Lessons in creating family photos that people want to keep (2018)

There are two categories of family photos:

1) Photos you look at when the subjects are still alive

2) Photos that you remember people by and cherish people for

    1 = are all the typical family group pics, lots of posing

    2 = the photos where the subjects may not even know that they are being photographed, while doing the things they are cherished for by others. Sometimes they might not even like the presented actvities, but everyone else around them appreciates it .

   - Photos of people repairing their family's gadgets
   - Photos of people doing mundane tasks, ironing their clothes, cooking dinner for everyone, being exhausted, reading to others...

    - This is what prevails while people are still alive who remember you. What you will be remembered by. Mostly what you did for other people and how people observed you.

I lost all of my photos (along with everything else) when growing up, so taking pictures and videos was important to me as I became an adult.

I'm 59 now. In the 1990s I started taking VHS videos of family events. Sometimes I would walk around "interviewing", sometimes I would walk around and try to normally talk to people while holding that huge recorder. (That didn't work). I even set it up on a tripod and just let the recorder run while my parents and others visited.

This past year I've ripped a couple of dozen DVDs out of all of those tapes. In the past two weeks I've then ffmpeg'ed them to mp4s and loaded on an SD drive and put in a e-picture frame.

Now we have 30-40 hours of "family memory TV" playing constantly in our living room. It is one of the most amazing things I've done with technology. I can't describe the feeling of looking back 30+ years to see folks who are long gone -- or now adults with their own kids!

God I'm glad I didn't record all of this on a cell phone or use social media. It would have been impossible to have the patience and time to scale all of those walled gardens for this project.

Best videos? The "family interview show", where I ask questions and everybody performs some kind of art. Wish I'd done one of those every year. Second best? Just setting the cam up and letting it run. Third place are videos of family members doing things that'll never happen again, like watching a sonogram of a new baby on the way.

Worst videos? As I know (and knew at the time!), a bunch of videos and pictures of things we were looking at that were interesting to us at the time but stuff you could find online in a couple of seconds. Unless it has audio commentary, it was a pointless exercise.

There is a related problem, which I hit while scanning family archives going back slightly more than 100 years. There is no good photo archival software.

If you now rushed to click "reply" to say that yes, of course there is, right here, hold your horses. You probably do not understand the problem.

Good photo archival software would let me keep my photos in formats that will be readable 25 years from now. It must not rely on any company being in business or offering any service.

It must support storing the same picture in multiple formats. It must support assigning dates to pictures that are not the same as the file date nor the EXIF date. It must support assigning imprecise dates (just a year, or ideally an interval).

It must support storing multiple files as part of the same "image", and I do not mean multiple versions/formats of an image here. Examples: front and back of a scanned paper photo, or 24 scans of a large format picture that are then merged together into a resulting stitched image.

All that information must be preserved in ways that will let me recover it even without any software (e.g. files in the filesystem).

I used many solutions over the years, and got royally screwed by most, the most recent one being Apple shutting down Aperture (which did most of these things pretty well). I am now close to writing my own software.

EDIT: to all those who respond with "just store it as files" — yes, of course they should be stored as files. But that's not an answer. You do want searchability, nice visual access, and other niceties on top of the basic plumbing.

Great tips in here! And I know this isn’t about videos… but, don’t forget about videos.

I love taking pictures. In particular, candid moment-capturing portraits that reveal something about the subject. Also, technically challenging ones with really long exposures (eg around a campfire), or narrow depth of field (eg of my kids playing in the backyard). I like to think I’ve taken plenty of “good” photos of my family over the years.

But something I’ve found is what I go back to the most are those poor quality, poorly edited, silly little videos I take of my family just living life. I used to avoid video because the outcome was just too hard to control. They would never turn out “good”.

But flipping through my digital albums now, I wish i took more videos. A poor video can capture a lot… maybe even more than a great picture. So I find myself taking a lot more videos now.

If you just start taking photos (with permission) and keep taking them eventually your subjects will get used to you being there and start acting normally again in most cases. It doesn't cost anything to take photos, except your time, so just keep spamming the trigger. Each exposure is a chance at a good photo, for the most part.

The thing about family photos that's most important is to have THE NAMES of everyone in the photo, not "mom" or "lucy"... actual full names, so that someone in a generation or two can actually understand who is who. My wife's family had that... but then the photos were ripped out of the album, and all context was lost. 8(

As much as possible, I've got every face tagged in my photos so sproutlet has something useful when the time comes.

I can understand the sentiment not to add extra work of scanning pictures of items that have seemingly not changed over the years. But I personally find these pictures interesting. I love to look at old pictures of say a square or a street and see how much or little has changed. I guess it depends on the viewer but I hope my kids don‘t feel the need to dump the hundreds and thousands of pictures of things they’re not a focus of. But I agree 100% on the non staged photo motive part. I took a lot of photos of my kids over the years and other people asked me to do the same for their kids. With the question why the fotos looked so good. I always explained my two secrets. 1. Go down to the same level as your kid. Most parents snap pictures of their little ones from above. This looks like a screenshot from the eye. The different perspective to see a kid how another kid sees it is more fascinating. 2. Don‘t Stage the Fotos. Try to capture interesting moments. You may have to lurk or wait. If you know the person well you get a feeling when a certain emotion will show on their face. That is something a staged photo won‘t give you. Doing group photos like this becomes more and more difficult of course. And when kids age they become more and more aware of the camera.

There was a similar journey for our family after our parents passed and indeed, the photos with people doing ordinary things are the ones we share and enjoy. The Grand Canyon has a way of looking the same now as it did in 1955 and so those photos were discarded. Five boxes of photo albums were examined and the photos to keep were cut out and sent to be digitized organized by year and topic. I am glad someone wrote about their experience and the tips that come from having spent examining a life well photographed.

I second his opinion. No point to take the 15 million's photo of the eiffel tower. Loved ones of course. But also the street! What I find the most interesting in old family pictures is a window into how people I know, or only apart by only one degree of separation, lived at a completely different time. What seemed mundane at the time is often the most amusing a century later. That's also what I like in old movies. Like just the streets of Paris in the early 70s look foreign to a modern eye. Hardly any traffic, you could park anywhere, hardly any advertising boards.

I agree with most of that.

After doing some in-house scanning I sent a bunch of stuff out. At the time, there was a company in CA that put stuff on a pallet to India. A bit butt clenching but it was great and I wrote a review for CNET where I was in the Blog Network at the time. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/reviewing-the-result...

Was probably more selective than you. And agree that a lot of the day-to-day stuff outside of the house in particular simply wasn't recorded. No photos of my mother's chemistry lab for example.

I've thrown a lot of stuff out but could probably get more scanned but not sure after looking at it if another pass is worthwhile.

If you can, get yourself a DJI Osmo Pocket 3 and a drone.

Completely transformed our catalog of memories. When you weave scenery with experiences and people, something magical happens.

Our recent trip to Taiwan: https://youtu.be/7LWxVzZco0A

Our photo library currently consists of 300,000 photos. It goes back 20 years, and while i would like to say it is curated, the sheer amount of photos makes that task pretty much impossible.

We take a lot of photos, both of family/friends/pets, but also landscapes and nature, and when curating the photo library, i often find myself deleting the landscape photos of 10 years ago. We don't need to keep 200+ photos of sunsets. Yes it was a pretty sunset, but there are hundreds of those every year, and unless it includes photos of our family or something else "special", the photo doesn't stand out, and will eventually be a candidate for being deleted.

I just finished the years curating, and have deleted almost 60,000 photos from the library. Sunsets, blurry photos (that doesn't have any other value), screenshots, and lots more.

Eventually i will however have to curate it even more. When our kids eventually "inherit" the photo library, they'll most likely be overwhelmed by the sheer size of it, and simply discard it. On the other hand i don't want to leave them without photos of their childhood, and who's to say what matters to them as memories.

I'm in the middle of a similar project but using a mirrorless camera with a macro lens and a repro stand.

I second most of this, but would like to offer a different opinion about triage. In my experience, doing the triage often takes as much time as digitizing the slides. "Mindless" mass digitization where I just optimize for throughput has been a good strategy for the collections I've worked on.

Instead I'm more careful of what I choose to post process after I digitization. I haven't been throwing much away yet, I usually just don't process the stuff I don't find interesting. Storage is cheap these days.