All right. Just waiting a minute for all the streams to get live and, people to join. If there are waiting. Sometimes people will watch this later, and that's cool, too. And I'm really looking forward to today's episode. We have so much to talk about when it comes to pictures and the why. You know, we should work on our photos and preserve them, but today's story is actually really near and dear to my heart.
Most people wonder who's going to care about their memories in the future, you know? The the grandkids, the nieces, great nephews, you know, whoever down the line, are they really going to care about the work that you are doing today? And I am sure the answer is yes at some point. But the more important question, I think, is to think about who's with us today that we should be working with on their photos so that we can talk with them, hear the stories about the pictures that they have?
Whether it's an albums or photo, bins, you know, all of that. We want to share our memories with the relatives who are older than us, who are here today to still, tell us the stories and walk down memory lane with them. So welcome to live with Mollie. It is Tuesday, August 26th, and I'm here every while almost every week to help you feel confident and motivated in saving your family memories.
I'm so fortunate that I have this streaming software that allows me to send this a lot of places, so no matter where you're watching, I am open to you asking questions. I'll probably answer them later in the program if you are watching after their live show, you can post your questions and I'll get to them another time. If you are watching on Spotify.
Definitely check out, the recording on YouTube, because I do share visuals that may help people, you know, understand what I'm talking about. Now, I have to just tell you, this is the time for public service announcements. And really, it's kind of the same thing that I talk about all the time. But I'm going to frame it as public service announcement, because times are ticking, and we're going to lose the chance to share our memories with people, or we might lose our pictures to time, nature and technology.
All of this is just waiting for the chance to steal our memories. Time, of course, is one of the big factors, like you're going to run out of time in a day, in a week, in a year, you know, in a life, and you want to make sure you can save your photos while you can also, nature is, definitely a force to reckon with in saving photos.
We have just been contacted by people who had flooding in Milwaukee, recently, and they have some damaged photos that they're really hoping we can help with. And of course, we have fires and hurricanes and tornadoes. All of that is, a big concern. You know, when you have printed pictures and other physical media in your house that hasn't been preserved and technology can fail us as well.
So this is my public service announcement. Let's save some photos today, if you can. All right. And mark your calendar because September is save your photos month. And this is a time where you know it's back to school for some people and their kids. But save your photos months and September is really a good time to make a plan to do something with your pictures.
We actually are holding a, a Save Your Photos bootcamp on September 26th through the 27th. You can do this at our studio in Milwaukee or virtually, and it's, starts off with a get prepared evening, couple weeks earlier on Monday, September 15th. And then we have two days and I'll share the links in the chat so that you could go and look at the details more yourself.
But it's over ten hours of time that you can work on your pictures. And in this day and age, that's kind of a valuable thing. So I would just, you know, consider setting some time aside to work on your pictures. At the very least, you should, delete some photos. In fact, just this past weekend, I was at a dog park with my mother in law and sister in law who was in the town.
And of course, we have two dogs. And getting good pictures with the dogs is just really difficult. So you're snapping away trying to get, you know, the dog to be looking right and the human looking at the camera. So I had a lot of photos to delete, and I just did that right away so that it was done.
So easy when you keep up on it. So make sure you are deleting pictures routinely. And I would like to just, recommend that you, consider saving last month's photos. This is my second public service announcement. Save last month's photos. It is the best habit that you can do, and all it means is you're going to be deleting all the pictures from the past month.
You know you'll never need again, and then saving the ones you want for your family and a special folder on your computer or a cloud site. Like I always talk about how we use Forever. So save your photos monthly and we're coming to the end of the month. So, next week, Monday, Labor Day is September 1st, and it's a good time to, you know, work on those pictures.
Now, I love working on photos with my mother in law. And, we've been working on pictures. It seems like Forever. I, I gotta give her credit back in the day, which, when I say back in the day, for me, it was like in the early 2000s. She actually scrapbook to with me. My mother in law was not a scrapbooker.
She, she's great at so many things, but scrapbooking wasn't probably her first calling. But she dived in and she really made some beautiful albums. So she's been with me on the journey for a long time. The most rewarding time that I have had with photos is talking with her about her memories and who she knows in the pictures.
So in that process, you know she's been on the journey with me, but I've been on the journey with her throughout her life. Even though I only met, my husband, well, since the 90s. It's crazy how the decades just pile up. Anyway, I wanted to, tell you a little bit her journey has been filled with life and joy and family and service.
She has, this history, you know, with the church, which I'll get to. But she enjoyed, a lifelong career with, friends of hers who also, you know, have been her friends since whenever she started. There is over 40 years. I know that. And, those women, you know, she's got pictures of their families through their lives, and she loves sharing the clinic memories.
She also, had a 90th birthday party. Did I did I mentioned that she's 93. I don't I think I might have forgotten that she's 93. So a few years ago, she had her 90th birthday party, and those clinic friends came there and looking at the memories that they had together was just a wonderful part of the evening when my mother in law retired with my father in law, which was back in the 90s, they actually, they went and became laborers for Christ.
They went around the country and helped build churches. And the photos from that tell such a rich story of all the people that she met, you know, through those years, it was really, it's really amazing to look at all of that. And to know that she and my father in law impacted the lives of countless Lutherans across the country.
It means a lot to me. You know, I've heard those stories with her so much better than, you know, letting it just wait until you know she and my father in law were both gone. It wouldn't have meant near as much. And she was able to experience, you know, and talk about this again in many different ways, because now the pictures are on her phone and she shares them with people.
After my father in law passed away in 2004, it was horrible. He went to young to cancer. She had the opportunity to kind of regroup and travel, and she began to travel around the world. And I can't tell you how many pictures that she, you know, took, like she was in Russia and she was in, Egypt, all these different places.
And I had to tell you, this was, really fun to go with her, go through her with the, the photos that she did. So I, I actually had these wonderful videos of her talking about the experience of traveling and then looking at the photos, and darn it, I did not upload those for the program today, so maybe we'll just try to do that from the backside and, and, and I'll share them with my mother in law and I have been getting together on and off for over four years to work on our pictures.
So I'm going to just I think I've got this photo next. Let's see here. Oh, well, those those photos are important, but this is the picture I wanted to show you back in 2021. My mother in law and I were at, this restaurant's local restaurant, which we did on a routine basis, like, once a month, we would go out to lunch and we'd bring our laptop computers.
This is really a fun thing to do with family member. You're both working on your pictures. You're looking over each other's shoulder and you're sharing the memories. She showed me photos from Egypt where she is sitting on a latrine, which is it looks like, a bunch of bricks in a wall. And, I was at the. I forget the Colosseum.
No, Egypt. It's I this terrible. This is why I have, like, I have to write notes down, but she's sitting in this latrine, and it's, It's so it's such a funny photo, and she's like, yeah, the the bathrooms are outdoors back then. And to hear her talk about that trip and the holy lands and seeing, you know, all of those important in important places, you know, in our faith history is really amazing.
And she told me, you know, this is something only I can experience. When I look at these photos, only I can know what it was like to be there and what it meant to me. And it was so special for her, you know, 400 or 500 photos going through each one of them. Like she could just picture herself back there.
And, you know, these days she can't travel too much anymore. And those those photos are such a source of joy for her. So anyway, because we have worked heavily on her photo collection together, she does share pictures and, you know what's hard when you reach 93? Sometimes you lose your friends along the way, and that is a really tough part, maybe one of the toughest parts of aging for her.
But, sometimes those those photos, there's a purpose for them. And one of her friends who I loved dearly to and I love dearly, Barb, is still with us. But Barb moved to California, and I think if I just go back here, let's go back here. Right here. Barb. Oh, no, that's. This is just friends from church.
I'm going to go one more this way. Barb is in the center here, and, Barb, she could sing. I wish I had a video of her singing. She came to our church and sang a song for advent by candlelight. Barb started, you know, having signs of dementia that progressed. And her family eventually moved her, I think, to California.
And, you know, by this point, she really isn't remembering anybody. And the family said, could you, could you send us some photos? So fortunately, my mother in law Eileen and I, we went to her Forever account. And we used facial recognition. So I knew Barb was in this picture and we used facial recognition. I identified her here, and then it found the rest of the photos.
You know, that looked like her. Maybe not all of them, but enough, you know, for us to send some pictures so that her family could hang them outside of her memory care room. All right. And Barb's full of life, and and I when I asked Eileen if I could share this story, she said, Barb would love to have this story be told.
And she she's great. And, you know, when you think about the memories that people have and then have lost, when you can share a picture or a handful, it really means a lot. So we identified the pictures of Barb and downloaded them on my mother in law's computer, and we ordered them from Walgreens, and within an hour, my mother in law had emailed those picture.
No, she had ordered the pictures. She picked them up and she mailed them to Barbara's family. And, we waited to hear what they thought. One of the pictures that my mother in law took was of Barb with her children all in pews at the at their at her church at the time. And it's a lovely family photo, and I don't think anyone else would have had that picture.
So it was really meaningful. And, when they received the pictures, they loved them and they shared them. And I have a note here, that my mother in law shared to me. Barb's family wrote. The pictures came. They are so good. Thank you for taking the time to print these. What a special time you had all with such a big group of ladies.
I know she's really looking forward to the day you are all together again and laughing at and with each other in heaven. You know not everyone has the chance to have relationships like that. You are all so blessed to have these sweet memories. Thank you, thank you. Now, when you have photos to share with lifelong friends and in a situation where there is dementia and forgetfulness, a photo can tell so many words and be so important, you know, to to someone and to their children as well.
And my 93 year old mother in law is able to do this. We, you know, we spent a lot of time with our system here. We organize the pictures first, and then we scanned them, and then we uploaded them to Forever, which has an app for the phone. And, Eileen, my mother in law, she's just sharing pictures away.
I get I get pictures from her now and then, you know, of of random things that we've done together. And it brightens her day to send them. And it sort of brightens my day to receive them. So that is my story today. If a 93 year old grandma great grandma can, manage your pictures and share them. I hope that gives you some hope and inspiration too, because the photos, you know, they say more than a thousand words.
They say, things about life and love and friendship. So very, very, very important. Now, you might be wondering how you could potentially organize all of your pictures, and I know there is a lot to do, so I did. I shared a link to, our website, the Pix plan, which has a class on it. You can check that out.
I know that, it's a process and sometimes it's hard to know, like, what should you use to organize your pictures? And I mean, that could be answered a lot of ways. One of the questions that comes up is, should I use a photo management program? And that kind of leads me into my questions for today. Should I use a photo management program?
Someone emailed me about, using my Leo. Some of you probably know I have recommended using my Leo over the years, and I definitely love the program. It's very, very powerful. But I have had to step back on my, recommendation for it. So here, this woman just emailed me last week. Some of my videos on YouTube are older.
We've been doing this for a while, but she's wondering if I still recommend it, and it looks like they're charging something. She's wondering about something less expensive, so. Oh, it was Jackie from Wisconsin. Anyway, I wrote Jackie back and I mentioned that, my Leo is great, and I'm going to just share a little bit on their website here.
Let's just share this tab here. My Leo's Beautiful program, and it is installed on your computer. You installed, you download and install it and you can start for free. And they have a calendar view that is stunning. You know, you can just see your pictures, click on a year and kind of drill down. It looks beautiful. They also allow sinking from different computers and, external hard drives, your phone and an iPad or, you know, tablet.
It is a very nice program. The pricing, it looks like it looks like they're charging $20 a year. It's a start free trial. I don't know, it looks like you can try it for seven days. This is what I'm going to say about my Leo. They have changed their pricing structure a lot. And I've been following them at least for 8 or 9, maybe ten years.
So the pricing model changes. The other thing that I'll say is that most of the people who are looking to work with their pictures have so many, things to manage. And you do when you have all your pictures and you're scanning them and you have your computer and your folders, having my Leo as another program to figure out is too much.
And, you can load everything in and you can do lots of editing. You can add metadata. There's facial and object recognition, but it's what I consider an advanced program. I used to, sell it and, a lot and teach people how to use it, but, often enough, you know, a year or two later, people would come back and they had, a library in my little library that somehow was corrupted, or the syncing got mixed up and they couldn't manage it.
Here's the deal. I, I love everybody, I love everybody that I've worked with. But organizing photos and working with them on a routine basis is actually really hard to to keep that habit up. My Leo is a program that you need to be in every week so that you remember what you are doing, how you are doing it, and where you need to start when you come back, if you change computers or you mess up, you know the backups.
Figuring that out is hard. And while my Leo has a great community there, their support is, it really is difficult to get the level of support that I've seen people need when they have things mixed up or, you know, have lost all of their work. It's it's a frustration that I think most people can avoid. Use folders on your computer, your Mac, or your, of course, File Explorer on a PC, and you'll have better control over your pictures, and you won't have to pay for another program, unless you want to.
If you can work with this every week and all of that, perfect. Okay. Just know that all of the work you do inside of my Leo, or any photo management program for that matter, you can't share it with people without exporting the pictures. So if you've done facial recognition, it's really hard for other people to see the work that you've done.
So those are some of the reasons why my Leo and other photo management programs I steer clear from with, Forever, which is we're ambassadors for them. And, they're they have a simpler interface and it's web based. So it's not dependent upon your computer, which I actually think that's kind of a big feature that we don't talk about that much.
Anyway. That's my answer to, Jackie in, Wisconsin. Here with me, I do. I recommend it for people who are advanced users who are going to work with it all the time, and know that they need to export their pictures to share, to do projects, things like that. So hopefully that helps her out. Let me see here what the next, question is.
And this actually relates to, the prior question, this person is asking, how do you sort when you store photos on a drive and not on the Mac? He's asking this question after viewing a video I did on how to organize photos on a mac with Apple Photos. So we just spoke about my Leo, which is a photo management program, and now we're talking about Apple Photos.
Those of us with iPhones, we're using that app every time we're looking at our pictures on our phone or taking pictures. Okay, the Apple photos on a mac is carries that app over to the Mac computer. It is a photo management program. Also. Therefore, you need to export the pictures from the Apple Photos app to your external hard drive.
Okay, and you need to use folders on your computer with the finder so you know that this is, I, I offer this class or this video on how to organize photos on a mac, because a lot of times, Mac users don't even know that they have the photos app as an app on their computer, and they have finder that's folders based.
So it Apple just does not make it clear at all. So anyway, my answer to him is to use folders with his finder. Let me just go to, the next question. And certainly if you have questions, you can post them to and I'll just say hi to Lori. It's good to see you. All right. The next question that I had brought up here, this is a, good topic to bring up.
I haven't talked about photo mine in a while. I have a video that I did, probably a few years ago on using photo mine to scan photos. It literally is the easiest way to, scan photos. I just don't know if it's the best way. I, I think I put in the, chat a link to my photo mind comparison video.
So anyway, John quits a you asks, about using photo mine, and, he's used it to scan the family photo albums and number of them. He's scanned in scrapbook mode. So they're the full pages that he scanned. And there were notes in there and illustrations, of course, that you want to capture the full scrapbook page. But he is wondering, is there a way to get those individual images off of those?
Scans or digitally? Does he have to go back to the album and scan the pages again? All right. So I'm going to just share this screen here. I want to tell you photo. Mine is an app on your phone. And you literally just hold it over pictures and scan them. So you can see here on the bottom left angle is scanning artwork.
All right. The artwork is kind of like a scrapbook page. All right. And, you really don't want to edit these pictures and crop them out because I think the scanning is a a lower quality scan whenever you're. And I'm trying to see if they have a scrapbook page here or they're scanning, maybe this one right here. So, in the center of the page, there is a, phone being held by an arm, and it's taking picture of a black page with two photos on it.
This is, you know, a good example of an old fashioned scrapbook page. When you scan it with the app on your phone, you are getting a Jpeg version that is higher up. It's not, the page isn't flat down, and you're going to get that picture, which is you could be perfect someday. You know, someone will be really thrilled to have those two pictures, but if you want a good quality scan, you would first, go use a flatbed scanner is what I would recommend.
But if you're enjoying using photo mine, you could go back and scan the pictures individually instead of, cropping them from the picture in a photo. Editing program later. So I, just thought I would mention that. And it's great. That photo. Mine allows you to scan scrapbook pages. It used to not work very well, but it does now.
So bottom line with photo mine is I would first I would go use a regular flatbed scanner. But if you're really, you know, gung ho and this is working well photo mine I think is like $60 a year for your phone. You you can use it, scan your scrapbook pages and then scan the pictures separately so that they're an individual image and not stuck on the scrapbook page for you to have to edit and crop those pictures out later.
Okay, so I hope that is helpful. All right, let me see. I know I've got one more question. And this this question comes up really frequently. You'd have no idea how many times I have been asked this over the years. Gina is writing that she's just getting started on having photos digitized, for photos of people. Is there a way to associate the names of people in the photo, such that the folks she sends the photo to can also know who the people are, other than putting the name of the people in the file name.
So, this is like an opportunity for some big, company to come up with an app or a program, and I, I really don't think it's a good idea to encourage another app out there. We really don't need more out there. We need for our current, our current, you know, tech companies to do this for us.
I've had the question is, do you want to have a photo and you want to have a caption right across the bottom of it, how can you do that? And, essentially this is the same question that she's asking. So in my mind, the there are three ways to add the names of pictures to a photo. You can add it to the metadata.
And this is not the answer or our gal is looking for it because you can't can't view it. You can edit your photo and type on it, but you really need to save the original so that, you have a good, clean version of the picture, not the one with just the the caption on it. That means you've got do like a duplicate.
You've got two pictures and that gets kind of cumbersome. You could use Forever to add the details and share a link. So let me just show you a little bit about what this looks like. First of all, here's that metadata. There is a place for tags and a place for comments. You can see I had typed in our staff photo, we could have add tags for each of the individual people, but viewing this information is hard on a PC, and it's really hard on a mac and on a phone if you share it that way.
I don't think anybody is going to get here easily either. So metadata is it's like the preferred archival way to add information, but day to day sharing doesn't work so well. Another way is to just edit the picture with a photo editing program and type on the picture to, put it in there. So I have our 28th anniversary date on here.
If I save this picture with this, you know, note on there, I'm going to have the original and this photo. And I don't think that's the best solution either. So then we look at, Forever permanent photo storage. This gets close to what I would like to see. When you share a photo, the person who receives it is going to see the picture.
And then on the right hand side you can see that they will see the description. And they can also see the people that have been identified in the photo. I don't have to do anything for the person to see this, other than I've added to that on my side when I share it, they get to see anything that I've put in there.
This is the closest now, my, the request I get is that people want to have the caption on the photo and that that does not exist yet. I did put a, request into Forever's, feature request page, and someone reminded me that you can open and edit a picture. So there is an edit icon, and when you edit the picture, there is a way to add text to it.
Let me just see if I have that that example. Where did it go? Well, I don't have the example, but in Forever you can open the picture and with this edit and you can add text to it. And then when you save it you're going to have the original picture and the photo with the edited text.
So I just don't think it's great to have multiple versions of a picture, you know? But sometimes people want it for a slideshow and they want to have the, the caption right on the photo. You could use, PowerPoint or I guess Google Slides to do something like that. So, that's my, my solution for the issue personally is I just add the information in Forever, and then when people view it, they would get it that way.
I haven't had to make a slideshow in a while, for my family, but, adding the caption on all those pictures would be a lot of work. So that would be, you know, a project you you'd have to weigh the pros and cons of how you do it anyway, that identifying who is in the pictures kind of brings me to, the wrap up of this program.
And it's this we have all these old photos and there's people in them I don't know, you know, at what point you are in your life. But if there are older family members who are still, you know, around sharing and talking about pictures and getting identification is one of the most rewarding things that you can do. And rewarding is probably not even the right word.
It's fun, and you know your visits with people can be so interesting when you you bring up old pictures and talk about them together. So I, I want you to not worry so much about what the future cares about you and your the work you've done with your pictures. Start preserving them while the storytellers are still here. All right, that is what I wanted to cover for today, and I.
I don't have any questions in the chat. I'm certainly glad that you have joined us today. Next week, Tuesdays will be, I think, September 2nd. I'm going to talk about how, land documents can be a part of your photo preservation project. I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but land in pictures. I mean, our photos have a lot of land in them one way or the other, and there are some good family stories that might be hiding in the work that you need to do.
All right, that is it for today. Thank you so much for joining and we will see you next week. Happy Labor Day. Take care. Bye bye.
