Get the latest info about photo organizing, photo editing, workflow, scanning and new products to help you keep your family photos organized.
I deal with the same challenges and frustrations you do. I'm always searching for, and trying to keep up with the latest photo technologies and tips, so let me do all the hard work and sort it all out for you.
I just finished a large slide scanning job for a client of over 4500 slides. The camera scans I did on the 50-70 years old slides made them look like they are taken yesterday, the camera scanning quality is that good.
I can’t show you my clients work, but here are some slides and negatives of mine I recently scanned. Some of these I haven’t seen in decades, but all wonderful memories.
Read MoreAdobe just updated Lightroom Classic with some interesting new features. I’ve had a few clients call me as they were confused about some changes in the way the tools in Develop mode now display. If you wish to set up a session to go over these new tools, or anything else, let me know and we can go through them.
Here are the basics of the new changes.
Read MoreLightroom – Information is everything
One of the most common things I come across when I first see my client’s Lightroom catalog is this generic display on their thumbnails, displaying absolutely nothing of importance. So one of the first things I do when helping to set up a catalog for a client is to show them how to display important and helpful information in the Grid view of their catalog
Read MoreOn Wednesday, August 17, 2pm Eastern Time, 11am Pacific Time, I will be doing a webinar with Cathi Nelson from The Photo Managers titled: How to De-Dupe Your Photos & Why It Matters.
Read MorePhoto editing is story-telling. When we edit our photos, whether it’s for a photo album or just our general library, we are telling stories of an event, a trip, a person’s life or even just a great day we had.
As part of Save your Photos Month, I will be giving a free 20 minute webinar on how to become a better photo editor. I have over 20 years as a professional photo editor and will talk about the editing methods I have found to be the most effective, ways to train your eye and mind to work efficiently, and utilizing best practices to achieve consistent results with all your projects.
Read MoreI’ve always wondered how people get through wars and other frightening times that can occur during one’s lifetime. My mother and father lived through the depression and then later WWII. My grandmother was a medical practitioner treating German Soldiers during WWI and then later had to endure the Spanish Flu which came just as the war was ending. My God what a time!
Last week I found myself, like most of us, cycling through a range of emotions: fear, hope, hopelessness, despair, denial and as much acceptance as I could muster. As both the parent of a teenage boy and the son of a very at-risk mother in an asssited living, every decision I find myself facing carries many potential consequences. I get absolutely exhausted just trying to navigate what used to be the simplest daily decisions in my life.
But I don’t really have to tell this to anyone do I?
Read MoreI work with many clients, and as one might expect the collections I am seeing are getting bigger and bigger. I am currently working on two personal photo collections over 100k images and that is not uncommon.
The question then becomes, where is this going and do we really want to go there?
Read MoreI recently became a regular contributor to the popular website Sixty and me.
Read my latest article here - Have you become the designated family photo historian?
Read MoreI recently placed a post-it note on my computer screen that asks – What do you want your photo collection to look like in ten years?
Although it was meant mostly as a reminder to me, it's now a question I ask my clients as well when starting a new project with them.
In this age of massive digital accumulation, it is something worth thinking about, especially if we believe a family photo archive has value to us, not only in our lifetime, but to those we might consider passing it down to in the future.
Apple Photos has a trifecta of features – Live Photos, Burst Mode and HDR, that while offering some convenience and perks, really are part of a strategy that long-term results in massive subscription fees from ever-expanding iCloud accounts. OK, that sounds pretty paranoid, but it’s essentially true.
Apple has released these cool features over the years, which can unquestionably elicit a few oohs and aahs, but ultimately eats up enormous amounts of storage space while the unaware user has no idea why it’s happening. When you think about the relatively short period of time that iPhones, and in particular these features, have been around, it is staggering to think what 10 years, 20 years and more will bring in terms of these growing storage eating features that keep getting rolled out.
Read MoreFor years my mother had old photos of myself and other family members and friends thumbtacked to a corkboard in her kitchen. When I moved my mother out of her home a few years ago I had to remove these up to 40-year-old photos that were now faded and yellow and had multiple tiny holes in them from the repeated thumbtacking. If one didn’t know better you might have thought that I and my other family members were victims of some terrible voodoo ritual. Maybe Mom did have some unresolved feelings she was expressing, but more likely they just kept falling down.
Read MoreI’ve mentioned many time that my Grandfather, Boris Lenoff, owned and ran a portrait studio on the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. It later moved to Ocean Parkway and probably closed sometime in the sixties when he sold off the entire inventory of cameras and photo files.
Read MoreIts so hard to talk about Capture Dates without getting super excited, so I will just calmly start at the beginning. OK, there’s actually nothing at all exciting about Capture Dates, but if you are working with digital images or scanned prints/film you do need to understand them a bit as they can either make your digital life a lot easier or very confusing.
The Capture Date is the date and time that a photo is taken.
Read MoreMy family and I visited the museum the other day here in LA to see the renowned King Tut exhibit. It will be the last time much of the collection will be able to be seen outside of Egypt, ever! The key word here is “seen”, as in looking at something and experiencing the use of our sensory ability called sight. If I am starting to sound sarcastic it is because as I wandered around the exhibit looking at all these ancient marvels, I also started to notice that many of those around me were not actually looking at the relics, but walking around and taking photo after photos of them with their mobile phones.
Read MoreIn 1974 my brothers Tim and Nico took a trip out the Midwest to visit their grandparents. My stepmother Susan was originally from Minnesota but her parents had relocated to Missouri and so the family took off for the heartland. Along the way they stopped for a visit to Mount Rushmore.
I love this shot that my father took. The quintessential snapshot would have typically had my brothers facing the camera, framed from head to toe (because we all know how important it is to include footwear in meaningful family portraits), with the four presidents shrunk to minuscule versions of themselves in the background.
Read MoreI am always telling my clients that we all need to become the editors of our own life story, but sometimes figuring out what makes a photo worth keeping and adding to our story isn’t so easy. I’ve been a photo editor for years, but the criteria I used for professional editing and what I might consider for editing family photos isn’t necessarily the same.
What they both have in common is story telling, that’s what editing is. But while a professional edit requires a certain level of technical quality, family photos are more about emotional connections to people, places and things, the stuff memories are made of.
Read MoreHow many photos will you have in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? Kinda scary right? And what about videos? Yikes!
Aside from the holidays, summer is the time of year we take a lot of pictures. Taking lot of pictures is great, but taking so many that you don’t even want to look at them, let alone edit them, is not OK. Also ballooning the storage on your phone is not fun, so let’s focus on quality not quantity this summer. Here are a few ways to do that.
Read More…scanned from my archive. Mom, circa 1928. Mom just celebrated her 96th birthday last week. She’s here in LA, a long way from her Brighton Beach, Brooklyn roots, but she is close to her family, especially her grandson, and that is more important to her than geography. These are a couple of photos taken in her father’s photo studio which was located on the first floor of the apartment building she grew up in. The entrance to the building was on Brighton 4th street, but my grandfather’s studio was entered to directly from the Coney Island Boardwalk, just a hop, skip and a jump from the beach and the Atlantic Ocean.
Read MoreSounds like the diagnosis of a patient, right? Well like the human body, a photo collection is really a system of connections, and if all is not well with that system, it doesn’t work quite the way it should.
As a professional photo organizer, when I see a client for the first time, I actually do a diagnosis of their photo collection to see how healthy it is. I’ve seen some pretty sick photo libraries in my time, but thankfully no terminal cases so far.
So the question becomes, what makes up a healthy photo collection? Basically I am looking to see how it works in these six areas:
Is it organized?
Are images findable?
Are images accessible?
Is the collection safe?
Can images be shared?
Is it endurable?
email - peter(at)fotoflowsolutions.com phone - (three one zero) - 312-6640 All photos ©Peter Bennett - All Rights Reserved
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