All right. We are starting our live stream. I have to confess, like 10 a.m. jumped out up at me. I just didn't realize how fast time was flying. So we're going to just, hang out here a minute or two and see if we have anyone joining us live. This is live with Mollie, and it's always a great time to ask questions when you are, you know, trying to figure out a situation with your pictures.
There's nothing more frustrating than making progress on your photos and then coming up to your, stopping point and not figuring out how to move forward and that's what I'm this programs for, is to just kind of give you a, you know, a little sampling of the stories and news out there about photo organizing and an opportunity for you to ask questions and get help in your projects.
So it is, I would say we are it's it's 1001. I've got a few people joining, if you like. Go ahead and say hello. Tell me where you're from. It's always fun to see that. And I I'll just go ahead and get started because times are ticking and we've got photos to save. All right. Have you found old deeds and other types of land documents?
You know, in the boxes when you're organizing your pictures? Here at Pixologie, we frequently, you know, come across all documents in the boxes and bins of photos that people have. It could be like cemetery deeds. It could be land and mortgage papers and all of that. And sometimes people wonder if it should be saved. Well, I'm here to tell you, you definitely want to take a look at those land documents, and some of them definitely should be saved.
I never realize how significant two sheets of paper would be to me, until one day my mom handed them over, and it turns out that it proved my grandparent owned a significant piece of land in the town that I grew up in. All right, that's my little intro, and I just want to welcome you to live with Mollie.
It is September 2nd, and I'm here to share stories and answer questions and maybe provide a little bit of background on the organizational the photo organization news out there. We are live streaming to a variety of places, and you are welcome to post a question in the comments area or chat area. And I'll try to answer them before the end of the program.
If you're listening on Spotify, I would definitely head over to YouTube and watch the video version because I do share visuals to help explain what I'm talking about. And if you haven't already, subscribing to our YouTube channel will help you be alerted when I upload new videos to help you on your photo organizing and saving journey, let's talk about, some announcements that I have.
First of all, I need to let you know last week's topic on, helping, you know, people to enjoy pictures in their later years was really well received. I had, quite a few people comment how important it is to be reminded that we should talk with our older family members, even all of our family members, about our pictures, because you just never know.
I, Gail posted this and I thought it was really meaningful. She, is in the stage right now. Her folks are both 91, and they were missionaries in Dutch New Guinea, and she was between. It was she was between the ages of one and 11. And she has many stories, you know, from those years. And her parents are getting forgetful.
So getting at the slides and all of that is really important to Gail. And I'm hoping she makes a lot of progress. But I want you to see you are not alone. If you have bins and boxes of photos out there. She has 22 carousel trees to deal with and her own family photos and a very large rubber made of correspondence and paper trails for the events that occurred over there.
She's going to schedule two hours a day to focus on it, and I am rooting for her. We all are. And this is a great month to be thinking about saving photos. First of all, because it is September 2nd, it's a good reminder to save August photos. I just searched on my iPhone last night and I searched for August 2025 and I came up with 597 photos.
I took 597 photos last month. How did I do that? That's really unlike me. And I even deleted lots of pictures because we were, you know, doing things with the family and the dogs, and I was getting the best shot. So I have to go through that 597 photos on my phone, delete the pictures, never going to use again.
And then I'm going to copy the important pictures to a folder on my computer and upload to Forever, which is my choice for, cloud storage. So how many photos are on your phone, I wonder, from last month, and maybe you might want to take a moment to go and delete some pictures and I always encourage saving the best ones in a place away from your phone.
And because it's September, it is a great month to be working on pictures. It is. Save your photos month. So, every year in September, we've had some sort of event to help people with saving their pictures and I really, really encourage you to think about this or another opportunity. I'm going to tell you about it at the end of September.
We're going to be working on, getting pictures organized. We have a Get Prepared Monday. We will answer questions two weeks before the event, and then we have three hours on September 26th and six hours, plus maybe a little bit more, depending if people want to keep working. This is designed to help people, you know, get a plan and maybe work on their plan if they have one already will be there with short little classes as well as there to just answer questions and encourage people.
You can do it in virtual on zoom, or join us here in our studio in Milwaukee. Now this is an intense amount of time, but you can accomplish so much in the event. So you need something maybe, you know, shorter or, you know, something different. I want to just share that the photo managers, which is, the organization that founded Save Your Photos month many years ago, they have a Save your Photos month itinerary for you as well.
So I'm going to just scroll down here and you can see, there's YouTube live events that they're going to have, as well as a memory Keepers Live summit. So I'm going to just post that link along with the other links for you in the, comments for you, because you might want to check that out too. And, I always think it's just important for people to know that there are resources out there, and that's what Save Your Photos Month is about, because not a lot of people realize that they should be doing something with their pictures.
So here comes a whole bunch of links for you for for today's episode, including this one, for the photo manager. So you have two events. And of course, you could always start, thinking about just working on your photos on your own, if you like to. Then lastly, I want to remind those of you who you've probably seen this before.
Maybe some of you are new. In February, my friend Krista Cole Check, who is a, professional photographer. She and I are hosting a cruise and we're calling it The Great Photo Voyage. Organize your memories at sea. This is a completely laid back experience where, you know, we'll have classes, you know, while we're at sea. But we'll also, you know, enjoy a couple stops.
Coco Bay and Cosmo. And there will be photo walks and, all sorts of things to make this be less intimidating, maybe. And fun. Krista is an amazing, advocate for saving photos because she lived through Hurricane Ian in, a couple years ago, and she helped people recover photos. In fact, Krista is going to be a guest here on this show in a couple weeks, so I have a few opportunities here for you.
I'm hoping one of them may stick out for you to work on saving your photos, and really, this is a great month to just share information with other people. Have a have a conversation. It's pretty easy to just be looking through pictures on your phone and and saying, you know, what are you doing with your pictures? And chances are a lot of them are just frustrated with it.
Just like you are. So share the information you know with someone that you know who has pictures, which is probably like most people, right? Okay, so that brings me to, you know, what you're going to save during the month. And when you I mean, you could save your own photos, but when you work backwards and save your, your family's photos, you know, your parents or grandparents, you can like, check that off the to do list.
And that's when you go to the bins and boxes and when you might find those old documents. Now, as you're doing that, your older family members, if they're still around and you let them know they might volunteer here, you know, information that you wouldn't have thought to ask. And one example of this is, personally, I. I grew up in the house my grandparents built.
They built it back in, I guess 1960. And it was a brick ranch right on the, near the corner of Paiutes and Howell in Oak Creek. All right. And, it was just a ranch on one acre, and I knew they had built it from money that came from the sale of a farm. And I had heard that they owned this whole corner in Oak Creek.
It was a major corner of the, farm. And, where I grew up was right across the street from City Hall. And it was, also across from the post office and the library. And the high school was right in the same area. I, I knew that they said they owned it, but I had no proof. We had some photos that my mom had, you know, like this one with her cow.
And there's the farm farm, the barn in the background. And, and I just knew it was out there as I was, you know, going through the, you know, 20 tens. I was interested, but it didn't really have a lot of time. And then when we started Pixolgie, family history became more of interest to me, and I began to wonder more about the land.
So over a period of, I don't know, I would say, 2 or 3 years, I was just working my way through the materials and the digitized items that my parents had, and I came across a slide of my mom with some lambs and a chicken. And, it could possibly be her brother in the background.
And, you know, the building there was really cool. And then, when I showed her that slide, she would describe to me how people would come in from the city, from Milwaukee, I guess they'd come in from the city and they would go on here rides and get a tour of the farm. And she remembered that, and that's her on the right.
I just thought was really cool. And I can kind of see in the background a road there, but I wasn't real sure what it was, and I just figured I was never going to learn the secret of did they own that land? How much did they own? And, you know, I just kind of let it go. And as I was talking to my mom, you know, over the months, she must have started thinking, I'm going to start cleaning my drawers out.
And one day I came over and she hands me these two sheets of paper, and I took them home. And when I opened and looked at them, I saw was a plat of survey like of survey plat. And there was a drawing, I think, unless it's a photo that just was photocopied of the farmhouse and the barn, I've never seen this, from the front like that.
And then I saw on the bottom half of the plat that it had the markings out. Paiutes Road and Howell Howell Road, I guess back then. And it showed clearly that this was the land that my grandparents had. It's dated 1951, and I was thrilled on two levels. Like I had a photo of their farm, and then I had a date and I had the property lines.
It was a fantastic find. And I think that when we take the time to investigate those papers and maybe know that we're hoping something will show up, it will eventually. This is another example that I'm just displaying here for you. We have, of course, like I mentioned, phone land documents in photo organizing projects. And this gentleman, Vencil Malachy, he and his family, moved out west during the big land.
You know, rush and this is a document that appeared which shows that they purchased land out in Nebraska, I believe. And the handwriting's difficult to read it. It says 1800 or 1885. So 1885 they purchased this land. When we looked deeper into this, we we were able to go to the Bureau of Land Management. I didn't even know it was a thing.
But the Bureau of Land Management has many records of people who bought land out West. And not only did Vencil buy the land, his wife bought two parcels as well. It's just really unusual that a woman, at least in my mind, it seems unusual that a woman was able to purchase the land as well, but her name was on the other two plots that they bought.
And when we were working on the pictures, you know, we didn't have much from Nebraska 1885. And eventually the family, I believe, moved to Iowa. But we did find this photo in the stack. It's like a nondescript farm field. And, you know, sometimes people would, including me, set it aside and decide that it wasn't necessary to save. Fortunately, someone wrote on the back of it and it said Vencil malarkey land.
Now, was it the land in Nebraska or Iowa or somewhere else? We don't know that. But you know, we can put it with the land, purchase, documents and at least have something. The family had a heavy history in farming, and so either way, it was kind of a treasure hunt to find it. So when you start thinking about all of the items that might be in your your photo boxes and, you know, memorabilia and all, the document, you can think about saving some of the the documents, the land documents.
We had, one of our clients just, he's going through his parents stuff, and there's parents had owned three homes, and they were fortunate enough, I think, to build two of them, you know, a new community. And he had a big stack of documents. So we don't have to save everything. We just want to save, you know, a few pieces of information that really tell us the story of what land was purchased, maybe the cost of the home, if there's any information about that.
And, some photos of the construction or the plot of land, that kind of thing, you don't have to save it all, but enough to tell the story. And if you're in doubt, just save it. I used to try to encourage people to let things go a little more heavily, but I don't want that to slow you down.
So land documents are super interesting, especially if you have a few photos to go with it. Now, in the case of Ansel and, his wife, we, you know, have a photo of them and I'm going to just show you this. Let me bring it up. Because it's really, really an interesting situation. You know, it's 1885. We don't have a whole lot of, photos from that area.
So let me just, I'm going to just choose this one here and let's see if this works. Okay. So here is the portrait of Vencil and his wife. All right. And I've actually opened it up in, Google Gemini. All right. Here. This portrait is the best that we had. It was a it was a like a printout on a sheet of copy paper.
And you can see there's, a spot on the wife's. No, on the chin. And I brought it into Google Gemini because I wanted to just mention that Google Gemini is another A.I., app that people can use with their photos. Last week I think we talked about grok, which is Etsy's, AI app. And of course, there's ChatGPT, and I'm really just, sharing this with information.
These are apps that you install on your phone, and then you can, do things with them. All right. These apps are separate, and usually you can do a couple free things with them. And then you might be prompted to pay for more. Okay, so I hadn't talked about Google Gemini. I thought this would be a good time to to do that.
So anyway, we have this portrait and I loaded it into Google Gemini. I'm on their website, but I could have done this on my phone and if I wanted to do that with their app anyway, I said please restore this photo and I'm going to tell you I did pay a dollar. No, I, I tried the, the trial account.
I get a month free. So I'm using the pro account. It seems like you can't do anything with Google Gemini unless you pay for it. So I have a free month and they have this, ability to do things with your pictures. So I said, please restore this photo. And in, like, less than a minute, it gave me this new version of the photo and it looks fantastic.
All right. Google has just announced that they're using something called, banana. I can't even keep track. Let me have the temporary or. No, the new chat here. And, when I click. No, thanks. Somewhere in here there is, here's a photo I've loaded into it and we're going to just type in here, restore this photo so you can see it in action.
All right. Incidentally, this is a picture of my, my dad and his father on their mink farm. So there's farming on my dad's side as well. So, here, restore this photo. It's generating the image. And it was that fast. So we had cracks in there. We had writing on it, which actually is pretty important. It's from 1949, the restored image.
Let me just open this. It removed the cracks and it cleaned up the writing, which in my mind takes away some of the, the coolness of it as well as the information. But I can still see some spots and, you know, it's, it's a, it's a good go for, you know, being I but I wouldn't want to pay for this service monthly.
Although you can do lots of other things besides, restore photos. In fact, I had, Google Gemini do a, I had it do a video of. Let me just scroll to the little list here, restoring an old photo. Not that one I had. Google make a video of them talking, and it it was kind of interesting.
The first, the first go had word bubbles across it, and then the second go had them talking and he was said something like, I think your appearance is very fine. And then she went, and I deleted it and I try, I was going to try again, but apparently you can only make, three videos a day, maybe with Google.
Gemini. So there's those restrictions. Anyway, the idea of working with pictures in AI is a rabbit hole that can waste a lot of time. So I always share this so that you kind of have a few ideas about, you know, what's out there and what you can do with pictures. But, it's a rabbit hole if you have a specific photo.
Definitely. Making it better is one of those fantastic opportunities with AI, and this one is really, really nicely done. So I'm gonna click on it and download it, and then I'll be able to, share that with Vencil Maliki's family. All right. That is a little bit about Google Germany and, and what I'm going to touch upon for industry news today.
We already talked about photo managers and save your Photos month. I think it is time for some questions. So if you've got any please don't hesitate to throw them in the chat and I'll answer them. In the meantime, I do have a couple questions that came from my, viewers. Over the last week or two, when you do have old photos and documents and slides, one of the issues that can arise is definitely that you have red hued pictures and slides.
Red hued pictures and slides are so frustrating and they've turned red because of the, you know, the film processing. The colors that are used, I think are like, cayenne yellow and magenta. Magenta is the last color to fade in a picture just due to the chemical properties of it. And a lot of times pictures will lose the blue and the yellow and leave you with a red hue.
Now I found this picture from, the photo, Stack Exchange. And I've got a link where you can read more about this photo and, you know, the processing and what happened to it if you want to dive deeper into it. But can you save these? We've really tried to recover old, old slides and photos that are red hued, and it's really difficult, you know, to bring color back to that even when I put it into Gemini and another eye, they couldn't do much for it.
So let me show you what you can do. All right. And it's it's not the ideal solution because you'd really like to have the full color and, and just have it look wonderful. So here's the original the next frame here, which you can hardly tell there is a difference. The next frame here, I actually took it into Photoshop to do a little bit more in-depth work on it, and I couldn't improve it very much.
Now, I'm not a pro on photo restoration and you could probably spend some money in having this, done professionally by a photo restorer. However, I, I don't know how much more they can improve it. The AI solutions aren't. Couldn't do as good as what I did here in Photoshop. So what we usually end up recommending to families with these photos is just make it be black and white.
Whoops, I went too far there. Make it be black and white. This obviously there's no color in it, but it doesn't look bad. And in some ways it kind of looks more true to the era of the photos date. And, it's an option for you. And, you know, when you're especially an old slide, sometimes people have lots and lots of these photos.
Making them black and white is pretty quick and easy with, you know, a few photo editing tools. And I bet I would definitely be able to, do this for you with, with no problem. So that's the answer for red slides and red photos. It's that darn, magenta ink. It just lasts Forever compared to the other colors.
Another comment that was left, and I thought it would be funny to share this with you. Beldon. Clear water posted. Digital storage of photos and video is just a bear, and it is like, you know, managing your photos and storing them and making sure you're getting the new pictures added to it. It's really a challenge. And, I just thought you guys would appreciate seeing, his comment or her comment.
The next question is, I think, a really interesting, scenario. And I wanted to dive into this a little deeper for you. I have, a video out there about how, is Amazon photos the right place to manage your memories and someone, asked the question de pronto. It says, thanks for the great vid. He's, reviewing various photo storage solutions, and he's wondering in Amazon, can I upload my windows folders along with the photos in it with the same folder name they have in the windows environment?
And interestingly enough, I actually have, a positive answer to this in one way and then a negative answer in a different way. So let me just share my screen and show you a little bit about Amazon photos. It's a, an easy solution for people because, it's free for people who have Amazon Prime. And, you can put the app on your phone or on your computer and upload and download pictures.
But there are some functional things that concern me as well as, Amazon's ability to change the service however they like. So let me just go here and share this, tab. All right. We have here I'm in the Amazon Photos app. Now folders is one of the the tabs here that you can click on. So I'm going to click on the folders.
And you can see I've got some folders up here I have this testing uploading folders to see if I could upload folders from a PC. So I chose my folder 2025 photos which had two folders in it I think June and July photos. And when I open it, it definitely has the photos there. So if I go in it, I can see the listing of them.
Kind of similar to a, you know, a PC's file explorer. So I only get to see the date added and the size and you know what it is. So it's it doesn't really give me like ways to view the pictures differently. So the folders kind of are a standalone part of Amazon Photos. And they were added because Amazon ended their drive service.
They had promoted Amazon Drive for years, and people stored all sorts of photos and documents in the drive, not in Amazon for Amazon Photos. So they discontinued the drive, Amazon Drive and then in order to make things right ish, they allowed folders to be added into Amazon Photos and all of the content was moved over here. So if I just go back to the folders area here, you can see that I have a little notification here that we found none folder and non video files in your account, and it's prompting me to download them or get the desktop app.
So this whole folders area is kind of like an add on. It's not really integrated. It is in the sense that the photos show up right in your gallery. I guess you would call them, as you can see your photos right in your gallery, the same as the other pictures in Amazon photos. The organization seems to either be in albums or no organization at all.
And I guess you'd have to kind of consider what does organization mean to you? Is it being able to just sort by date? Well, okay. The photos are sorted by date. They have, media types and they have things. This is things and people. This is their a AI organization where you can just click on, you know, I'll click on me and I'll see all the photos of me which I don't know if that really worked or it's just it just checked.
I just checked and it's only showing photos that have me in it. So I'll just clear that. So as if that organization works for you okay. But if you're hoping to have, you know, like folders, you'd have to view them in here. And working in here is extremely clunky compared to a PC. The albums area is okay, but you cannot have nested albums.
All right. So every album has to be its own on the top level. I've seen people have, you know, hundreds of albums and they're really hard to sort. There's a way to sort them by name, which is my preference, so that the years come first. But then when you go somewhere else. So if I go to people and then I go back to albums, it goes back to being sorted by the the date created instead of the name.
So in my mind, the organizational part of Amazon Photos really doesn't work. Yes, you can upload your folders, but it's not fun to look at them. And I always look for a photo management solution that is fun, right? We want to enjoy our pictures and, Amazon photos. There's ways to enjoy some of them, but organizing in there is actually kind of challenging.
This grandma scrapbook photos. You know, if I wanted to just put this album inside the Corbis farm, there is no ability to do that. If I wanted to have, you know, a 2025 album with a nested album for each month inside of it cannot do it. All right, so that's my answer. Yes, you can have folders in Amazon Photos, but it's not very fun to use.
So I'm hoping that, helps you understand a little bit more about how Amazon works. And, you know, programs can have folders and albums, but, you know, they have to have something and they have to be able to nest. I see question here. What's the best program to use for restoring photos? Well, it depends on what kind of, what kind of edits you have.
All right. And there's so many out there. I'm trying to think of what would be the best. I think Photoshop does work really nicely. There is. There's a few quick things that you can do with auto tone and auto color that really make a photo look good, but it's, you know, it requires having Adobe Creative Cloud, for quick solutions.
I really these AI apps are not bad. They're not bad at all. I think, I guess I'm going to just show you one here, that I did with, Gemini. And I think this would work with the other ones, too. Let's just see here if I can find it. So I'm going to,
Well, I'm gonna share this screen here, and it's always a trick. Share this tab instead. So here we are on hive there. And, go this route okay. So with photo restoration. And in this case I uploaded this picture and I added it to colorize it. It was a phenomenal like really? I can't believe the color it brought out in this picture.
If we were to, you know, throw any picture in, you know, things will get improved, you might have to prompt it. So I'm thinking, let me just look at this one I did here. It's so vintage of portrait restoration. So, here this was one of my original asks the nice thing about I is you can continually prompt it to do more.
So I said, please restore the portrait, removing the spots and cleaning it up. So this is one of my earlier ones. And the, the spot on her chin was really noticeable. So so it it did it improve the color? I think to more natural, but it left the spot on her chin. And so I asked it again to remove the spot.
And then it it did it. So it's really kind of a rabbit hole. All of them are going to produce something a little different for you. So if you're going to ask me, you know, what's the best program to use for photo restoration? I'll start with Photoshop. And, even Adobe Bridge allows you to do some cleanup. Those are be my favorites because I have control over it if I want to, you know, use something else.
There are many out there, so photo mine is an app on your phone that will do photo restoration and colorization. Photo mine's about I know it's like 40 or $60 a year. There might be a monthly charge for it. Then you have, ChatGPT. And you have Google Gemini, which I think those are running around $20 a month.
So maybe if you had a few that you wanted to do, you could, subscribe for a month. My heritage is, got photo restoration, colorization, and the ability to make videos. So MyHeritage is a great option. I've really enjoyed using some of their tools. And the problem is, Karen, is you're going to get a different result no matter where you go.
And maybe you want to try a few to see which ones you like the best. I do think, you know, having to pay a monthly fee for one of these programs that can edit your pictures for you is a pain. But a photo restoration, even like the one with the spot on the chin, they can go from $95 on up, depending on the photo restorer that you hire to do it.
So you have to be, you know, aware of that. So $20 a month is an option. Lori is suggesting vivid pics, and I haven't worked with vivid pics in a long time, but there are another one. And, you might want to try them out to thank you, Lori, for mentioning that I, I probably I'm gonna do a review or something on that because I need to refresh myself on vivid pics.
So you have some options there. Karen, and I hope that gives you some ideas in moving forward with, restoring pictures. All right. So in wrapping today's program up, I want to just go back to the restoration of the colorizing picture that, I did and, you know, am I going to be able to find it?
That's the problem when I go back and forth and, photo restoration, I just cannot make photo. Well, anyway, I showed you the picture of my family's farm colorized, and I can't tell you the how meaningful it is to have something like this ready for, me to share with my future family, to show them what life was like.
And to have a photo be in color is just really, an amazing, an amazing thing to me. Like, it looks like a beautiful sunshiny day there. And I don't know if that's true or not, but it brings up a black and white picture to life. And we see the farm in the backyard. This was a photo I didn't even know existed until my cousin passed me a scrapbook that she inherited from my grandmother.
So, you just never know what's going to pop up to add to the stories that you have and land ownership documents, I think are a really big part of it. That's the magic of photos. They're not just images. They're clues and connections. And sometimes a key to solving, you know, the past family mysteries is this tell stories we might otherwise not ever, ever know.
And I see one last question here. Karen, you are asking, is there a Gemini app for your iMac? I'm actually on my iMac. And you would you can just go to the website and do this yourself in your Google account, or there might be an app that you could download. And most of these are now coming out with apps install on your computer.
And I think that's an option, you know, that you could look into. But I'm using it right in the web browser. Okay. All right. So that is our program for today. And I really appreciate the the questions that people submit to me. It tells me that you are working on your pictures. Right? I always say if if there's no questions, maybe people aren't working as much on their pictures.
And obviously it was a holiday weekend and, now we're moving into September. Save your photos month next week. Tuesday at 10 a.m. central time, we're going to talk about recovering photos from a fire, a house fire just the absolute worst, scenario. You hope that everybody gets out safe, and then your next, your next thought is for your family memories.
And I'm going to share a story about someone that we helped years ago who had a house fire. And the damage to the pictures really wasn't from the fire. So it's a very important story to help increase awareness of the importance of saving photos. So for today, I hope you go and delete some of those August photos that you took and, send some questions my way.
We'll have them ready for next week. Thank you. So much for joining. And we'll see you guys the next time. Bye bye.
