Three Fun Photo Ideas on a Family Road Trip

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Pixologie is on the road this week . . . traveling down to Florida where the Association of Personal Photo Organizers is having their national conference. Ann flew while Rosie and I drove the 18+ hours down to Orlando. I love road trips . . . and will jump at the chance to hit the open road.

One of the road trips I went on was with my friend and our two 10 year old daughters . . . we drove for a week from Wisconsin all the way around the East Coast – with the goal of seeing twenty states and two provinces. Ask me to see the scrapbook sometime, 3300 miles in seven days . . . it was an unbelievable adventure (name the landmark, we most probably were there!)

There are three things that I love having photos of when I’ve been on a road trip.

ONE – Sleeping child – the stressors goes with taking children on a road trip are many (food, bathroom stops, “are we there yet,” and on). But there is something special about looking back at my kid sleeping that tugs at my heart strings and brings some peace. Definitely take a photo of that moment if possible – you’ll know what matters when you look back at the memories of the trip.

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TWO – Unusual rest stops. . . You may not be lucky enough to find a rest stop that has something unique about it, so if another decidedly “different” stop catches your eye, snap a photo. You’ll better remember the story that goes along with it. I really wouldn’t have remembered this bathroom we stopped at in West Virginia – but the two toilets reminded me of the gas station. Not only could you stock up on snacks, bait, guns, ammo, camo and much more, there was a stuffed version of every type of animal that could be hunted mounted around the store. (Kind of like Cabela’s but in a rural, tiny town in the hills way.)

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THREE – Take a photo where it looks like your son or daughter is holding the monument. Okay, it does take some manuevering to position your child’s hands right where they should be, but the fun of driving your kids nuts with something might be worth it. You can see I got better one year to the next, thank goodness, my daughter is a great sport!

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Those are my thoughts about some photos to take on a road trip. I wonder what photos you might have from those vacations you took with your family on the road. If you haven’t looked in awhile, it is time to pull the photos out of boxes and off of memory cards and computers – and enjoy the memories!

Need help with sorting and saving your photos? Let us know!

www.pixologieinc.com

The Secret to Organizing Your Photos While Exercising!

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Oh the joy of killing two birds with one stone!

I really hate that analogy because I have never willingly killed a bird (just accidentally with the car.) Okay – on with what has to be one of the first times ever someone has organized her digital photos while exercising!

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Seriously, this is me this morning with my iPhone 5 and my trusty elliptical. (Sorry you aren’t getting a photo of me running on the elliptical organizing my photos – lol – I have some dignity!)

About a month ago we started testing a new photo organizing solution called Mylio.

Mylio is a photo management software system that works both on the desktop and as an app on phones and tablets. Mylio helps you gather, organize and access all of your photos across all your devices, anytime, anywhere. Mylio is available via annual subscription

I have Mylio installed on several of my devices including my laptop and my iPhone with an account dedicated to our Pixologie photos from our studio and our events. This means all my Pixologie photos are synced between my devices. When I make a change on one, it will update on my other devices. I needed to do some catch up sorting photos from the last month which I hadn’t gotten to yet.

While I was running on my elliptical this morning and playing my Bonnie Tyler Pandora station, I thought, how am I going to get through the next half hour of boring exercise? Then it it hit me, I could organize those photos waiting for me. I picked up the iPhone started up my Mylio app and sorted over 200 photos and deleted ones I didn’t need. The time flew by!

Then, when I went to my laptop sitting on my kitchen table, I could see that my updates from my phone had already synced to my laptop. See the screenshot below.

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This is my Pixologie Mylio account with 1800 photos in it. My personal Mylio account has 17,000+ photos in it.

Unbelievable! Two tasks that sometimes seem like a chore (exercising and photo sorting) – when combined was amazing, beautiful, wonderful!

If you have photos on multiple computers, tablets and/or iPhones, you might want to learn more about Mylio. We are excited to be offering it in person at our studio and online at our Pixologie Store. For clients who purchase it through us, we offer a complimentary Open Studio Time to get you up and running comfortably with it!

Want to learn more about Mylio? Check out their website at www.mylio.com.

Happy exercising & photo sorting!

Three Reasons Why You Need to Bring Your Family Photos to RootsTech 2015

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Roots and Tech, two words that are so completely different in nature tell so much about what is going to happen in Salt Lake City next month. Thousands of people who have a passion for their family ancestry will come together for three days to learn the latest in technological innovations that will help them tell their family’s story.

Last year, RootsTech reports that nearly 4,000 youth ages 12-18 attended their conference classes and activities. I love that statistic because I believe that, in addition to documenting our family ancestry, we need to teach our youth about where they have come from, what values mattered to their family and how hard work builds character.

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When completing a family history, we have found that photos are integral to telling a family’s story. Photos add impact to family lineages by visually connecting generations. There is a reason children, teenagers and even adults enjoy looking at photos of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents from “back in the day.”

Our friends at E-Z Photo Scan have been passionate about helping people digitize photos for over twenty years. They along with Kodak Alaris and FamilySearch are bringing over a dozen Scannx Photo ScanCenters to the RootsTech 2015 Conference. All attendees are invited to bring their photos to RootsTech for scanning at no charge.

Their goal is to scan 100,000 photos and treasured documents during the conference and you need to be a part of it!

Here’s three reasons why you should bring your photos with you to RootsTech 2015:

  1. This kind of scanning is easy and super fast! At a speed of up to 85 photos per minute, the scanners make quick work of digitizing your photos. (And did we mention free? Scanning photos can cost anywhere from 17 to 99 cents a photo depending upon where you go.)
  1. It’s such a relief to get it done! Many people delay scanning photos because it seems so overwhelming to start and, thereby, risk losing those photos to time, damage and other types of loss. Just get it done!
  1. Your photos have the power to strengthen your family’s story, traditions and values. We are a visual society and photos tell stories – bringing people and personality to life. We can see in our family photos how our ancestors lived, what values mattered and what life was like long before technological advances became an everyday happening. And. . . you will delight other family members when you can share the images with them as well.

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We are thrilled to hear about our colleagues’ goal to preserve 100,000 photos through the Scannnx Photo ScanCenters at RootsTech 2015. And, we are “rooting” for attendees to step up to the challenge of making their photos a priority, bringing them along for the ride to Salt Lake City and heading to Booth #1343 where family history will be saved!

For more information:

RootsTech 100,000 Photos Scanned Goal by E-Z Photo Scan

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At Pixologie, we help people get their photos out of chaos and back into life to be celebrated and shared. To learn more, visit us at www.pixologieinc.com. 

Top Three FAQs About Family Slides

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We wrote about the importance of families looking at their slides a few weeks ago. Here’s some frequently asked questions about getting slides converted at Pixologie.

Question: I have thousands of slides and have heard it is pretty expensive. How much does it cost?

Answer: We have two main options for our clients to have slides converted to a digital file.

  1. WE DO IT – Slide conversions cost 59 cents each and include color correction, dust removal and digital organizing.
  2. YOU DO IT – Our clients are welcome to come to our Open Studio Time which is $15 for three hours. You can use our simple Wolverine Converter at no extra charge and scan your slides yourself. We will be there to help answer any questions and assist with technical difficulties.

In either case, we can work with clients to prepare a quote that meets your needs while ensuring your memories are ready to digitally save and share.

Question: I think there are way too many travel scenes from my parent’s vacations with nobody in them. Do I need to save those?

Answer: We believe that the best slides are pictures of people you know – families doing things together, celebrating milestones and growing up. With that being said, we have seen that many, many slides have been taken of landscapes. We recommend perhaps saving a few of the very best landscape shots to keep with the family vacation photos.

Question: How do I save the digital files of my slides with my other photos?

Before answering this, we need to mention that we recommend saving all your digital photos on your computer in one place (free options include Pictures folder on a PC and iPhoto on a Mac). Here are some naming recommendations for your files of digital photos:

MAC – Save your slides as an event in iPhoto:

  • 1970s Slides or
  • 1960 to 1980 slides

PC – Name your folder as follows: YYYY-MM-DD Description.

Examples of this on a PC include:

  • 2010
  • 2010-01
  • 2010-02-17 Valentine’s Day

And then, so your folders will fall in date order, name your slide folders with the date first:

  • 1970s Slides
  • 1950s to 1975 Slides

If you are feeling ambitious, you can subdivide the folders into months and family events.

We’d love to help you get your slides converted now! There are too many family lessons and stories to be told from those memories to wait any longer. Here’s two ways we can help:

NUMBER ONE – COMPLIMENTARY SLIDE PICK-UP!

In February – FREE SLIDE PICKUP! We will come to your home and meet with you to pick up your slides. Please contact us to arrange this (within 100 miles of Milwaukee) at 414-731-1881 or email: contact@pixologieinc.com.

NUMBER TWO – OPEN STUDIO TIME TOOLS

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Come into our studio, for three hours, it’s only $15. Use our slide projector, slide sorter and more to figure which slides you want to save. Then you can use our Wolverine scanner to convert them yourself or have us professionally convert your slides for you!
No matter what you decide, it’s time to get those old slides out of their carousels and back into life to celebrate and share the memories!

website: www.pixologieinc.com

Three Reasons to Haul Out Your Slides Today!

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Back in 2004, my in-laws pulled out the slide projector and carousels of slides to go through. We had all the family over – twenty of us watching memories from the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. It was the one of the last times we were all together before my father-in-law passed away from cancer, and one of my favorite family gatherings.

Here’s my three reasons to haul out your slides today!

  1. It is the winter and a great time for family get togethers. How much fun is it to look at photos of you or your parents growing up?
  2. Reconnect with and celebrate your family traditions and memories. Today’s world operates by a different set of values, morality and norms. It does us all good to reflect on how family life has changed since the 1950s and 1960s. (See the Christmas group photo below – the whole family dressed up for the holiday, bow-ties and all!)
  3. Life flies by and before we know it, we can lose a loved one. Celebrate those memories together now when you can hear the stories aloud, instead of when it is too late. I know that Sunday afternoon, ten years ago, with my father-in-law will stand out in mind as long is I live – and I was blessed to have a photo of the event.

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Lastly, don’t just haul out the projector to watch the slides, have your slides converted to a digital file so the whole family can have a copy of these special memories to pass down to their children and grandchildren.

At Pixologie, we have scanned anywhere from five slides to thousands of slides for our clients. Let us know if we can help!

http://www.pixologieinc.com

email: contact@pixologieinc.com

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Like Taking a Picture of the Mountains

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Client empties her photo closet and takes a picture to show her own chaos

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Our dear friend Lori has her own successful business helping her clients create beautiful scrapbooks and digital photo books – a calling that she loves. But, something in Lori’s house was also calling her – a photo closet full of over 20,000+ (our eyeball guesstimate) printed photos that needed to be scanned before she could create her own scrapbooks of her family’s heritage.

Psychologically, her chaos of photos might as well have been the mountains, so overwhelming it was.

She wrote to us – “Not only do I have decades of old photos, and take hundreds/thousands of photos each year, but I also acquired heritage photos from my Dad, Pat’s parents, and Pat’s grandmother dating into the 1800’s” Here’s what she catalogued in her collection:

  • Her father’s photo albums (back row on table) – 15+
  • Sort boxes with 2400 photos in each of them – 6
  • Banker’s boxes stuffed full of developed photos and memorabilia – 8
  • CDs of photos
  • Files and additional boxes filled with photos – 4+
  • And many more not in the photos above

Frustratingly, Lori stopped scrapbooking because she wanted to back up the only copy of these photos digitally before she put them into albums. With the process being tedious and time consuming on her flatbed scanner, she was getting further and further behind.

Lori attempted to bring the six sort boxes to Pixologie to rent our high speed scanner in the studio – but this work didn’t even touch the volume of photos she needed to digitize. She then made the decision to rent our scanner in her home for an extended period of time. Here’s photos of when we stopped by her home to set the scanner up. She really did have a whole “photo closet.”

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Now with the Kodak Alaris Picture Saver Scanning System at her house, Lori can get to work at her pace in the comfort of her own home. She said “Approaching this project methodically has been helpful. It is not only fine tuning the photo sorting process, it’s also helping me get Historian (photo organizing and editing software) more organized and entering circa dates and info.” And below you can see how methodical she is with her work station set up in her office.

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Now that these photos are getting scanned quickly, Lori can start giving her photos a home in a family album so she and others can enjoy the memories.

Our high speed scanning rental includes a computer which has a very simple interface to use to get your scanning done. Click here for more details.

Please do not postpone or procrastinate on your photo chaos any longer – your family memories are just waiting to be rediscovered, waiting to tell the stories of your traditions, faith and growing up. We have solutions that will get your photos out of chaos and back into life to be celebrated and shared.

Our website: www.pixologieinc.com

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