Last month I gave a new Zoom lecture for a geneology club entitled "Preserving Your Ancestors' Pictures". It went into a lot of interesting subjects that most of the attendees were unaware of (many of which were touched upon in this blog post from 2018, and I also discussed data preservation techniques I wrote about in this blog post from 2014 about digital bit rot).
The last part of that talk showed off some of the new capabilities of generative AI programs (the same programs that will ultimately erode trust in what you see and poison all of the internet, making anything on the internet wholely untrustworthy.) But until that happens, you can use programs like Google's Nano Banana Pro or Remini.ai to clean up old images. Below are some impressive examples I gave from the talk (click on any image to view larger and sharper):
Another point in the talk I've never blogged about is what to do with your old family photos once you've learned that nobody wants them. Geneologists I've spoken to tell me that interest in family history tends to go in cycles, with interest peaking every 3 generations or so. I've actually run into this problem myself, as all of my parents' photos have been digitized and made available to the family via Google Photos, and yet the physical photo albums remain and nobody (myself included) seems to have the extra space for them, yet also don't have the heart to throw them away.
In my talk, I discussed uploading such digitized images and captions to family history websites like geni.com, MyHeritage.com, or LegacyStories.org. But it feels like a shame to toss the original photo albums! All that living history -- out the window!
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| My mom, going through family photos, writing who was in each image on the back so future generations would know. She died in 2019. |
Here, the Internet Archive (https://archive.org) can provide nice home for historians. Most of you know its alter ego, The Wayback Machine, where you can find old content that has been removed from the internet. It turns out that the Internet Archive preserves more than just web pages - they will also provide a good home for home movies, podcasts, old radio plays, old TV shows, old software, old political ads, and the entire Library of Congress.
Not only will they accept scanned photo album pages, but you can even send the physical books to them and they will scan them for you - and then preserve the original album in their physical archive. Here's an example of the Patterson Family Photo Archive that is being preserved for future generations. And here are instructions for uploading and adding metadata. Want to donate physical artifacts like photo albums? Instructions for that are here.
National Geographic photographer David H. Wells, whose 50-year photographic career I wrote about in Cameracraft magazine back in 2024, has this problem in spades. “I love my daughter, but when I'm gone, I'm sure she's going to go through all this stuff and say, ‘Oh I like that picture of me’. Then she’ll toss the rest because they’re not relevant to her.” Through a lot of effort he managed to get his life's work preserved in the archives of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Although I still have to do all the captioning and keywording” he says.
At the end of that article, he urged everyone who will listen to him to ask the following question: “What will YOU do with your imaging archive? What steps are you taking to ensure your work has a lasting impact and doesn’t evaporate? If you don’t want your life’s work going to the trash, then you should start acting NOW." Food for thought.
Next Time in Cameracraft Magazine
Nevada is a multiple award-winning photographer specializing in documenting the remote corners of the world and the cultures that inhabit them. Having worked with National Geographic for 30 years, she has built her impressive career on capturing the humanity of the people she meets. When the Iran war started, she decided to start sharing some of her favorite images from her three trips to Iran in 2017 and 2019 on social media. It was an effort to present another side of the country that the West never sees.
In the next issue, I sit down with her to discuss her photography, her career, and how, at 74, she's showing no signs of slowing down. Subscribe to Cameracraft Magazine digital edition for the full scoop!
Wanna Write Books on the Latest Cameras?
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Parting Thought
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| Once upon a time, the ARPAnet was the conduit through which research institutions could share their findings. That turned into the internet which gradually morphed into a cesspool of ignorance (with some chemtrails thrown in). Today AI slop is exasperating the problem exponentially by diluting whatever truth remains and then new AI models train on that. In a fitting show of irony, I created an AI image which illustrates the problem. :-) |
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