Making Sense of the Digital Age Wes Clark, 14 September 2016
Some Probing Questions Who is the CMO (Chief Memory Officer) in your family? You? How many of you have boxes of prints that are not in scrapbooks? How many of you have cell phones full of images not saved elsewhere? How many of you have an unknown number of cell phone images stored in the cloud? How many of you feel overwhelmed at the thought of organizing all those images? FEAR NOT! Making sense out of all this is not hard!
Then and Now Back in the Day you used to get physical artifacts of photographs: Prints Negatives (For moving images it was a reel of film, a Beta, VHS/VHS-C or 8mm tape) Nowadays, however, the Digital Revolution has changed that! We get ones and zeroes instead. The media that those ones and zeros resides upon can be varied: DVDs or CDs Thumb drives The Cloud A hard disk An SD card Some web site and therein lies the advantage and the problem! An image or video file is an abstraction!
Another consideration Electrons are cheaper than film processing. With digital cameras/cell phones you can take LOTS of photos! (I could take 600+ images from a couple of rugby matches, easy.)
The Beauty of Paper My bias and agenda are laid on the table: I am a proponent for getting images on paper. Why? Paper can last thousands of years. Two examples (there are others): Egyptian papyrus Dead Sea Scrolls
The Beauty of Paper This is a circa 1888 photo of my grandfather Clark as a child, with his sister. It is, therefore, about 128 years old. Will.jpgs still be around in 128 years? Will we be able to access our CDs, DVDs and hard drives? You don t have to do a technology refresh or data maintenance on paper!
The Beauty of Paper Plus: A paper scrapbook is easy and convenient to read or look at It looks classy on your coffee table It doesn t need electricity or charged batteries It s not expensive YOU own the scrapbook, not Google or Tumblr or some other soon-to-be acquired company With archival, acid free materials paper can last for lifetimes
Scrapbooking then (1990s-ish) Provo, Utah OWNED scrapbooking!
Scrapbooking now four main options (1) Electronic scrapbooks! (COSTCO, Photobucket, etc.) (2) Acid-free archival scrapbooks pre-formatted for 4 x 6 prints!
Scrapbooking now four main options (3) Traditional, frilly scrapbooking
Scrapbooking now four main options From a Google search of overdone scrapbook pages (mostly Pinterest) If this is your thing, then fine! Keep it up! But if you find that your scrapbooks aren t getting done, consider (4) Brother Clark s modified layout (aka Male Style )
Male Style Scrapbooking This is a scan of half a page More photos per page No or fewer frills Some stickers if you want Emphasize the image, Not the format Minimal journaling These get done much faster!
Creative Memories creativememories.com
Male Style Scrapbooking My Creative Memories consultant, Mary Bell Mary Bell, end of Carrleigh Parkway, 703-569-5570 or ringrbell@aol.com
Don t ever use those magnetic albums A 1975 artifact from my first scrapbook, a Do Not Litter sign for Vietnamese refugees housed at Camp Pendleton just before I was stationed there. I took it off a telephone pole. Note the dots: these are glue dots from magnetic pages. It will also happen to your photos.
Once you have paper, then do electronic! There is absolutely nothing wrong with this photograph. In fact, it makes perfect sense and demonstrates the power of modern digital multimedia platforms.
A Simple Tip from the Nikon School Organizing those raw image files Start your organization effort by year Then month Then occasion.
A Simple Tip from the Nikon School Then views of photos Make filenames logical and memorable so you can search them later! Using this system I was able to recently inspect 10,000 files for photos of one (deceased) rugby player in a few hours!
The Suggested Workflow for the Buried-Alive (aka Mothers) (1) Sort your files by year, then month/occasion. (2) Go through them and copy the best or most representative images to a print directory. (3) Photoshop or correct any images as needed. (4) Print the images. Costco only charges 17 cents for a 4 x 6 print (5) Load up the prints in a photo book (6) Caption prints (7) Re-use the images in the print folder for electronic albums (Shutterfly, Google Photos, etc.)
A Word of Advice (6) Caption prints
Making Scrapbook Printed Pages
Archive your paper scrapbooks Make digital flatbed scans of scrapbook pages
Upload your scrapbooks to the Internet I use Picasa which got bought by Google. Now it s Google Photos My images are in private space (you have to know the URL) https://get.google.com/albumarchive/103982908931339963000/album/af1qippjsrjmkwzjhazvhw VRyNZLf_R2DzMmHkxTFiJ7?authKey=CKeCqM2V7YrmHw
Upload your scrapbooks to the Internet A screen capture of my Google Photos Albums page
Upload your scrapbooks to the Internet A screen capture of a page in a Google Photos Album
What do I Scan and Archive? Paper scrapbooks Photos Documents Important papers Videos Audio files Letters Yearbook pages Baby books Wedding albums Church documents Genealogical interest photos and forms Anything you would reasonably want to share In a word everything.
What do I Scan and Archive?
What do I Scan and Archive?
Flatbed Scanner Logistics You can scan half of a standard 12 x 12 scrapbook page on a normal flatbed scanner. Two passes, or halves, per scrapbook page. I go at least 300 dots per inch.
What About Videos? An excerpt from my online unlisted family video list Put em on YouTube! (Select unlisted space.) There is no limit to the number of hours of videos you can post there! I have 22 two hour VHS camcorder tapes (1986 to 2001) and 20 two hour Hi- 8mm camcorder tapes (2001 to 2011) uploaded there = 84 hours. I have about 27 hours of other videos from tapes, etc. Grand Total = 111 hours. Every minute is of that accessible via any Internet-connected device!
What About Videos? Non-tape YouTube videos I have 822 videos of various lengths on YouTube Go to wesclark.com and select videos. YouTube playlists. Go to Springfield (VA) Ward Videos Videos from 1987 to 2015!
The Advance of Tech: Tron s Identity Disk Putting a person s identity on a disk seemed terribly futuristic in 1982. We ve almost there!
From this to this Questions? Contact me at wesclark.com