Helping Everyday People Scan, Restore, Organize, Preserve and Share Your Photographs

All My Pictures in iPhoto Disappeared! How to Safely Get Them Back

By Curtis Bisel • Organizing Digital Masters • 0 Comments

iPhoto is so good at protecting your precious photos, that in those very rare times when something actually does go wrong, it’s hard not to just freak out and think you really have lost all of your photos!

Luckily in situations like this, you are able to recall some clues that could make you realize your photos are actually still on your computer. It’s just that you can’t figure out how to get them to show up again in iPhoto.

This is exactly what happened to Abdullah and his iPhoto collection.… Continue Reading

How to Write an Autobiography: The Secret Tips to Finally Get Started

By Curtis Bisel • Documenting • 3 Comments

Something unusual just might happen to you when you start working with your family’s photo collection:

You may suddenly get this urge to start writing about what’s happened to you in your life and why it meant so much to you.

And what’s even more surprising, you may also have an overwhelming desire to ask your loved ones to start writing the same about their lives!… Continue Reading

The Benefits of Recording Your 35mm Slide’s Exposure Number

Did you ever notice those little 2-digit numbers printed at the top of your 35mm slides?

I have to keep in mind some of you reading this may have never even touched a roll of film in your life!

It’s scary for guys like me to think that’s even possible, but it really is since we live in a time when digital cameras have been affordable since about 2000.

For the uninitiated, [cough] when you shot pictures that would be developed as those little plastic or cardboard slides you later projected onto a large screen for family viewings, you used a special roll of film in your camera.

One of the choices you had to make when picking out a box of film was how many exposures you wanted. … Continue Reading

How to Get iPhoto to Store Your Photos Inside or Outside of the iPhoto Library (Managed vs. Referenced)

By Curtis Bisel • Organizing Digital Masters • 0 Comments

If you’re an iPhoto user, have you ever wondered to yourself where your original photo files are actually stored on your computer?

I mean, you know they’re stuffed in there somewhere. You just honestly haven’t really seen them with your own eyes in a long time.

I can’t think of anything that should be more important to an iPhoto user than knowing where they are really saved.

In fact, it’s so important that I decided to put together a nice little tutorial video explaining these basics.

This is the foundation of how iPhoto works.… Continue Reading

How to Date Photos When Even Your Family Can’t Remember Them!

By Curtis Bisel • Organizing Digital Masters, Organizing Originals, Scanning Photos • 10 Comments

Q&A: A couple of years ago, I started organizing my digital photos the way you showed in your naming scanned photos post, instead of by subject, etc.

I’m just now starting to archive all the photos my Mom has. As we are taking them out of the albums (which, by the way, I hate those old “magnetic” albums–the photos stick to the pages), she is telling me who is in the pictures, etc.

Most of the ones we are doing now are the real old ones–her family photos and my Dad’s family photos. Some are dated and/or have captions to help identify them, but several don’t.

The problem is she can’t always narrow down the date enough to come up with a year. So that’s causing me to have a lot of photos with ’19xx-xx-xx’ as the date. There aren’t really any other family members who will know the answer so I doubt if the dates will ever be completed.

Any suggestions as to how to handle situations like this so I don’t have a long list of ’19xx’ photos?… Continue Reading

What Would You Take?

By Guest Blogger • Backup, Preserving Originals • 3 Comments

This is a guest post by Trevor Rumsey.

A couple of weeks ago I was reading the November 19th, 2012 issue of People magazine which talked about some of the stories of rescues and survival around the recent superstorm Sandy that hit the Eastern seaboard of the United States.

One article entitled “Found in the Wreckage” (pages 58-59) caught my attention. The article spotlighted eight different families whose homes were destroyed by the storm.

It showed each of them holding the possession that they grabbed as they frantically abandoned their home to escape the storm and save their lives.

As I was reading the article I started to put myself in their place and to think about what would I take if I only had enough space and time to grab one or two things?

As I thought on this it didn’t take long to come up with the answer.… Continue Reading