Working With Photos

Working With Photos

As part of my genealogical research, I make every attempt to acquire old photos of related family.  This I feel is the best aspect of genealogy.  There is a lot that you can do with a photo.  Here are a few tips that may help you with your old photos of your family.

MAKING COPIES AND ENLARGEMENT

Perfect copies of old photos can be easily done with today's computerized technology.  This is important when you run across a photo in a relative's personal collection.  Duplication of these important photos is cheap for black and white and color copies when done at national office store chains on their professional behind the counter photocopiers.  You can also request photo style paper for just ten cents more per page at most outlets.  Photos can also be stacked on a page to further cut costs.  Also, it is understood by the industry that any photo can be enlarged up to four times its original size without loss of quality, which makes it easy to view jewelry worn or many other secrets that are captured by the camera lens and otherwise too small to see with the human eye.  I have even gone as far as to enlarge wallet size photos up to 8X10 photos with amazing results.

WORKING WITH SLIDES

Slide pictures are easy to convert to JPG files to view on TV and seen better than the old screen method.  How do I know this?  I've converted over 4,000 family slides on 35mm and 110mm film.  I consider myself to be an expert.  My collection of personal slides and that of my parents, dating from 1953 to 1982, can now be viewed better than I ever saw them on the antiquated slide screen and projector.  Viewing old slides on TV through you DVD player is the 21st century method.  Inexpensive scanners with special options to scan slides and negatives sell now for under $40.  The DPI setting for such scanning is best at a 1200 DPI setting.  Higher DPI settings take more computer time to process with no improved results.  Also, with 110 slides, higher settings actually produce poorer results.  Then with a simple photography program, photo quality can be improved to a better level than the original slide.  If you haven't tried this concept, follow the above steps with amazing results.  Or you can pay the $1 cost per slide charged by commercial companies nowadays and hand your private collection to outside hands that hopefully won't damage your collection.

CARE OF PHOTOS

Besides keeping your photos in a cool and dry place, the main term that you need to know is Acid Free.  Acid destroys photos.  Your albums, photo sleeves, pens, or anything that might make contact with photos must be Acid Free.  These items are carried in stores are clearly marked on packaging.  Check scrap booking sections in stores where these items are mainly sold.  Never, never, never use any albums that have those sticky pages to place your photos.  They are a death sentence for photos once you attempt to remove them later.

LABEL YOUR PHOTOS

Nothing was more discouraging for me than to take possession of the old Rice family photo trunk.  It was amazing to see hundreds of photos dating as far back as the 1890s.  But with the passing of my elder generation and not one of these photos labeled in any way, I held scores of unknown faces with no source in my immediate family to identify them.  It has taken me years of painstaking research and connecting with numerous cousins to learn or put together enough information to identify the faces, dates, and places.  I now have about 80% of the handed down photos identified.  Much of the credit goes to other family lines with older living relatives and the practice of labeling the backside of each photo with the person's name, date, place, and occasion of the photo.  Had I taken the assumption that many of the photos were not important and not direct family relations, many of these photos would have been lost in time.  As a rule of thumb, any photos passed down through the family are extremely important and are in you direct line.  Otherwise, they would not have made it to you.  Important inherited photos are eventually sorted by surviving children.  Many are thrown away, thinking that they are not family.  This process, after a couple generations, takes its toll if there is not verbal communication and no one ever thinks to label the photos.  This is a valuable lesson that I learned the hard way.  Also, when you label your photos, use only Acid Free pens and do not press hard to damage the photo that you are preserving.

 

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