Hello, everybody! Today is Tuesday, August 19th and I am just testing something out here. I believe I may have done my live stream in the wrong room with my streaming software. Vocals are a great tool and I was just checking to see who might be here. And we have, it looks like we have some people watching and my apologies, I have, already done my live stream in the wrong room, and I just thought I would check in with you and see if you have any questions for me today.
I will share the link for the live stream. And I, you know, technology gets me to I, I always come across the new situation where I did something wrong and I didn't even know I was doing it wrong. So let me just see if you're here. Just say hello. I'm happy to chat and answer questions. We have people joining us in the other live stream, so I was not even aware that I had, started the live stream in the wrong room.
So we have more people joining us and makes me think, well, maybe I could do this again because, I always am learning and I might actually do the, the program better this time, except all of my slides are in a different and a different room, but I bet I can make this work. Let's just, let me just bring this up here and and, let's just do this at at a presentation live with Mollie.
All right? And I will I'll just start it again. Hey, Terry. Leighton. Hi. I'm from Saint Louis. We have, been down to Saint Louis to see the arch. It's so much fun there. It's beautiful. And, Tammy, hi to you as well. I can't even believe it. When I saw people were waiting, I was like, oh, no, I have really screwed up the live stream today.
But that's all right. We are going to just, plow ahead and do this again. If you have questions that you would like for me to answer before the end of the program, please, throw them in the chat. We are watching or doing this on YouTube. And if you're here live, you can do that. If you're watching later, just throw it in the comments and I will, answer it another, another time.
I also, have this on Spotify, so if you're catching this on the replay, I would definitely recommend watching our YouTube channel so that you can see the visuals, because I do share some visuals to, make some of my points and answer questions. All right. The topic today is really a good one. It is, should you organize photos by who's in the picture?
If you're sitting there with boxes and bins and you're trying to sort, sort your photos by who's in it, you might find this to be a little challenging. I know this because I have done this in a variety of ways, and the first time happened probably back in 2017, I was I was with my client helping her in her home, and she insisted we organize her photos by person.
No, by person. That means, you know, we were going to divide them up by the each child, the pictures that have both children in it and all of that, it became a little bit of a mess, but, we plowed through anyway. So I'm going to talk about why you would want to reconsider organizing photos that way.
So today is Tuesday, August 19th. This is the second time I'm doing this live stream because I was in the wrong room before. So, it's going to be better than the one I just did. I bet I'm here to help you feel confident and motivated as you tackle your photo organizing projects. I would highly recommend that you subscribe to our YouTube channel because in our YouTube channel, we share all sorts of videos, throughout the week.
Some are longer and some are shorter in fact, one that we just shared last week or two was, because one of my clients, Pam, we were in a work group and she was working on things, and, and she wanted to share a revelation that she had. And she said, Mollie, I am organizing photos by the addresses I have lived at.
And this was new to me. It was like, what a unique way to do that. Of course, organizing pictures. You you come across all the places you've lived, but those places actually are a really good milestone marker to divide up your pictures. I don't know if I would could do that with all of mine, but, she did, and she actually shared with us, a binder of her work and how the photos were going to be displayed.
And all of that was really cool. So I shared that as a short on our YouTube channel. And, last week we hit 14,000 subscribers. It just was a really exciting moment to cross that threshold, and hopefully we'll hit 15,000 by the end of the year. Of course, I'd love to be, 85,000, but, it takes time.
So hit the subscribe button if you haven't and, share if you think this would be helpful for other people who are trying to figure out what to do with their family memories. Okay, upcoming, we have Save Your Photos virtual bootcamp. It is Friday and Saturday, September 26th through the 27th. That Friday night it's 6 to 9 p.m. central time.
And then on Saturday, it's 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., central time. And it's a great amount of hours to focus on doing something with your pictures, whether it's print or digital. I'm there. And and Matthew, Zach, the co-founder of Pixologie , will be joining us and will answer questions. We're going to have a few tutorials.
We'll get your questions answered. The challenges that you are coming across, we'll touch base on. We'll be there for you the whole time. And if you are not at the point where you're ready to dive in, but you do want to figure out if, you know, what plan could work for you, but you want to do it in a relaxing way.
We have our crews coming up February 16th through the 21st. This is, Krista qual check, my friend from Florida who saved a zillion photos in the Hurricane Ian, disaster. She would have loved to have saved a gazillion more. But she lived through recovering pictures in, a flooded situation. She and I are doing this together will be a lot of fun, so I'll post links for that.
And then a little bit so that there's those announcements. Now, something that I feel extremely like strong about is that everybody saves their photos monthly every month. You should get the best of your pictures, either to a folder on your computer or to a favorite cloud storage site. Of course, we recommend Forever Permanent Storage. Now we're only two thirds of the way through August, so you know we're not going to save August pictures yet, but you should be deleting pictures.
Okay? For instance, this past weekend I was camping with my husband. First time it was just the two of us and no kids, and I took a lot of pictures and at one point my camera or my phone was in my pocket on the camera mode and it took a bunch of pictures while it was in my pocket, which was nothing.
I hadn't gone back to delete pictures until I thought about today's program, and when I opened it up, I realized I could delete a lot of photos. So on the left hand side, you'll see the photos as they looked before just a handful of them. And when I deleted out the repetitive the the botched pictures and the few screenshots I took for information, I my photos looked a lot better.
Like, you know, our camping trip was a lot of fun and I could just see it at a glance. Now these pictures I will copy over to my computer in and in like the first week of September, and then I'll upload them to Forever . But there is always cleaning. You can do on your phone, all right. And then you'll be much better prepared to save your photos at the end of the month or at the beginning of the following month.
Okay. All right. Now I like to teach that people save their photos, and when they organize them, they organize them chronologically. Chronologically is, there's a lot of benefits for this, and I, I know when I was talking with my client, Mary, from 2017, I'm like chronological, so easy. We'll just, you know, start with the decades and then divide the decades up by years.
And she's like, Mollie, my brain just doesn't work that way. So I had a take a breath and and regroup. So as we organized photos, she she would go through her bins and boxes in her albums and then she'd give me stacks. She had stacks for each daughter. She had two of them and her son. And then she had stacks for when there were two daughters in the picture, and she had stacks when there were, all three kids in the picture.
She even had a stack for herself, a stack for her husband, a stack for when the two of them were together, and stacks for the family and the extended family. Can you imagine when, you've divided your pictures up this way, you kind of lose track of the stories of why you guys were together. Okay. I think about, family reunions, and I see that, my cousin Linda Zaleski is here and saying hello, Linda.
It's stuff so funny that you are on Facebook here. Because I'm going to talk about family reunions. If you take a family reunion and remember, you've got pictures of the groups of the family, you've got pictures of the activities you were doing together, like cornhole or horseshoes or whatever. And then you have the photos of the food and the interacting.
All right. So you have your family reunion and you divide that family reunion up by person or even family. You're going to end up with all these separate stacks. They'll go into their batches that you've already started, and you've lost the essence of the family reunion. And that, I think, is a problem when you when you divide things up by person, you're going to lose the story and what everyone together, it's all going to get lost.
And I, I know this because another client of mine, dear client, she organized by person and family group. All right. And they have a family reunion I think every two years and then a family gathering every holiday. So all of their holiday gatherings and it's a big family, were split up by family groups and, and by people and the whole essence of all those years of family reunions, it was just in a big stack of pictures.
So I, I'm going to just stand by. Organizing by date is so much easier. All right. First of all, it's efficient. You're going to you're going to guesstimate the dates that you've got. A lot of them have clues on them. And you'll organize them by years, months and special events. When you do that you're going to bring batches of pictures together.
Again, as an aside, when I organize photos for people, it's like they shuffle them. They shuffle them like crazy. And the, organization by by date brings them back together. You start seeing more of the the whole option or the like, the whole vision of what was happening at the events. So you're bringing things back together again. It's also easier to compare for duplicates when you've organized by date, and there's just less variables to think about, like when a photo has five people in it.
How are you going to divide that up? You only have one copy. Well, you know, can't go in each person's individual folder or file. So there's just less variables when you organize by date. Of course people are going to like be like, but I want it organized by person. How can I do that? So I want to respect how people organize their photos for sure.
And any time, you know, you watch a video on YouTube, you take what you learn and then you're going to adjust it for what works for you. But I do want to share, I want to share this screen here with you, this background and how I teach people to organize photos and the people part of it doesn't happen until this third stage.
So the three stages are organize, digitize, and preserve. The organizing is sorting chronologically in major categories. Of course if you have different sections of the family, excuse me if you have different sections of the family, they're older pictures, you know, like the grandfather on the maternal side, whatever. That could be a major category. All right. But the majority of your family's photos, you want to sort chronologically.
All right then, the organizing includes duplicating and consolidating. All right. That's the task that I have assigned to the organizing area. Then the second step is digitize. And this is where you would scan photos, negatives, slides, transfer film, video and audio, and, you know, digitize the memorabilia. Digitize is only necessary for your print stuff. Your digital pictures.
You get to skip that. Then the third task is preserving. Now the third stage, I guess. And the tasks under there include adding the story, editing metadata, which includes tags and facial recognition, which I'll come back to those two points also and preserve is create photo books and then share and pass the memories on. Okay. The preserve area is important, but if you start doing things in that task before you've organized, you're going to not get it all done.
And it's even hard to get the photos organized once and for all anyway. All right, we go down these rabbit holes of of things that take away the time of just getting things organized. All right. Now, when you want to add people to a picture, you want to talk about who's in the picture. We use tags and facial recognition.
Depending on which software you use. Facial recognition might have done the work for you already. Google photos and I Apple Photos already group people by faces and and that's can be a really easy way to find photos of people that you need for a specific purpose, but it is not visible or viewable outside of that program.
And sharing is kind of difficult. So we usually recommend that people use Forever Permanent Storage. In Forever you can add tags to identify people. So let's just say you have three children and you want to see all the photos with your three children. In the past, we would just make a tag that said, you know, three kids or whatever you wanted to call it, and you take all the pictures with three kids with that tag in this day, and age, facial recognition has really like become mainstream, okay.
And that means other programs offer it, automatically in, Forever . You do have to pay for facial recognition, but I think, I think it's worth it. Facial recognition. When you get your pictures into the software, whether it's, you know, the Apple Photos or Google Photos or my or Forever and you run facial recognition, all of your pictures are eye assessed, analyzed for faces.
It's artificial intelligence that's doing the work now. And it does an amazing job. It it will give you batches of people and you just have to identify them. And in a lot of cases, the software will allow you to sort your pictures and filter so that it shows the pictures with your three kids in them or with you and your husband, or you know, your spouse or whoever.
And it works really amazingly well. I for a long time, probably like, I don't know, nine of the last ten, 12 years, haven't even used facial recognition because there's so much to do with the original ization stage, but the facial recognition makes it all a breeze for you. All right. And back when Mary and I first met back in 2017, facial recognition really wasn't going to be something that could help us back then.
But now she has turned it on in her Forever account and she can see all of her people, that she's labeled and all the pictures, you know, you know, it's a couple clicks. All right. So that's that's where I feel that the photo, where the people enter into the photo organization process. Now, if you have a funeral or something, of course, you're going to have to go find the pictures, you know, to put something together.
But as a long term strategy, I don't think organizing photos, by person works very well. And when you think about how, AI has bene, coming around, there will be more and more, of that. And I kind of remember back, back when we started. So like again, 2017 when facial recognition wasn't a thing, cloud storage wasn't a thing either.
And that has largely, become very acceptable. Many people are storing their pictures in multiple cloud places, and facial recognition is something I think a lot of us are getting used to. What I'm not so sure about is, are people getting used to the idea of AI being in our pictures and doing things with our photos? In fact, Elon Musk has been in the news quite a bit lately because, he is now has his app animating pictures.
So let me just share this with you because it's really kind of, interesting. But, he has been advertising a, promoting that people bring their photos to life. And he shared this picture, I believe the one on the left here is the original picture. Let's see. Yeah. Maybe he he has this, this photo that he brought to life.
And, the truth is, is that animating photos has been around for quite a while. Actually, we have, had MyHeritage, which has been animating pictures for people. I think I talked about that two weeks ago. So this photo, if I just play it here, you'll see, like this is Elon Musk as a kid eating from a bowl.
And that is completely a fake memory. It's not real. It's not. We don't know what happened when he had the apple. But, his app grok. Imagine made it come to life. So I thought it would be funny to, try this with a picture of mine. So I just have to take a second here and find it.
Let's see. Is it this one? No, no, no, here we go. We were camping this last weekend, like I mentioned. So here is my husband and I are, enjoying, some, a really great, dinner that we made on the camp stove. And I put it into the software, and this is, what we got.
All right? You're going to have to give me a second to, get it up here. And incidentally, one of my clients mentioned that, he hoped I had fun. Glamping and glamping is not, what we did. We. My husband's pretty traditional, and we, we tent camped and, it rained on Saturday, but. But we were good.
Sunday was a beautiful day. So I want to just get this little video up and show you what that picture looks like with, grok. Imagine. All right. We are smiling and laughing. And my husband, you know, he laughs, but he doesn't look like that one. He laughs. It's really kind of funny, but we look like we're having a good time.
But, and I'm making him take the picture with the selfie, which he would never smile at that. I'm lucky I got a little smile out of him. So anyway, is is this going to become mainstream? I personally hope not. I feel like, we have enough good memories in life to share with each other that we don't need to make things up.
However, it's fun to just share something and and and enjoy it. And a lot of people are doing that right now thanks to this latest thing that Elon Musk is, doing okay. So that was, a little bit of, what I would say, news in the field. I have a couple questions that, I had submitted, and I'm going to answer those again.
If you have questions, throw it in the chat. I will be happy to answer it on any issue related to saving memories. And and if not, that's okay too. So let me go back to my little screens here. We need to just go back here. Remember when I mentioned that we have this? I think we're just okay sharing and saving photos in the cloud did not used to be that way.
But in 2025, lots of people are saving their photos anywhere. And Amazon Photos is definitely one of those, programs that people are using. It's free for Prime members. I think you might have to pay if you have a lot of video. And and that's actually what this gentleman, posted when he watched my review of Amazon photos, which I did give a one out of four rating.
However many people are using it. And he writes, I have many demo dance videos on my Amazon Photos app, and they don't show anything but a black screen as an icon. How does he find a particular video? So a couple things here. Remember, many of us have VHS tapes from performances, dance tapes, gymnast sticks, tapes. I know those are out there.
And sports events, I mean, there are. We videotaped a ton of, life's events, especially, you know, of the VHS recorder. And then there was the eight millimeter recorder and mini DV, all of that. Unfortunately, Amazon Photos treats transfer video differently than digital videos. So the videos that you, have, done on your phone or a digital camera, let me show you this.
And for those of you who don't use Amazon photos, I think this is still interesting. So let me just go to the next screen. Here I have, the view showing here I have just videos selected. All right. And it's sorted by date uploaded. So I have some stuff in here, just that I was using for testing, and I uploaded a transferred VHS tape.
It's 41 seconds long, but I have no idea what it's of. Okay. And I, when I click into it, and this is what Bob's question is, is how does he find the videos he's looking for? When I click into the video, I do get that there is a file name. It's a Thanksgiving 1986. I could change the date and time if I wanted, but it would only be viewable in Amazon.
All right. The other thing I've noticed here, let's just say I knew it was a Thanksgiving video and I, wanted to search for Thanksgiving. There is no search bar in Amazon photos. It's, it's kind of odd. In the paid version down the the left hand side, there's a lot more options and keywords Amazon Photos uses I heavily like you could search for flowers, you could search for dogs.
All of that would come up, because of object recognition is what it's called. And, that's how you're supposed to search for things. I guess you can't just type in Thanksgiving and video. You cannot like, you can't recognize things inside video yet. I'm sure it will happen. So, so unfortunately, this situation's really a problem. We we had another client who had 20 VHS tapes transferred, and he wanted them to be an Amazon.
His whole family was using Amazon photos, and they really liked it. They felt it worked for them. But then he wanted those 20 VHS tapes split up into the little events that they were recording. So one VHS tape could have 12 clips, you know, from a piano recital to a family gathering to, you know, building a snowman or whatever.
20 videos became like, I don't know, 300 clips. And they all got uploaded to Amazon. And it was really disappointing for him. And we worked with, you know, clipping them differently. And it still had the black view screen. I think we even submitted like a problem to Amazon. But I don't think it was ever resolved. Now I'm going to just say hello to Chris in here because she said hello from Salt Lake City.
I love Salt Lake City. I was just there in, July. She's asking if it's a file extension issue. I don't believe so. These are mp4 and that's an mp4, so I don't think it's a file extension issue. It's just, Amazon stinks, but it's a good solution to back things up if you don't have anything else.
I just think that there's a lot of better ways to save photos, and, and that's why we recommend Forever Permanent Storage. It's not free, but, it is more reliable, and there's a lot more you can do with it. So we're looking at the gallery in Forever here, and you can see I have videos from the 80s and 90s, and I know exactly what they are because I have a thumbnail.
We can also, you know, add descriptions and tags and a lot more in Forever with the videos. And that's what you want to see is you want to see what the video is about. And when you're in Amazon, the black square is not good. So so that was one question I wanted to, answer. And then another question that came up, recently, it was a gal, emailed me about photo albums.
So she went through her photo albums. They were nice Kolo albums. I think they're a little pricier. She went through them and she scanned and she organized the photos that she liked or had meeting, and she wanted to know. Do you suggest that she pitched the others and then place the print photos back and albums for her daughters to inherit?
Eventually. And then she mentions, I do have attractive albums that she'd like to keep. They look nice. So first of all, kudos to this woman. And I blacked out her name so I can't remember, right? I'm sorry, but kudos to her for actually curating the photos and maybe rethinking what she needed to keep in the albums. The next thing I want to mention is that she writes they look nice for display purposes that she'd like to keep.
Then you keep that unless you are enjoying them, they look nice. You just keep them. Whether or not your daughters want to inherit them in the future, it really doesn't matter. Although it seems like more and more the young people don't want to inherit this kind of clutter. It doesn't matter if you're going to enjoy them. You keep the albums and this really is a, you know, it's kind of a same thing with the other types of like, scrapbooks or vintage old albums.
You're going to keep the things that you really enjoy and, and make sure they're scanned at the same time. So I thought that was a good question. I also see here, oh, and Kristen, you are Kirsten. Kirsten, you all you say always keep the originals. Well, that's also going to be a personal, a personal decision as well.
We have had many, many people who thrown away their printed pictures after they're scanned and after they have a digital copy in three places. Right. You want to have your copy, your digital copy, maybe on your computer on an external hard drive and then stored up in, cloud storage site. And if you want to keep the originals, you absolutely do, do it, keep them.
But sometimes people don't. And it's okay to, to throw them away. We can recycle pictures that were printed with modern print production. So anything from the 80s on forward, you can recycle pictures that were, processed, developed chemically. They cannot be recycled. So a few extra thoughts there. And that's, a little bit more about, what you do with the print pictures.
I'm also seeing, Kirsten, you are asking, how did we convert our VHS? Do you have the equipment or did you have a service? Do it. We never recommend doing the equipment. You can get a VHS player or, you know, another player that fits your tape type and the, software from Amazon, it's like VHS to DVD or something.
And I, find, I think that you can do it, but it takes as long as the video is to transfer to plays for two hours and often that equipment will stop because of a VHS issue, the tape issue or the player issue, and you have to monitor the quality won't be as good. You just send it out.
Is what we recommend. Send it out, to a provider. Maybe you have a local camera store that'll do it. Forever Permanent Storage offers digitization services, and, they have like, 40% off right now. A lot of those places, you can do it. And just pay for it because they will they'll do, they'll stabilize the video as well as, you know, try to do some enhancements to it.
So, I would definitely recommend, hiring someone or having it be transferred by a professional. All right. And she's wondering, too, about nightmare stories that people have sending in their media and never getting it back. It definitely happens. Happens like, I don't know, I've been doing this for 12 years with Pixologie . I'd say there's been 2 or 3 stories in the media, and it always becomes a big media storage because it's horrible.
It's horrible to lose your memories that way. So, what you want is a service that has three way shipping. They send you a box and then you track it. Forever has a great tracker. And, they're right up in green Bay. And I feel really confident about sending stuff there because we're in Milwaukee. If you're nervous, then find a local camera store.
Although occasionally camera stores and even the pharmacies that offer digitization services, they're going to send it out anyway. So I would choose a reputable provider and then, have them do it. And I think I can just put in a little link here. For, Forever's digitization services, and you could check that out if you like. So put that in there.
Okay. Yeah. And she says local is the way to go, but ask them, are you sending it out somewhere? Because they might be. And then, you know, it's on them to manage it and get it back for you. All right then, I'm going to just post this comment to here. Kirsten, this is referring back to keeping the originals.
So, the original, the originals were the only way I could get high res duplicates. When I refer to original pictures in the organization process we have organized, you have your organized prints, and then they're scanned and they should be high resolution scanned. 600 dots per inch, at JPEGs, then, and they're saved and backed up. Then you can let them go and you can get, reprints from those scans.
So just to make sure we're clear on that. So. Okay, let me just see here. Okay. Well, Kirsten, you kept me on my toes today. I'm very happy to help. Very happy to help. All right. Those were the things that I wanted to cover today, and, I'm really grateful that you all joined me. And you waited around because this was supposed to start at ten.
Thank you very much for that. And, I do think I did a better job this time. Now, September is save your photos month, and we really want to think about doing something with your pictures in a meaningful progress way. Okay. And, I don't know what that looks like for you, but, again, consider our our our boot camp.
It's virtual or in person here in Milwaukee. And then, I would go delete some photos and then join me here next week, Tuesday at 10 a.m. central. I promise I'll have my tech figured out.
And I'm going to talk about, 93 year old grandma who is able to go to her phone or her computer, find photos and share them.
When you're 93, a lot of your friends are gone or they're, you know, they're not remembering so well. And I'm really fortunate. This is my mother in law. She is a gift to everybody, and she's got photos of her friends through the years that she's sharing with, their children and even some of her friends who no longer remember her.
And this is the power of pictures, you know, it connects us in so many ways.
All right. I want you to be motivated and go do something with your pictures and join me next week. You guys take care. Thank you again. Oh, wait wait wait. I have a question. It's a last minute one that snuck in there. Terry, I am happy to answer this for you, Terry.
If you can't identify years of photos, try a decade. All right? At least get it into an estimated decade. Occasionally we have, let's just say we have the 1980s, and we've got years set for, all of them, except maybe 20 pictures. Who knows what that number is, but there's 20 that are estimated 1980s. We'll have batches that just put an estimated 1980s, or we leave them as undated and hope to get back to them in the future to, to manage them.
And, Kirsten, you made a suggestion. She talks to everybody in the family until someone can identify it, which is a great idea. Okay. So, so that's what I would say is, identify what you can and then, and then you have a smaller batch that needs to be, to be dated, and you just scan those together and you'll get to that someday.
But the majority of your work, you know, should be pretty, pretty organized if you go that route. And last comment from person is just look at the clothing, all right. And, in a minute I will put up, links that might help you guys. Every week I do send out an email, for, with a new checklist of what you might be wanting to do with your, pictures or memories in some way.
So I just put a in a bunch of, links there for you guys, and you can check that out. All right. With that, I'm going to wrap up. Thank you guys so much for joining. It really means a lot to have you here and I hope to see you next week. Take care. Bye bye.
