When my husband and I attended the Family History Expo in Colorado Springs in August, I attended a class taught by James Tanner about Family Tree, the new product for our genealogy at FamilySearch.org. A light bulb came on in my head. I decided that Family Tree would be the best place for me to store (and archive) the Family History research I've performed in the last 15 years. Because of the new developments on the Family Tree, we are now able to upload a maximum of 5,000 photos to our personal account and can attach photos to the appropriate individuals in the Family Tree.
If the photos we want to upload are not already online or in digital format, it's necessary for us to scan those photos into a digital format. I've resumed my activity of staffing the Family History Center each Wednesday 5:00-7:00pm so I can help our Consultants and Patrons learn how to scan and edit our family photos and upload them to the Family Tree.
I encourage our Consultants to get familiar with Family Tree and start sharing (and storing) our old family photos so we can collaborate with others.
I regularly follow the posts that James Tanner publishes on his "Genealogy's Star" blog. I've learned so much from his teaching. Today he posted an article called "Update on Photo Management Software for Genealogists". Since I use Picasa for my photo editing software and have been teaching it in the Family History Center, I'm sharing what James posted about it in his blog.
At the entry level, there is Google's Picasa. This program is up to Version 3.9 and is a free download from Google. The program will automatically begin searching your computer's hard drive and any attached hard drives for images. It does not make a copy of the images and it does not share any of the images with the online world. It merely makes a thumbnail version index of each image and leaves the original image exactly where you had it on your hard drive. You then have a visual index of every image on or connected to your computer. Using Picasa you can move an image to a different file, rename images, rename file folders and find the original image on your computer. The program will also do some basic photo editing. There are many more functions of the program including tagging people in the photos and adding metadata tags to the images.
