Friday, June 26, 2020

A Simple Guide to Saving Your Family Photos: Book Review

From my bookshelf....

I am an avid reader and my genre of choice is non-fiction, history, biography and of course genealogy books.

From time to time I am going to start posting a book review of a book that I have on my bookshelf.

I hope you enjoy!


A Simple Guide to Saving Your Family Photos aims to help anyone who has photographs stashed in shoe boxes, plastic containers, under their beds or in the back of a closet. Many genealogists have this problem and are always seeking help to organize their photos.



Knowing where to start in photo organization is how this book begins. Bartlett says “I wrote this book in several chapters to set the state for the multiple phases your photo organization project can go through”. The author explains she and Ann Matuszak founded the company Pixologie, Inc. and states “it’s the first photo organization company of its kind in the country”.

There are seven chapters in the book; each deals with a different topic related to photo organization. Bartlett addresses many aspects of photo organization from organizing original photographs to dealing with digital photographs. Bartlett explains that preserving and organizing photos are important for our children, families and to connect the generations.

George Washington Stringfield Family, ca. 1903, Melissa Barker Photographs

This book has appropriately placed photographs of the organizational process in each page where that part of the process is being described. Many of the steps described in the book are in bullet point listings for easy reading and referencing. Bartlett instructions are concise and are very easy to follow.

On page 31, Bartlett provides an example of an age chart to use as a tool to dating photographs and is a great tool when trying a large amount of photographs. Chapter 3 discusses which photos to keep and which ones to toss. I pretty much agree with Bartlett’s suggestions with the exception of tossing photographs of people she says are “not relevant in your life anymore”. As an archivist, I would suggest that no photos of people be tossed but donated to an appropriate archive.

Age chart from Page 31


Bartlett gives the reader great step-by-step instructions on how to organize the many different kinds of photographs. The steps are easy to follow and there are many photos share in the book to help those that need visuals. Chapter 5 deals entirely with scanning photographs. Bartlett does a great job of explaining the process and the equipment needed to achieve this goal. The last chapters shows the reader how to back-up digital photos, save photos and use cloud storage for all digital photographs.

A Simple Guide To Saving Your Family Photos is a great little book and reference guide for anyone embarking on a photograph organization project.



Published 2016 by Pixologie http://www.pixologieinc.com 
ISBN 978-0-9978136-1-6

Get Your Copy from Amazon: https://amzn.to/3eDGy7m

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