let me know if you have questions at the end. I should have some time to maybe answer a few, and if I can't, I'll address them on a future episode and if you're listening on the podcast, I also welcome you.
And you can. You can read the show notes to find my contact information and send me a question that way. We are kicking things off in a different way here, because I think we've got a real problem out there when it comes to saving family memories. It's wild. We have all this amazing technology right at our fingertips. So many ways to capture and share moments, but somehow it feels like our photos are in a bigger mess than ever.
I want to talk about this because if we don't start changing our habits now, the years are going to continue to fly by while we lose. Not the photos necessarily, but special opportunities to enjoy and share our memories with those we love today. It's just not okay with me to let the status quo continue, and I'm betting it's not okay with you either.
If you're here on my channel. I want to start off with a personal example of how losing track of memories has impacted my life, and I would love to know if this sounds familiar to you. I have to confess, I literally cannot remember what I did three weeks ago. My photos are a lifeline for me to remember all that I've done.
That's fun and enjoyable, and it really struck me. Back in 2010, my husband had lost his job in engineering and he returned to nursing school. He wanted to become a nurse. Money was tight in our household, and our kids were ten and five, and the summer went by and I realized it was September and school was starting, and the kids were going to have to say, what did they do that summer?
And I thought, well, I don't think they're going to have a whole lot exciting to say. And I really felt bad that we just hadn't been able to have a fun summer. Now, at the time, I worked full time in the, health care nonprofit field, and I sold creative memories, scrapbooks and albums on the side. This was the precursor to starting pix ology.
Now we had quarterly scrapbook workshops for our customers, and October's 12 hour workshop rolled around and I had the opportunity to work on my pictures from the summer. The summer I thought we had done nothing. Now, I actually back then was printing pictures out and I realized as I was putting them in a simple photo album that we actually had done a lot over the summer, we went to many parks and explored and saw new areas of our county that we hadn't before.
And being outside is just so good for the soul. And then I saw the photos of my husband and I. We had run this five K Tough Mudder like I cannot run, but I managed to pull myself together enough to do this with my husband. And I did a decent time. Such a fun memory and I thought we had done nothing.
We also, with the kids went to a petting zoo and we had all these fun memories and these special, special photos and we went up north and I hadn't even counted. That is something fun. As I thought about it, I realized that, you know, the process of working with my photos was as enjoyable as actually looking at the memories.
And I knew that life is so busy. Our memories get lost in the day to day routines that drag us down. And that's exactly what happened to me back in 2010. I learned my families connect me to the joy, laughter, and fun we have together, and I learned if I didn't make a conscious effort to save our memories, I easily could lose the sight of all the blessings in life.
I want everyone to be able to enjoy the best moments of their lives on repeat. We've all achieved major milestones, overcome obstacles, and we've reached grand new shores in our travels. And we have loved our family so much. It's time for us to have a better way to save our family photos. The big question is how do we save our photos?
It's kind of haunted me for the past 12 years. Like, how do we help people save their photos? Interestingly, a couple of years ago, I received an email from an engineer named Chip. He wrote to me, I am a bit OCD when it comes to being organized, and I'm seeing more and more this trend of don't organize stuff, just put it in a big pile and use a powerful search tool to search for it.
I see this often too, in photo management solutions, namely our two largest ones which are Apple Photos and Google Photos. The apps are designed for you to look through your library or gallery, and then search for something. Of course, we have to deal with the ever changing updates to these apps, and it seems like these companies think we can intuitively find our photos, and that's just not true.
Chip pointed out next in his email. He just can't wrap his head around, you know, don't organize it, put it in a big pile. He said, as I know the pile will get too big and I won't even remember what's in there, so I won't know how to search for it. He's absolutely right, and my personal example kind of brings it back home to me.
If I can't remember that I attended a wedding back in 2009. Why would I go back to look at the memories, unless I was with the couple who got married and we were reminiscing. But when I have saved those photos in a place I could easily find. How many of you have a photo saved from 2009, or any year before digital photos arrived?
It's a very interesting question to me, but I think we have to ask, what does it even mean to save a photo? I think as life goes by so fast that people just start thinking that keeping pictures on their phones is good enough. You can scroll through it and eventually maybe find what you're looking for, so it's okay.
It's like the phone is the default and people know it's good enough for now. It's adequate and I'm going to do something later. The problem is, for now becomes years and years of accumulated photos that have never been truly saved. Here's the thing. Saving photos on your phone. It's not enough. And I'm going to really hammer this home tonight.
Your phone is not going to help you leave a lasting legacy of your family's special moments. It's not going to incorporate those old photos from your parents, grandparents, or even great grandparents. It's just a giant pile of pictures that keeps growing and it's mixed in with all of the photos we're taking for information, screenshot and the repetitiveness. It's just a mess to me, and I've taught this for years.
A saved photo checks three boxes. You can find that photo when you need it. Like you know pretty much where it is and you can get to it in a couple minutes. You're not scrolling through your phone. You're not going to Facebook and trying to find a picture there. You know pretty much where it is. This also goes along with knowing you have the photo.
Next, a saved photo is backed up in two places purposefully. All right. It can't be that you're just backing things up to wherever without conscious thought. You've purposely saved it in two places so that the photo is safe from disasters. Like, you know, a house fire or losing a phone or a hard drive crash backed up in two places.
The third box to check is that you can pass that photo on to future generations, and you can share it today easily. You want your family's story to be told today and passed on. All right, so those are the three things that to me qualify as a saved photo. Now, right now people are saving photos all over the places.
External hard drives, cloud sites. Some people are still printing pictures out into photo books, but it kind of starts getting confusing. Where do you start? How do you choose what's best? It's a total mystery. And when people try to tackle their pictures, life gets in the way. Two years go by, they try again, and now they're even more overwhelmed.
And we've got to stop this cycle because it's only going to get worse as we keep snapping more photos. I have met people who have stopped taking pictures because they're like, what's the point? And that's pretty sad. We have to stop this cycle because as time goes by, AI, artificial intelligence is going to become more a part of our lives.
We already know that there are apps out there that are combining pictures to produce for you. The best version of a moment. Is that really how you want your photos to be managed? I mean, I get it. It would be nice to have the best version of a photo, but if it's like, combined together using artificial technology, you know.
Is that the best answer? It might be, but at the. In the meantime, we still need to figure out all that we have going on. Now, I need to tell you a few more reasons why your phone is not enough. And I'm just going to be tough about this because I've tried to be nice for 12 years. Your phone has many problems with the photos that are on it.
If you're like most people, all right. Some have 5000 pictures, 15,000 photos and videos, 50,000 photos and videos. And I've met people who have over 200,000 pictures on their phone. And when you have that many, chances are good the majority of them are living up in the cloud, leaving you just a thumbnail version on your phone. Managing that amount of storage is is is just a nightmare, and you're paying monthly for fees for the storage as well.
If you're an iPhone user, your full resolution photos might be stored in the cloud and actually getting them back down to your computer is pretty difficult. If you're an Android user, your full resolution photos may not get stored up in the cloud. Depends on what subscription you are paying for your Google Storage. And you probably have experienced losing your phone.
Hopefully in this day and age, you all have your backup turned on. Even if it's, you know, not organized, a backup is better than nothing. If your phone is lost or stolen. I actually have that. People. I remember one gal, she had two years of pictures lost. You know, of her, her newborn grandchild, child. It's heartbreaking. So please make sure your backup is turned on.
Also, your phone's camera roll gets cluttered with screenshots, duplicates, or random pictures you know, from messages or Facebook. And it makes your family photos just get lost in the mess. You also can lose important metadata about your picture, like the date it was taken or the location. You probably have come across photos with long names on them. So frustrating to see that in your folders.
That happens when you download pictures from social media sites. They have lost all their metadata and they have an awful name on them. Next, you could do organizational work on your phone. Both Google Photos and Apple Photos. Have a way to work with albums and folders, but the work that you do on your phone doesn't necessarily sync to your computer.
And you can easily get confused with what is saving. Where. The, the other challenge that I see with people and their phones is sharing photos is so easy, but it's like a temporary fix, a temporary gift of a memory in three months when someone needs that picture again. You know, how are they going to get it from you?
Or how will you get the photo you want from someone else? Sharing photos from phone at first is convenient, but for the long term you can lose track of those pictures and a link might expire. The family member may have deleted the picture. It's, just a recipe for losing a good picture or ending up with a pixelated, smaller version of it.
The worst problem I think I have seen with regards to photos on a phone is you might be backing up to multiple places at once. There are a lot of apps that would love to have your pictures in their cloud storage. Amazon Photos OneDrive. Dropbox iCloud photos. Google Photos. I had, a client. I love her. She's like, anytime something asked me to back it up, I said yes.
So she had like five different backups. And the problem is, someday that Bill is going to come due and you're going to have to figure out what is saved, where, which is your best version of the photo, and you're going to have a mess. It takes a long time to duplicate and sort that all out. When your photos are a mess, the joy of your family memories get buried that these pictures from fundraisers and graduations, weddings and travel.
They have the power to inspire you, to lift you up, to celebrate life. And to do this with other people. But if they're stuck in a digital swamp, you can't enjoy them with your loved ones, and sometimes you can't enjoy them while they're still here. To share the stories behind the pictures. We don't want to wait until someone passes away to rush around, find photos, and wish we had talked with them about what was going on in the pictures.
So what I really encourage and I teach and I am, I am like, this is my main purpose in doing this live with Molly on Mondays is I want to teach people to build a monthly photo saving habit. Every month I save my family photos in a folder on my computer, and then I upload them to an album in my favorite cloud storage, which we sell here at pixel GS forever permanent storage for easy sharing and preservation.
Imagine opening up an album of photos and seeing the stories of your year laid out for you, and albums with descriptions. This is what I love. Looking at last year's albums, I can see at a glance that my memories include a wonderful trip to New York City, saw my son play at Carnegie Hall. We had family celebrations. Our dog Sydney is visible there and I've got pictures of birding.
My new favorite thing to do with my sister. So here's my my additional tough talk. And I don't know if it's for you or for me. Well, I just have been trying for all these years to get people to save their photos on a monthly basis. Here at pixel AG, I, I've worked with thousands of clients, even super dedicated clients who work on their photos routinely.
We have sent out thousands and thousands of emails over the years with the steps on how to save last month's photos. I've got at least two specific YouTube videos. I'm saving photos monthly, and I reference the habit in many other videos. I think it's also in my books. All of this time, I really get the feeling that I can count on one hand with five fingers, the amount of clients who actually save their photos every month, and I'm hoping betting that there are more out there and they just don't mention it and they're lying in the weeds.
But saving your photos every month is key. This has been an uphill battle for me, and I'm not ready to give up the fight on creating awareness for this very, very important habit. I am doubling down on it. Here's why. Saving monthly photos is so important. You're going to master the skill like working on your computer and your phone.
These are not natural things for people to do day to day. So when you save your photos every month, you're going to master the skills to do it, whether you're moving them or copying them to your computer folder or uploading them to a cloud site like forever. Doing it regularly builds confidence and keeps you sharp. No more fumbling with the tech you're going to know exactly what to do and you not.
It's not going to be like brushing your teeth, you know, like second nature, but you're going to develop the skills. And it's really important to do that. You're also going to stay organized, and you're going to plan ahead when you know you're going to be saving your photos monthly. You probably are going to start thinking, do I need that many photos?
Because you're going to have to delete some. And it's really hard for people to delete. So you're going to stay organized and you can plan ahead knowing that at the end of the month you're going to save your last month's photos and you'll start seeing the picture of your photo estate, which we'll talk about. Coming together, this is the foundational structure for your family's photo collection.
You're also going to feel relief from the chaos. Every month you save your photos, you are chipping away at the bigger digital mess. It's a small win that feels really good, like cleaning out the corner of a cluttered room. You'll know you're taking control, and the peace of mind is going to start building. Because while you do this, you're also protecting and sharing your memories when you have them in folders and in a nice place online.
It's easy to share them and know that they're backed up. Most importantly, when you save your photos monthly, you are building a year end treasure. How busy is December for you? Like it's crazy for me. So when you save your photos monthly, you're going to have a curated collection on December 31st. If you're that quick. Think about a family photo book for the year or a calendar for 2026.
You will have identified your favorite pictures and probably be ready for that holiday or Christmas card. All ready to go. Your best memories will be organizing and waiting to shine with no last minute scramble needed. Your year may not have felt great, but when you look through the memories, I'm hoping you're going to find reasons to smile and be joyful and celebrate.
So here's how it works to save your photos every month. All right. I thought I had my phone here. Oh yes, I do. All right. The first step is you're going to take your photo. Take your phone and you're going to go to your camera roll. You are going to search through your last month's photos and delete anything you will never, ever need again.
So screenshots, blurry shots, accidental screenshots, the identical pictures you took trying to get the best moment. Unless you want to save those for when I can combine them, but that's too cluttered for me. So you're going to delete everything you don't need on your phone that you don't need ever again. If you hesitate, just leave it. So that's step one.
Step two is to copy your phone's photos to a folder on your computer, and you're going to copy all of the photos over to a folder on your computer. If you need help with that, we will post that in the comments later. Links on how to do that. All right. So you copy the all the photos from the month to the folder on your computer.
So we are in April. If we were to save March's photos. The folder would be 2025. All 3rd March photos. And then we copy all the photos and videos, of course, to that folder. So now they're sitting on your computer. And that brings us to step three. You're going to go through that folder and delete anything that isn't necessary for family celebration.
You know, for preserving. You might have work photos. You could put those in a different folder. Or maybe they're fine just staying on your phone. You might have other photos for information that you wanted to keep on your phone, but you can delete them out of the folder. The point is, is clean that folder up so when you look at it, you're seeing the memories from your last month and you can just smile.
It's such a good feeling. Then the fourth step is to back that folder up. We back it up to an external hard drive, and then we upload it to a cloud storage site. And like I mentioned, forever is what we choose. And then you can enjoy and share them and feel so good that it's done. As you build your monthly photos, you are creating the foundations for your photo estate.
So you might be wondering what is a photo estate? Epic psychology here. Now, we've been helping people organize and preserve photos for over ten years. Early on, my friend Anne and I offered photo organizing services to our customers. However, organizing photos seemed kind of vague. I mean, obviously you're going to organize the print pictures and the digital pictures, but organizing to what end?
We realize that people sometimes needed a concrete goal to envision how their memories could be preserved and and started using the words photos state. And I eventually came around and we really brainstormed this out for a few days. And that is how the concept of creating a photo estate came about. So what is it? Our definition? It's either or a printed or digital or both.
So it's printed or digital collection of your photos, videos, memorabilia and documents. Organized, digitized and curated in one place. A photo estate can be different for everyone, but I'll give you a few examples. For some people, it is that set of folders on their computer. That's what we teach here at Pixar. You have the folders on your computer and then we upload them to forever.
So you can see the story of your life. Your life mapped out by decades. All right. So that's one way to have a photo estate. Some people keep everything printed. You know, in addition to the digital copies. And so they'll have their printed photos and boxes and albums as well. For other people who don't have a lot of photos, it can be a real small collection.
So like my dad, he really only had about 150 pictures that I found from his toddler years through, you know, adulthood before meeting my mom and I have his pictures in an expandable file folder, and I was able to make a simple photo book, 21 pages that have the essence of his life through the toddler years, teen years, his high school pictures, and then his Navy service, and then meeting my mom, being a father and then a hunter, safety instructor, a photographer.
All of that in one book. That is a photo. That is my dad's photo estate. Some other people go big with a family website. You know, we've had websites around for good 20 years now, and a lot of people over the years have built a website that has pictures, maybe audio and video clips for people to watch, and they build it, you know, on a actual website.
So it just depends on your personal preferences. And you just at the point is that you have to start. Okay. And creating a photo estate is a big project. I just I can't sugarcoat it. It's a lot of work. Some of my clients, you know, I've known for 12 years and they are still working on doing this.
There are three main steps to creating a photo estate, and these three main steps are repeatable depending on what you're working on okay. It's organize, digitize and preserve. If you're working with physical photos like your mom's old photo albums, you've got to do all three steps. If you're working with your digital pictures, you get to skip the digitizing part.
But the catch of this is these three simple steps. It pulling it off depends upon three things. You have to have a solid plan to keep you on track. All right. A solid plan that covers all of the variables of your project, of bringing your stuff together to be a photo estate. And incidentally, saving photos monthly is on that plan.
It has to be because we're always going to be adding to it. The second challenge is your available time to work on it. We have people who work on their photos every week, and that's truly the best scenario. But it's really not realistic for most everybody because life happens. We travel, we have, you know, health issues come up and then we have big life events where everything gets put on hold.
So your available time is key. All right. And if you can't continually work on it, which most of us can't. You have to refer back to that solid plan so that you write down what you were working on. So that when you come back, you know where to start. And then the third thing that is a challenge is your tech equipment and your skill in using it.
You have to have a good computer. All right. And if you're not using a computer, there is a way to work with getting things uploaded, you know, to, online site like forever. But usually we recommend if you want to do this yourself, you're going to have to have a good computer and then you have to use it routinely so you remember what to do.
All right. Now all three of those challenges I, I can't really like wave a wand and give that to you, but what I can do is start you off with a solid plan to keep you on track. You can download the three steps to creating a follower state in the comments or show description. Use it, modify it, copy it, whatever works for you.
Be sure to grab a clipboard and a notebook to track your progress. That way, you can go away for three months and come back and a little more easily dive back in. In future shows, I'll be talking more about the steps, as well as how to conquer these challenges that arise when you're working on saving your family photos.
But for now, I have been talking quite a bit. I want to turn it over to you. What questions do you have for me this evening? I'm happy to answer your questions if I can. And if not, we'll definitely address it in the future.
So we'll just see if there are any questions out there. Sometimes I worry that people don't even know what to ask. Like. We've shared so much information and you don't quite know where to start. So I just, going to see what we have here. It's. Well, it is really cool. To see that we have, I think this is Jill here.
It's good to see you. And Flighty Lens is good to see you. And I'll say hello to Cindy while I'm at it. And, Karen, thank you so much, for your thoughts. There. And, flighty lens, is asking, how do you choose when to scan as a PDF versus a Jpeg? This is, an interesting question because, oftentimes in the past, you know, and we've been scanning pictures for over two decades.
I remember when our dad got his first scanner, I was still living at home. Often in the past, people would scan their pictures as PDFs, which is a document file, and that's not the best quality of a scan. You can't use it in photo books, and it's, a challenge. Anyway, today, I think a lot of people know that you want to scan documents, generally as PDFs and then pictures as JPEGs or TIFFs sometimes.
So you come across something unusual, like a handwritten letter. If it's a single page, will scan a single page letter as a Jpeg. But if it's like multiple pages, we tend to scan them as a PDF. And, it just kind of depends upon how you're going to use that when it's done. If you want to be able to send, you know, a multi-page document in one file, then a PDF is going to make more sense.
If you want to use, you know, a five page handwritten letter in a photo book, then you'll want to scan them as five separate JPEGs so you can place them in the photo book. So that's a good question. I hope that helps. All right. Well I am not seeing any more questions at the moment. Oh, wait a second.
Let's see this. But what about like scrapbook pages that are going to be used as a page in a new book? Sorry, you should have said that. So scrapbook pages. And I obviously had a lot of scrapbook pages in my, time. I like scrapbook pages to be scanned as JPEGs. Generally. Some people might choose to scan the scrapbook pages individually, and then they have them as a Jpeg.
Some people might want to scan them, and then you're going to get the best scan as a Jpeg. But then you combine those JPEGs into a PDF, and then you can, you know, send that PDF off of pages. You will, you know, you'll have it that way when you upload scrapbook pages to like a photo book printing site, you can upload either the JPG or a PDF.
But, usually you would scan the scrapbook pages as a jpeg. Hoping, hoping that helps. I see that, Michelle, is writing here that you are using my Leo and that it automatically uploads your photos, from your phone to your external hard drives. I think that's an a fantastic solution. I, I have recommended my Leo a lot in the past.
I think it's a wonderful photo management program, but it is a program to manage your pictures on your computer and your hard drives. I have seen people get mixed up with what is saving where and how the external hard drives are working. So I would say, Michelle, if you are confident in your setup, continue using it and then for purposes of sharing, I would export the pictures from my Leo with any of the edits you've done as well as, there's facial recognition in my Leo, so you could, take that facial recognition and then turn that into tags for the photos and export them and then upload to forever.
My Leo's great. It's an extra step, and I have found that the majority of people aren't doing well with adding new, technology. They're they're just trying to get through the basics of what they have. And, people are not good at maintaining habits, I think. And Miley requires you to use it frequently so you keep up on it.
So hopefully that answers you. And, Cindy is asking with forever, the mobile app automatically uploads iPhone photos to forever and do I recommend, do I not recommend that? I love that forever has the mobile app, and for people who don't want to go through the hassle of saving pictures to folders on the computer, this is a great option.
It is. It's wonderful. And, I have actually changed my my tune on this. I used to say that we did not want to use forever to upload pictures, but over the last year and a half, especially forever has improved and come out with their new interface forever 3.0. They offer, Forever Valley. And so uploading automatically to forever is a perfectly good example.
It's actually a whole lot simpler. I even found out, some of the people in my, group are doing this, and and it's great that it works. I just remind people, all right, if monthly you go in and you make last month's album and then delete out the pictures, you don't want or don't need to be in your forever or account.
So, Cindy, that's a it's a great, a great option. And it reminds me that there are always multiple, multiple ways to do anything with your pictures. So we have to find the path that works for us. And I have to help my clients find out what works for them. So there are people that are definitely in my group uploading pictures automatically to Forever.
And I, I see that, Michelle is mentioning that you're thinking and I think about exporting the pictures for my Leo, and then uploading to forever. So, yeah, if you're relying on the facial recognition in my Leo, you're going to need to take the extra step of taking that facial recognition and making it into tags. The tags will upload to forever.
Now, forever does have facial recognition, but it is, an extra, fee for it. So, if you want to know more about that, we'll have resources for forever in our our notes. So, what I'm going to do now is I'm going to just copy a whole series of links that I mentioned, and I'm going to just paste them in the comments here so that wherever you are, you have all of those links handy.
All right. So I'm thinking, do we have, anything else out there?
All right. Well, I have, estimated that this was going to go about 45 minutes, and I don't know if our future episodes will, but I really, really hope this is helpful, and I, I really want you to join me on this journey. Each week we're going to dive into a different topic. I'll answer questions and we'll keep you motivated to saving your family memories.
And I'm really asking from the bottom of my heart. Share this information with your friends and family. This recording will be available. You can share the link. Everybody needs to be saving their photos monthly. Who cares? You know about preserving their family memories so many people just don't know. There's better ways out there. And I'm really on a mission and you're on it with me.
If we all start saving our photos monthly, we will develop good skills, and by the end of the year, we're going to look back and say, we had a good year and you're going to have the photos to prove it. Thank you. So much for tuning in to this very first episode. Check the shownotes, then for the links, and then let me know if you have topics you want me to talk about next time.
Save those memories, celebrate life and we'll see you next week. Thank you so much. And I, really appreciate all the kind words in the comments here. I'll just say, thank you to thank you. You are welcome, Cindy and Mary, thank you so much for sharing. And it is true that we get focused on the old stuff while the new pictures and don't get saved.
So you guys have the tools. I think, and I'm cheering you on. We'll see you next week. Thank you so much. Take care.
