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.

Take photos of your parents and loved relatives during daily life and their tasks. You will be far more moved and inspired by these pics, than by typical family group photos.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One criticism and one suggestion.

As for "include the photographer": unfortunately the photographer (aka me) is usually the only one who reads these articles. Whenever I ask someone else to take pictures of me they ask me to strike an artificial pose and then take a full-body shot. Hopefully one day my nephews will say "we don't know what uncle probably_wrong really looked like, but his pictures were great".

As for the suggestion: I stick to the rule "do not make albums with more than 36 pictures" which is the number of photos a roll of film used to deliver reliably. If you take 300 pictures and stick to the top 1% you'll quickly learn which pictures are worth keeping. Your friends and family will be silently grateful.

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

I just scrolled through my gallery, and the number of meaningful photos I had was zero.

Snapped a photo of my room first thing.

Just to share my experience: My brother and I recently digitized all our family photos. The process doesn't have to be so daunting. We found someone on facebook marketplace with a high quality scanner, and paid them to scan every photo and put it on a USB stick. I don't remember how much it cost but it was pennies per photo.

Does anyone have any recommendations of a site or a self-hosted option for uploading photo collections? I’d love to share photos of our child with the grandparents but end up just sending the odd snap through WhatsApp, it would be nice to make an actual collection.

I inherited similar boxes of thousands of unorganized photos when my mom died. I threw them all away. They weren’t meaningful enough to her to organize, and they meant even less to me.

My lesson is I don’t take photos. I realized long ago that I never look at them again.

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.

Good lessons. If you are using a cell phone, make sure the location is recorded.

> Labels matter. Even a few words helped me know when-and-where something happened: “1955 Nova Scotia” or my grandfather’s name. One of the saddest experiences was looking at a family-gathering photo from the 50s with several people in it, and having no idea who’s in it.

Dear lord, yes. My in-laws have just boxes and boxes of photos, some going way back into the late 1800s. The old ones are mostly people and faces. But we have no idea who these people are. My in-laws think they are related to them, otherwise, why would they be kept? But not a clue who this person is.

It's terribly sad in a way. My spouse doesn't want to throw it all away, it's family history presumably, but we have no idea if it'll ever be a history we know.

And so they sit in an attic, waiting for some magical technology to rescue it.

Labels matter.

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.

My dad took thousands of photos of us over the years. His big rule: every photo should include some family, and some landscape.

These points are also useful for your own photo library. Forget about your relatives going through your stuff after you die, that doesn't matter. But which of the hundreds of photos you took over the past few years would you look at again?

Right, it's the same kind of pictures mentioned in the article. Life happening. The kids helping you cooking, mom goofing around, the family hiking etc etc.

It's not the landscape, some flowers, fireworks, a beach usually. What you care about are people and the moments you spent with them.

I wish I had more videos of my kids when they were very young. That is what they seem to me the most interested in right now.

> I remember Pop telling me how much cheaper Ektachrome was (compared to Kodachrome)

gone are the days when ektachromes are considered the cheaper options.. now they are one of if not the most expensive 35mm format films

This is excellent, though modern cameras (let’s be real, phones) tagging photos with timestamps and geolocation obviates a few of the recommendations.

My startup idea is to put all those rules into an AI-engine and feed it my photo collection.

Just kidding..! But damn, a lot of my photos are of the scenery...

How do you guys organize your photos to give to your kids one day? We just have too many photos and videos. I like it, but I try to make some form of a library that has the best photos of each year/vacation/birthday, etc.

There is no need to see 50 photos of each vacation or birthday, but it's nice to see 3-5 and have the ability to dig deeper if you want to.

I need to do this with the giant pile of Polaroids I found in my dad's closet. For me it hasn't been any technical or logistical barrier, just an emotional one. I know I need to do it before something happens to them that makes me regret waiting, but I just haven't had it in me yet even after two years.

> I bought a heavy-duty slide scanner to help me process the images. It’s a Canon CanoScan 9000F. I like it, in case you’re shopping for an affordable unit; in particular, I do not loathe the built-in software, which sets it apart from other scanners I’ve used.

I hope this is not unwelcome as it is admittedly tangential to the actual topic of this post, but this line makes me want to throw out an unsolicited recommendation for VueScan from Hamrick Software: https://www.hamrick.com/

I am not affiliated with them in any way aside from being an extremely happy customer. Easily the most value I've ever gotten out of a piece of shareware, perpetually licensed, supporting Windows, Mac, and Linux. I got into it to revive a '90s scanner whose software wouldn't work at all on modern computers, and I've come to prefer it over all OEM software even on my newer gear. Truly the great equalizer that makes the hardware features the only things which matter.

I currently use it with a Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL (when I want CCD+CCFL scanning and/or large-format scanning) and an Epson PerfectionV700 (when I want CMOS+LED scanning). It supports the film/transparency scanning features of both if you have the appropriate expansion lids. Here's a random screenshot from my shots folder, not of transparency scanning but it's what I have on me. It does have a lot of built-in cleanup options which I use with about a 50:50 mix of cleanup in Photoshop CS3. I especially like its built-in debayering https://i.imgur.com/xfBwZq8.png

> Include the photographer. I have few pictures of my father, because he was always the guy behind the camera. When he did ask someone to take a picture it was always posed, such as “Mom and Pop standing in front of the Grand Canyon.”

In my experience as a frequent traveler of the US West, it's rare now to even be asked. For me probably fewer than five times. I don't know if people these days feel uncomfortable asking due to how damaged and low-trust society has become thanks to those who need us all to hate each other so they can stay in charge, or if people have just been out of the habit for so long that they never had that example and thus don't even think of it.

I've started keeping an eye out for groups of people posing for photographs, especially when they are visibly families vacationing with kids, and I will ask them if they want a group shot if I read them as amenable to it. Some people say no, even once in a while aggressively so, but the acceptance rate is incredibly high and it makes me happy to be able to give them those memories. It probably helps that I am visibly non-threatening in a privileged way that society does-but-should-not enable, and that I'm usually carrying a chonky mirrorless camera on a strap so people are less likely to think I'd steal their phone lol

> Even though I spent much of my childhood writing letters, there is only one photo of me with a pen in my hand — and that was taken by a friend at summer camp. Yet my friends and family all recall me with a book or pen within reach. My father never captured that essential part of who I was.

It's interesting to see the way the human mind works here. We take photos on vacations and of unique events due to their novelty making them feel like something that can't be re-experienced, and we don't photograph the day-to-day activities because they are so familiar to us while we're in those stages of our lives. Turns out it's the other way around: the Grand Canyon will always be there, and the people won't :/

> Crop photos closely. My father took a lot of photos of “Mom in front of a pretty vista” but in the long run I care more about Mom’s expression than the expanse of mountains in the background. Thanks to iPhoto I can zoom in, but a lot of detail is lost.

These days when we're all digital and not paying per roll of film, I take both. Zoom with your feet. It doesn't have to become an overwhelming number of photos — just two. Tying back to my earlier comment, when I offer to take a photo for people I usually tell them I'm going to take one of the scene and then walk forward and take one more. I did this just two weeks ago for a very appreciative family at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History at Kirtland AFB. One wide landscape shot of them where you can read the building façade and tell where they were, and one tight portrait shot of just them :)

I don't know, I never really cared about photos other people take, and I neither did I show my photos to other people. When I die, there will be nobody left to care about any of the photos I took. I guess I'm just not a family type

Strangely, the thought that my porn collection will be dumped is more unsettling

Also: Try to give everyone the same good camera. I gave my girlfriend a pro iPhone very early in the relationship, anticipating tons of photo taking, and it paid off. The phone could capture any moment, even challenging ones and very easily share it with her family and me.

I wonder what will happen to the photos we take today, if they will "bit rot". The HDD and cloud storage wont last forever, maybe 20 years if we are lucky, or until someone stops paying the monthly fee. Meanwhile these films have lasted for 40+ years.

Many years ago, I built http://legacy-labeler.com so people could label their photos for posterity. It's admittedly clumsy, and nobody uses it.

"Whereupon, three days after my father formally retired in 1988, he died in his sleep."

There's a deep point here about approaching life as it pertains to all the things we say we'll do after we retire.

Worth mentioning photoprim, if you maintain photos on local hardware, nas, etc.

https://www.photoprism.app/

I'm scanning in my family slides and right now I'm scanning in when my dad was in the Vietnam war. The shots of the Vietnamese and the town are fascinating.

there's this wisdom I read a long time ago: "there's millions of photos of the Grand Canyon. There's only one or two photos of the Grand Canyon with you in it."

I really wish people would stop using medium.com. There is no real benefit, it is so easy to host a website and Medium keeps paywalling content that other people have written.

My advice? Never take a photo again. Only video. Video is so much more powerful for re-experiencing memories.

Says David Lynch as John Ford [0]:

When the horizon's at the bottom, it's interesting. When the horizon's at the top, it's interesting. When the horizon's in the middle, it's boring as shit!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mAyNNBOdns&t=2s

Does anyone have a recommendation for a self-hosted photo app that pushes to commercial cloud storage behind the scenes intelligently (I.e. I don't want thumbnails stored there etc) and which can use a local GPU for person-identification, scene identification etc.