Don’t you love it when you feel like you’ve made an accomplishment? I’ve been working intensely on increasing efficiency in my digital photo management this week and I hit a milestone last night – I couldn’t be happier! Let me explain…
This past July I shared my latest upgrade to my photo organization strategy — namely, that I started using the Forever platform and was (still am in fact) highly impressed. Forever has a multi-faceted ecosystem for photo management, media conversion, photo gift creation, & photo printing – all specifically designed with an emphasis on telling the stories behind the photo.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve added another component of the Forever ecosystem to my workflow – the Historian desktop photo organization software. Doing so provides me the benefit of mirroring my photos between my desktop and the Forever website. My photos, the descriptions & tags I add, and the organizational structure I use, are the same locally (where I have it all backed up of course) and online (where I can share it 24/7 via web and mobile apps with family & friends). I can do this mirroring without Historian, but I really like the software’s ease of use and all of the available features.
Up until now, I’d been downloading my archive from the Forever website on a regular basis. I was doing this because, even though the company has a robust back-up system – the backups are all online and it is important to me to have an offline copy of my complete digital archive and not rely exclusively on the Forever website alone. Downloading everything from the website was tedious – I can only download 500 items at a time and it can take a while, so I needed to do things differently. Now that I’m using the Historian software I no longer have to download from Forever.
My photo organization process has 3 steps: 1) I use the free Adobe Bridge software to configure photo file names & write descriptions for each photo; 2) I import photos into Historian where I structure the photos into albums and apply keyword tags, and 3) I upload the photo to the Forever website.
I do this for all of my photos – genealogy or otherwise, and it is ridiculously efficient! I can create a file name that is consistent with conventions I’ve established for myself, apply metadata (i.e., write a description and assign keywords), and archive it online to Forever in just a few minutes.
My process could be further simplified if I did not use Adobe Bridge and instead wrote my image descriptions in Historian. However, I choose not to write my descriptions in Historian for a very specific reason related to the way Historian saves image metadata. Historian saves the description to the file and that description stays with the image when you export it out of the software – this is good and extremely important! I can recommend Historian precisely because it does do that. Without getting into the technical details there is one small aspect related to how Historian saves some of the metadata that is not my favorite personal preference. So, I choose to use Adobe Bridge. Most people would probably be adequately well-served by using just Historian + Forever Storage though. The way a software program saves metadata is my #1 priority when it comes to choosing one; I’m quite picky about it because never want my photos held hostage.
The end result after I take my photos through this process? A digital photo collection that is organized, searchable, browseable, & easily shareable to friends & family with long-term access. I’m practically giddy now that I have it all set-up so well! Key to this is using metadata though – and believe me, you want metadata on your photos; here are my reasons why.
So..what was my accomplishment this week? I have now fully mirrored my photo archive between Historian and Forever’s website. I specifically wanted to mirror the two prior to continuing to add to my archive. At this point, my Historian & Forever photo archive has about 2,000 photos but I am hardly done organizing as I have many, many, many, photos to process. Not to mention all the photos I will continue to take – but I can at least rest assured knowing I have such a robust system in place.
If you are curious about Forever and want to try it out, you can sign up for a free starter account (comes with 2GB of space). Let me know if you do because I love talking about it and would be more than happy to show you more of the details about how I do this process!
Disclaimer: I am an Ambassador for Forever.com. The link I include above to the site enables you to get a free account (which comes with 2GB of storage space) and a $10 coupon. Your free account gets you started so that you can explore how Forever can work for you! You also get me as your personal ambassador 😀