Have you ever stood in front of your boxes and piles of photos, albums, envelopes and what not? Have you ever stood in front of all of that and wondered, is this even worth it? I was with a client last week who is showing me her shelves of memories, and she said, who is going to care about this anyway?
I'm here to tell you that your memories, your photos, and the family videos are super important to sharing your story. Celebrating life and so much more. Welcome to Live with Mollie. It is Monday, May 5th and we are going to start the program, but I have two important things to touch upon first. Number one is this live with Mollie tonight is actually pre-record recorded in my enthusiasm to get live with Molly started on Monday night.
I neglected to consult my calendar. So you'll be watching this perhaps at 630 while I will be in Pewaukee, Wisconsin teaching a class at a library. No worries though, if you have questions or thoughts, share in the comments or email us and I will definitely answer those at another time. I am so grateful that you're here. If you saw the episode last week, you know how important I think it is to save our memories, especially the monthly photo saving habit.
And we did just end April, so it is time to save April's photos. When we save our photos monthly, we get the opportunity to use the skills and getting the pictures from our phone to a folder on our computer. We learn about the importance of deleting pictures, which might help us take fewer next month. I'm going to just share what I did to get my pictures in order and ready to be transferred over to my computer.
The first thing I always do is I grab my phone and I search for the month that I want to work on. So I searched for April 2025, and I found that I had something like 280 photos and videos. The first thing that we're going to do with that is we're going to delete anything off of our phone that we know we'll never need again.
So I started deleting, and it's amazing the stuff that you take pictures of or take screenshots of that are junk. I was able to delete a lot, and when I was done, I had 143 items left, 143 photos and videos. So step two is to copy them over to a folder on your computer for the month. All right.
When I did that, I just made a folder in my Mac finder on a PC. It would be File Explorer. I made the folder 2020 504 for April photos, and I copied the pictures into there. Then I moved all of the work folders out of that folder and into another one. I also deleted anything that I knew wasn't really an important family memory, and that left me with 75 photos and videos.
Much more manageable. Now the folder is all set on my computer and it's backed up to an external hard drive, but it's really not much fun to look at pictures in folders on computers, and it's actually pretty hard to share. We recommend uploading photos to forever, and that is what I did. I took those 75 photos and I created an album in forever and uploaded my most important family memories from April.
I did find two more pictures that I could delete, so I ended up with an album of 73 photos, and I love that I could add a little description to the album that explained what we did in the month and what was important. This habit will really pay off in the future, when I am ready to make a photobook for the year or calendars for, you know, gifts at the holiday time.
So saving photos monthly. I have to talk about it today because it is the beginning of May, and I would say if you can get this done by May 10th, you are on track to have a good month and a good habit started. Now we really do need to talk about why photos, you know, are such a struggle and people question whether this is important when there's so much going on and you have all these moving parts of pictures that might be your moms or slides.
I came from a different uncle. There's so much to manage and people get overwhelmed and doubt seems to creep in. I get it, doubt when you have so much work to do and it's overwhelming, is natural. But we shouldn't let it stop us in our tracks. And I see it happen over and over. There are reasons why some people might not want to look at pictures, like when you ask the question, Will anybody care?
I actually have to give a little warning sign to you and say, don't expect a lot from your family as you're working on your pictures. Certainly some family members are super helpful and involved in the process of saving family memories, but we can't expect our family members to be enthusiastic, to encourage us, or even to help in some cases.
It's just what I've seen over the years, and I know that a lot of people think pictures are important when push comes to shove, though, it's like getting started is really hard. And that's why I'm here to to help motivate you every week to keep on track. But let's talk about some of the reasons why people might not be that enthusiastic about looking at pictures that you've so painstakingly saved.
I'm going to start you off with, a story here from Pixar. Now, we've been in business for over ten years, and early on, maybe through the first five years or so, we would call our clients after 30 days to see how they were enjoying their memories. So imagine this is like 2013 through 2018 or so. We had sent them home first with DVDs of their pictures, and then we had sent them home with USB drives.
We would call them and ask them, how did you enjoy your memories? And they would be oftentimes saying, well, I haven't looked at them. I haven't opened up the USB drive and it's just interesting to us, you know, that they invested in the work being done, but then they didn't use it. And I think that is what issue number one is with looking at family photos.
It's the technology. USB drives and DVD drives are clunky. They require you to put them in something and they work completely different. We are not good as a society and keeping up on our digital technology skills, and I've just seen it. So expecting someone to go throw the USB drive into their computer, it just wasn't like second nature to do that.
Like opening up a photo album. So I think there's technology issues. I know in my family they do some of my cousins who cannot figure out how to like post something on Facebook and and that's okay. Our skills are all at different levels. So the technology would be one area that might cause someone to not really be enthusiastic, especially if you're just giving them a drive or a link.
You're emailing them a link. They don't really sometimes know what to do with the link, other than maybe look at the photos once and then the link is gone. So that's number one. The next area that I think causes some of our family members to maybe not be as enthusiastic about looking at pictures is because it can be painful.
I actually had this situation in my family, and it's rather surprising to me all my years of growing up, I can remember my mom looking through photo albums and taking the time to put them together like she had at least ten, 12 albums. You know, there's a lot of memories in there, and sometimes she would wait a couple years and the envelopes would accumulate, but she would take them all up north with a brand new set of photo albums and put them together while she was on vacation.
She really enjoyed the process, but over time that habit of hers changed and she stopped doing it. In fact, around 2007 is when I started scrapbooking and I realized that she didn't really much enjoy looking at the scrapbooks that I had done and that was okay with it. I. I didn't really know what to say, and I didn't try to be hurt about it, but it was like, why don't you enjoy looking at memories?
I even made this huge photo book with pictures of them through their dating years all the way to the present time, and I gave it to them for, I think, their 35th anniversary and that album. I hope they look through it at least once. But it's sad in her sewing room, and I don't know if it has ever been open since.
I'm not sure. And I'm not going to like, you know, pick her brain to ask her about this. What I have found out is that she will look at a picture if I give it to her and ask her who it is, she'll tell me everybody's name. She'll tell me how they were related to the family and she'll give more background.
She'll talk for quite a while about it, and I have found this to be really rewarding with her. So you could just try sharing one photo at a time. And sometimes it is literally one picture that starts kind of a train moving of memories to start. I noticed, last summer my cousin Mark had his 60th birthday and it was a really fun event at a beer garden.
It was a nice evening. He was 60 years old and my other cousin, his older brother Steve, pulled out pictures on his phone that he had saved with my help, of their childhood. And all of a sudden the the the eight of us or ten of us that were gathered around were literally sharing these old pictures from the 60s and 70s back and forth.
We were laughing at the memories and really enjoying, you know, how we looked back then. Sometimes you just have to wait for that moment to arise. And if you haven't organized and preserved your pictures, the moment is going to arise and you're going to wish you had some photos to share. It's really a special part of, the work that you do, and you don't know when it's going to pay off.
So I would just say that, some of your family members may not seem like they care, but there will be a point when they do. Okay. I also think that maybe if we reverse the question, why should we care? When you're looking at all of these photos and you want to think past all of the work, what happens after that?
It can be just incredible. We had a client named Eric who had bins and bins of photos and family film that his dad was going to just throw away. Did all of these bins, kind of had a mix of pictures and memorabilia. And what was interesting is there was genealogy work and story is mixed in. So often when you have a photo collection, you don't just have pictures, you have genealogy and family trees and stories written down.
And Eric had so much of this. We first helped him get the family photos organized and scanned, along with the memorabilia and the film. Then his family was able to come. And this is one of those areas that's really important. Eric's dad, in his 80s, still live, as well as his two aunts, Joyce and George, and all three of them were still alive.
And Eric really wanted to get their their stories and kind of fine tune what he knew down while they were still here. It is really a special time when you can pick your parents brains, or the aunts and uncles that you still have living. Don't take them for granted because time does fly by fast. Anyway, we got the photos all organized, and Eric had this idea that he wanted to take all of those family writings.
He had stories from his, grandfather, who was a baseball player during the Great Depression. It's how his family was able to eat because he worked for oil companies that had baseball teams. One section of his family dated all the way back to Southampton, one of the first colonies settled in America. He had a huge amount of history.
That was all in these boxes. Once the photos were organized, we were able to write the stories and rewrite some of the writing and actually make a family memoir. It was like a 230 page book with all the photos in their stories as well as, you know, the ancestry documentation, even the stories of how the family was in the Civil War and slavery was addressed.
All of that was part of their heritage. And Eric got that done while all three of his dad and his aunts were still alive. And they were thrilled. You can truly thrill an older family member. I think in a lot of cases when you do this work and you involve them, some of it was frustrating because of course, when you're waiting for our family to get back to you with answers about who's who and this and that, it can be frustrating.
The whole project, from the photos to the memoir, took about three years. Having the pandemic in the middle of that did help. Anyway, Eric's and wrote to him and she said the book just arrived, were blown away. It's beautiful. It's captivating. You did it. You persevered. You put up with us when we didn't do enough on time.
It's beautiful. And she goes on, you stuck with the project and we will be forever indebted. When she found it in her mailbox, she writes at 1 p.m. today. She couldn't put it down. So the work that you do will be surprisingly appreciated by some members of your family. I hope. Maybe it's not a memoir, maybe it's an easier photo book, or even just a few pictures.
Something that validates all of the history that your family has. This is a reason why it matters. All right? And I want to share another story with you, and one that's kind of near and dear to my heart. I have a friend. I had a friend, Jen. She I consider her friend. Although she started off as a client.
She called me, I would say in late 2017 or 2018 and she said, I need a pix ologist. We had been called that over the years because our business name is pixel AG. She says, I need a pixel just because I have all these photos from my mom and my aunts and my grandma. I don't know what to do with them and I really want to do something with them.
So she had boxes and bins and garbage bags in her garage. There was so much to pick up. When I met with her, it filled the back of my car. We went through the process of organizing all of her photos using the system here that we share on YouTube. I'll put a link in the description for you below, but we did all of that organization for her, and it was really an interesting process because a lot of the pictures were, mixed and matched over the years.
Some of the photos that she had from her grandparents were in her mother's collection, and vice versa. But the thing with Jen is it was so important to her. And Jen never had children. She was the first to turn the one of the first female attorneys in Chicago in the 60s, and she had a wonderful career with the National Bank and accomplished so much in her life.
Her family revolved around her nieces and nephews, and she has, great nieces and great, great nieces. I think there's a great nephew in there as well. And it was so important for her to save these stories and pass them on. She also was curious about some of her family ancestry, and as we went through everything together, we, you know, got it all scanned and uploaded to forever, she told me when she looked at it all completed, she said, you have restored my life.
You know, when you reach your late 70s and 80s, it's hard to remember everything that you've done. I mean, I can't even remember what I did three weeks ago and ten years ago. I rely on my photos. Jen hadn't seen some of these slides from the 50s and 60s, and she was like reliving moments that were long, long gone.
I think that's pretty powerful to restore someone's life. I think it's really powerful to restore your own life. In the end, we created photo books for her, including a world travel book. She had been to every continent, and she was so proud of that. And actually proud isn't quite the right word. She felt so blessed for a wonderful life.
And when we gave her her world travel book, it just was so meaningful for her to see all of these memories of the places she'd been and would never have been able to think of it without having it right in front of her. In a book. I think this is the most important thing to consider restoring my life.
Think about all that you've done. Think about everything that you've done with your family. I know there are low points in there and there are not some great memories in there, but I also think that we're all in this life for some reason. You know, we've touched people in some ways. We've seen things that are amazing and all of that deserves to be celebrated.
So when my client sits in front of me and says, Will this even matter? I am wholeheartedly a cheerleader. Your story matters. Your family's memories matter, and who cares at the moment if your family may not really see it as a priority? If you do, it's important. And that's why I'm here, is to help to spread the news that your photos matter.
It really is such a wonderful experience to get some section of it done so that you can be happy, cross that part off the To-Do list, and move on to thinking about what you will do next, because there is always something more to do with our family memories. Those are the things that I wanted to share with you in tonight's live with Molly.
I would love to know what your comments are. You can let me know and below or email me. And, I just want you to feel good about your photos, even if it seems overwhelming. And that's why I have the link for three steps to create your photo estate. And it'll be, an inventory list that you can use along with, checklist.
And it might be a place to get started. All right, that is it for now. Thank you so much for joining me tonight. And we will see you next week. Bye bye.
