Pictures help us celebrate and grieve. Photos tell our stories. 

We use photos to help us heal and keep our stories, memories, celebrations alive. 

Are there particular images you want used for your celebration of life? Have them printed and place them in an envelope for future use. Be sure to let someone know where they are too. 

Look through your images and mark them with the people's names and stories while you recall the details. Future generations will appreciate your efforts! 

If you're like most people, you probably have lots of digital and printed photos that you'll sort "someday." You may have a vision of sorting the images in chronological order, tossing duplicates, and creating a photo book to share. You'll look through the book with friends and family and maybe even send some photos from the olden days to your friends. You probably can see the trend here, someday keeps getting pushed out to the distant future. 

Our photos are proof that we existed. Images show that we had family, friends, accomplishments, and love. Photos show we belonged. We keep our favorite images to recall that our lives were unique and special, and showing pictures to people is how we tell our stories. 

Two people looking at a photo can burst out laughing while recalling what happened in that photo captured with paper and dye. Stories and traditions get preserved when you know the story behind the image. 

Do you have some time available? (Yes, I'm writing this during a pandemic.) Spend it organizing your photos, take comfort, and honor those special days. Connect with your family while you preserve your memories. 

Take these steps to organize images:

1. Look through photos on your smartphone camera roll. See how far back your digital pictures go, and where they leave off.
2. Search your home for old computers, hard drives, USB drives, and disks for digital photos that aren't on your phone. Check old digital cameras too. Have you uploaded images to the cloud? Track those images down.  
3. Gather your print photos, including albums, framed pictures that aren't on display, slides, VHS tapes, reel-to-reel movies, 35mm film, and any undeveloped film.
4. Once you've gathered your collection, you're ready to start moving the group to a central digital hub. There are many excellent digital storage options, including Google Photos, Apple iCloud, Amazon Photos, and more. Select a service you are comfortable using.  
5. Backup, backup, backup. You should have multiple image copies on numerous drives, and use cloud solutions rather than one digital photograph.  
6. Once you have numerous digital backups, print your most important photos. Weed through all your images and select the best ones to print. If you have 150,000 images in your collection, they're not all the best. Print your favorites.
7. Make sure you let someone know where your photos are living. Knowing where digital images exist is especially vital. Give someone you trust access to your phone, your computer, or your cloud account and provide them the passwords.
8. Share your photos and stories with someone you love. Preserving and sharing your photos will help you pass your stories to future generations.

If you could use some help making a curated collection of photos that is accessible on all your digital devices get in touch. We're here to help you preserve your photos, whether we took them for you or not.