Better than a bundle of cookbooks

One of the new techtoys I acquired on my recent trip was a new mini tripod. I have an el cheapo model with very wonky legs so am delighted with this sturdy little replacement.

When I conduct GeniAus Hangouts on Air from my kitchen (so I can have a wired connection to the internet) I perch my webcam on a pile of coookbooks. When next I hangout I will be using my new Vanguard VS-86 Table Tripod with Ball Head.

I am most grateful to Mr GeniAus who braved the freezing conditions in New York City to fetch this item from one of my favourite stores, B&H Photographics.

The new toy

If you are suffering from Tripod envy you can order one online from B&H - they even ship to Australia.

Free Technology for Teachers: Two Good Free Guides to Digital Photography

Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers posts regularly about free resources. Many of his suggestions are eminently suitable in fields other than education.


Genealogists who use digital cameras to photograph family events, family graves and cemeteries, old documents will find these guides helpful.


Free Technology for Teachers: Two Good Free Guides to Digital Photography

Floundering in a Sea of Photographs

I read a very interesting post at the Olive Tree Genealogy Blog this morning in which Lorine discussed her plans to organise her family photographs. A number of readers had posted thoughtful comments to the post.

I made some comments that I think are worthy of post on this blog so I am repeating what I said  here.

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My four grown children all enjoy flipping through our family albums and reminiscing.I am preparing a digital album for each of them.

I have combined my parents and inlaws collections with mine - the photos are all in albums arranged chronogically.

Over the Christmas break I borrowed a scanner with a feeder that would scan 20 photos at a time - a great timesaver. Over a couple of weeks I scanned around 5,000 images into folders by year with subfolders of specific dates for occasions like weddings, 21sts with lots of images. I scanned the images as .tif images at a high resolution. These are saved on an external drive and backed up to another.

I already use Picasa to organise my digital photos so I imported all my newly scanned images into that program. So far I have tagged 35 years of photos with names,location and various other labels eg Christmas, Swimming, Family Cars. Initially I applied a year tag to each image (easy to do in big batches). I have 19 more years to tag so I can see that an end is in sight.

Once the tagging is completed I will easily be able to retrieve collections to burn onto CDs not just for my children but for aunts, cousins and family friends.

My advice is get your images scanned and then organise them with software like Photoshop Elements, the Windows Live product or Picasa. Don't try to scan with a flatbed scanner - it is too time consuming. Get hold of a scanner with a feeder for a more painless process. Scan at a high resolution and edit your images with software. I particularly like the straighten photo facility in Picasa.

Thanks for raising this issue. We all need to think about preserving current family history for future generations.

Moving to Picasa

When it was first launched I downloaded and tried Picasa as a means of organising my photos it did not provide the features I wanted so I looked for another tool.

When time permits (and it doesn't too often) I use Adobe Photoshop to edit new photos and restore old ones to their former glory but I like to have a simple tool that allows me to apply Metadata, do simple fixes and search and retrieve photos easily.

Initially I used the free Adobe® Photoshop® Album Starter Edition but it just couldn't cope with the number of photos I had (around 30,000 at that time). I moved over to Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 and have been using Elements 6.0 since its debut. This program struggles with my collection of 65,000 digital images on an external hard drive. As I have read some unflattering reviews of Elements 8 I have not bothered to upgrade to version 8. As version 6 still works (albeit slowly) I have not actively looked for another product to replace it.

I was recently on a Caribbean cruise that featured photographer, Peter Simon, as a guest lecturer and workshop presenter. Peter, a gentle man who has been taking photographs for 50 years, was a willing and enthusiastic tutor. In the few hours we spent with Peter my husband and I took on board many tips that we applied to our holiday snaps and that should enhance our future photographic efforts. We and other cruisers noted that Peter was using Picasa to download and organise his photos. In the workshops as he showed us examples of his stunning work and imparted his knowledge we were able to see various features of Picasa demonstrated. Peter suggested using Picasa as a 'staging post' to initially organise and edit photos. He then suggested using Photoshop to do more complex edits.

After Downloading a few thousand holiday snaps I decided to trial Picasa. The free download was easily installed and my photos imported. I quickly found that this program is a delight to use. So pleased was I that I imported the folders containing my 65,000 photos into Picasa. This happened very quickly and y photos were imported with their tags attached.

I find this tagging facility very easy to use although I would like to be able to nest my tags into categories. I love the ability to drag and drop photos into albums and the ease with which one can move files from folder to folder. Being able to upload pictures directly to Blogger is a bonus I hadn't expected to find. See my first uploaded photo in the previous post. The quick edits functions are situated conveniently on the desktop and so easy to use. That Picasa is a free application just adds icing to the cake.

I am going to say goodbye to Photoshop Elements and use Picasa.

Genealogists, if you are looking for a simple, user friendly program to organize your photos Picasa is worth a try. Thank you Peter Simon for your suggestion.

Put Together a Better Virtual Photo Album to Share with Friends and Family - Photo Sharing - Lifehacker

Put Together a Better Virtual Photo Album to Share with Friends and Family - Photo Sharing - Lifehacker

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