Sharing Photographs

Yesterday my Labeling Photographs post not only talked about labeling your photos, but I also urged you to get them out of magnetic albums if you have any there.  That's one piece of advice I consider worth repeating!

Most of the photos folks take today are digital, and it's good to convert any older photos you have into the digital format also.  You can scan them and then save the files as TIF or PNG files to keep as your archive copies.  You don't want to save the original scans as JPEG files because that format uses lossy compression.  Each time the file is opened and re-saved as a JPEG, it will lose data - and once you save a lossy file, you can never go back to the previous state.
 
If you need to edit a photo, first make a copy of the original scan and then do your editing to that copy.  You always want to keep an unedited archive copy of the original scan.  There are a lot of web sites with tips about scanning and editing photos, so I won't go into that here.  One place with a lot of info is "Creating & Editing Digital Photos" on one of About.com's genealogy pages.

Moving on to sharing – there are a variety of ways I can think of for sharing your photos:

 Sharing “paper” photos:

• Printing them out and giving copies to friends & family
• Creating a photo album or a scrapbook as a gift 

Sharing digitized photos:

• Emailing your files to others
• Uploading to a photo-sharing site like flickr or snapfish where they can be stored in albums and shared
• Creating digital scrapbook pages

Digital scrapbooks are created using any photo editing software that has the ability to work with levels. I haven't it tried it myself … yet … but I can see a lot of possibilities based on the sample page included in a "Digital Scrapbooking for Genealogists" post on the Shades of the Departed blog.

I could create a page with scanned photos of Mom's high school class ring, her Thespian pin, and a photo of her entire class that graduated in 1943 from Cameron High School. I could create a page to document Dad's service in the Marines that would include his dress uniform photo, his battallion photo, and scans of all the military memorabilia he kept in a box. Pretty cool.

As a genealogist, sharing family photos with others has the benefit of giving me a form of insurance against fires, floods, computer crashes, and any other way that photos can be destroyed. Last fall I scanned a LOT of photos from a distant cousin's albums that were a real treasure trove to me … but the flip side of that is that I am now a backup source for him. Should something happen to his albums, I have digital files that can be used to replace many of his photos.

I have so much work to do on my own photos, it's time to stop blogging and start following some of my own advice!