If your home should be threatened by flooding, approaching forest fires or other natural disasters would you be able to quickly rescue your valuable photographs? With forest fires currently raging across parts of Canada and the U.S. many people have been forced to flee their homes. For many of those who have lost their homes one of their deepest regrets is losing valuable family photographs, those parts of their lives that are irreplaceable and are now gone forever.
Most of us know and acknowledge that our photographs are one of the things we would most want to save. If disaster struck you today would you be faced with taking family photographs off the wall, looking at shelves full of photo albums and deciding what to rescue, or worse yet would you be looking at bins and boxes full of pictures and wondering what to do, what to take? If you have a young family you hopefully have an evacuation plan in place. Now is the time to put a photo evacuation plan in place for your photographs as well. Yes it takes time to do, yes it can be tedious work, yes it is easy to put off, but who is going to do it if you don't.
In our digital age it is easy to keep photographs in the My Pictures file on our computers organized and backed up, but many of us fail to do that. The first step in your photo rescue plan is to get your photographs organized. Programs like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and I Photo to name a few have user friendly programs that help you add metadata information to your photos, and an easy system of folder organization that once implemented is easy to maintain. Sorting through your photographs and deleting photos is also part of this process. Do you really need 3 versions of a picture that is almost identical to other photos? Be ruthless, delete blurry, out of focus pictures, pictures of poor quality, or pictures that no longer mean anything to you. On a go forward basis make it a habit to review your photographs after loading them onto your computer and erasing ones that you do not like so that you do not have to continually go back and do this.
When you have your digital files organized on your computer the next step is a back up plan. Photos can be backed up on external hard drives or portable hard drives, burned to DVD's or even sent to share sites where a full resolution copy is permantely kept for you. As a travel photographer I find shared sites invaluable for protecting my photos when I am travelling. The costs of external drives has become very reasonable within the last few years and they really reduce the worry about losing valuable files.
The same discipline needs to be applied to old prints, negatives and slides. As the person in my family who has become the "family historian" I have boxes of inherited photos going back three generations. It is a huge job to sort through these photos and determine what is worth preserving, what will add meaning to our family history, what is of personal importance to me. If you truly value family history make it a labor of love to start the process. You do not need to scan all of this material yourself (a slow and tedious process), there are companies that you can send your photos to that will clean and scan old photos, negatives and slides and burn them to DVD for you. Not only are these pictures now more manageable should a disaster occur, they are now in a format that you can do something creative with. It is very easy to now create photo books that can be printed and easily shared with family members.
Disaster can strike at any time, make sure you have a photo evacuation plan in place.
About this Author
Jillian Paulson is the owner of Out of the Shoebox http://www.outoftheshoebox.ca a site devoted to creating photobooks to preserve family memories. Jillian is passionate about the need to get photographs out of storage boxes or off of computer hard drives and putting them into archival quality photo books that can be enjoyed for years to come.
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