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Learn the Software First

This week I plunged into my photo project. As a novice in the digital image world, I am trying to take a measured approach to this. If I take on too much too soon, I know I will get too frustrated and discouraged to continue.

I decided to begin with our family snapshots from last year. Even that presented complications when I realized that I could not retrieve them all from one place. The camera held some; our cell phones held others. I had no idea how to get them off these devices in order to collect them for editing and preservation. My trusty husband/tech advisor solved this dilemma for me by doing this chore himself. He even vaguely promised to teach me to do it myself someday.

He put everything into our Picasa program on my desktop computer. Then he showed me how to edit the photos (by improving the colors if necessary and removing red eye) and how to create an album for the year. Enough to learn at one sitting! I made a successful start at using Picasa, and now I have a nice little digital family album for all the family photos we took in 2012. We also ordered prints of the photos so this Luddite will have copies in case the digital album disappears. Of course that is unlikely because we keep everything backed up.

My next step will be to create another album of our cemetery photos. I plan to use Picasa to organize that, too. We already have some of these photos in Picasa albums, but I will need to scan others and then organize it all (by surname? cemetery?). And how should I label the photos? I want to preserve the cemetery names, the names on the gravestones, the dates the photos were taken, and the name of the photographer.

Next week the husband/tech advisor will be called on again to teach me how to make this new album. I also hope to learn how to transfer the photos from Picasa to my genealogy database. I have no idea how many cemetery photos we have, but I think this could take awhile.

2 Responses to “Learn the Software First”

  • Sounds like you are off to a good start! It is a good idea to have an album of cemetery photos. I have a ‘folder’ full by state & then cemetery. I also have them copied in surname folders. I label mine: surname, first name, dates, cemetery & location.

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