What Happened To All Of My Family Photo Albums

Do you make printed family photograph albums? If so, why? If not, why not?

Do I make printed family photograph albums? If so, why? If not, why not?Yes, I do, but maybe not the way you think. When I was working, in film only, I made albums of pictures, prints, for wedding clients of course, and occasionally my wife and I made family albums.But now I make online albums. I don't make a lot, but I use only the first supplier I tried, MIXBOOK, and I stick with them because I find their quality is superb and their lines and choices are perfect for what I want. There are many others but I've never tried any because I am perfectly content.What makes the online albums so attractive to me is that I am not restricted in any way. I can, if I wish, take a single image and “double-truck and full bleed” it across two pages. It needs to be sharp and able to withstand that degree of enlargement of course. I can take that same double-truck and “ghost” it, reduce its opacity, even convert it to monochrome and then add a tint of any color I want, then use it as background for other pictures placed atop it. I can vary the sizes and crops of the pictures as much as I want. I can overlap them. I can add borders or not. I can add drop shadows or not. I can add text, captions, stickers (I don't use many but some are fun). I can tilt pictures for variety.You get the idea. The sky is the limit. They all have templates you can use, or plain white books you can build from scratch. You can change the backgrounds. If you can think it you can probably do it. You can even upload all of your pictures, choose an album template you like, and with one click their algorithm will load all the pictures for you. I never do it but it does work, and if it works for you then (as we used to say) swing!QUALITY of course is a huge deal, and I occasionally see complaints about people not getting the color they wanted or the sharpness or whatever. Mixbook will always do everything they can to make it right, but there is always the GIGO issue; Garbage In Garbage Out. Many people have zero idea that what they see on their uncalibrated too-bright-or-dark monitor is not what they will get when printed out accurately. My suggestion to all is calibrate your monitor! Preferably use a good calibration tool and software. Cheap they are not, but if you want to get into online albums I think it is essential. If you provide them with good, sharp, color corrected files, what you get back should be exactly what you see on your monitor.

Does any body ever make family photo albums anymore?

My clients range from wanting traditional slide-in photo albums, scrapbooks, or digital photo books (and even those range from simple to digital scrapbooking). So yes, people do make photo albums so that they can enjoy and share their memories easily. Just like some people prefer to read real books over Kindle and other digital books, some people prefer to have a physical album - whether hand-crafted or digitally created - in their hands.

What should I do with old family photos?

It depends.  Is your goal of preservation to keep it for your lifetime or for those of your great-grand-kids?   Choose:1) I want to spend a lot of time and money doing this.2) I want this done with minimal effort and spend as little as possible.1) Order, Sort and label your photos, Create captions for them including year it was taken and who is in it.  Get your own scanning equipment and put them in a highly curated online album that contains the details for each photo (place, time, and who's in the picture) and retouch by hand the imperfections on each photo.  Print up Albums for your extended family, perhaps add some historical context to it by showing old newspaper headlines from the time of the picture.2) Gently gather up all your stuff and lightly order it by dates or by medium (negative, slide, photo print, etc) and send it off to be scanned.  Put it in a folder on your PC and back it up with the rest of your stuff  on your PC(ie: Crashplan), set it to show that folder on your screen and enjoy recent and old pictures of your family.  Either WayStoring pictures for storing photos sake is silly, make sure people see them. Get a photo-frame for your parents/extended family that tunes to an RSS feed of the photos and update them once in a while.  You can even send family greetings by just putting a picture with words on it into your feed.  Voila! - 21st century xmas cards for the older generation.Also - do you have tons of photos?  Get them scanned by a pro photo scanning service such as digmypics.com - you can ship them boxes of stuff and they'll do it for you.If you have a few - I would scan them and then get them retouched perhaps.  Otherwise - I would then store them online in a photo-sharing site.  If possible, get the Wayback machine to scan your site at some point, or post blogs with your pictures and disseminate them to other caching servers on the internet.  This is easier when you have lots of people linking to your photos.  Not always possible or easy when you're trying to get people to link to pictures of your grandmother holding you and your brother.   However, 15 minutes of Fame on the Internet will likely guarantee that your pictures last a lifetime - longer than USB thumbdrives, CD's or 8-track tapes at least.Print the results and burn to archivable DVD - upload to amazon AWS and keep a copy (Hard Drive/DVD and Print)  in your safe deposit box.  This presents it's own set of problems for another post.

With current technology, are family photo albums or scrapbooking a thing of the past?

Scrapbooking is about sharing stories and memories, with or without photos. That being said, even with the newest technologies, we will always have stories to share. The technology might change some aspects of scrapbooking but it is far from dead.Now, you can do digital scrapbooking and not rely on paper supplies anymore. This has advantages of not running out of paper at 10pm when the store is closed, or not having to have a whole room to store supplies, or not being afraid that our 2yo will eat any bead that fell on the floor.Digital albums can now include sounds and videos too, thanks to the technology.However, some people will always prefer to manipulate supplies, cut with scissors, get messy with glue and feel textures. That is part of the pleasure, and the art. And art will never go away, even with technology. It will just change.If you want to see what can be done with digital scrapbooking, come and visit the Campus:Digital scrapbooking with Paintshop Pro

How do I preserve an old photo album?

Step 1 Organize your photos Before scanning, organize your photos – and slides and negatives, if you have them – into logical groups. This will make renaming and labeling them much easier later on.Step 2 Clean your photos Using a soft photography or makeup brush, gently clean your photos. Any dirt or smudges will be visible in your scans.Step 3 Clean the scanner Using isopropyl, or another cleaning agent that won’t leave residue or streaks, and a lint-free cloth, wipe any dust, smudges, and fingerprints off the scanner’s glass bed.Step 4 Select your DPI based on your image use For images you intend to print, a DPI (or dots per inch) of 300 is recommended. Slides or negatives need a DPI of at least 2,400. For use on the Web, a DPI of 72 is acceptable.Step 5 Scan your old photos Using the software free image-editing tools that came with your scanner, scan each photo into your computer.Step 6 Rename your digital scans Your scans will likely have numerical names that tell you nothing about the content of the scanned image. Rename each file.Step 7 Edit your images Using photo- editing software, view each image, cropping out bits you don’t want, straightening slightly crooked images, and using color correction where necessary.Step 7  download it into some cloud services example Dropbox or Picasa Web Albums . Or, which I think batter idea - to create a photoblog lifetile.