Photo Management | 5-minute read
Estate Talks | Family Legacy | Legacy Management
Main Link: Estate Talks Podcast: Family Legacy: Photo Management
Photos, slides, film, video – how to divide? How to organize? How to preserve? For many families, this responsibility falls on the executor of the estate.
Not normally on the usual checklist for estate administration, legacy management of important family history and materials often becomes an estate task. Who will be the steward of this legacy? Who will carry the family history and stories forward? How do you distribute this among the heirs?
Out of the need to digitize and organize photographic and related media, a cottage industry has arisen. Professional photo organizers are specialists who will receive, organize, digitize and curate a family’s photographic property so it may be distributed accordingly down the generations.
Executorium.com’s George Compton spoke with the CEO of The Photo Managers, Cathi Nelson, about best practices, tips, considerations and precautions, as families stare down the pile of family photos and media and ponder, “What to do?”
This episode of Executorium’s Estate Talks Podcast was broadcast on Wednesday, May 8, 2024.
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The following transcript has been edited for readability.
EX: Welcome to Estate Talks. I’m George Compton I’m publisher of Executorium.com. Today we have Cathi Nelson the CEO and founder of the Photo Managers. Executors have a lot of duties and often they come across boxes, albums, scattered pictures of family members. They find themselves the stewards of the legacy of the family. I hope they have some help! We have some help – we have Cathi here to tell us about how to handle some of those challenges. Cathi transformed her hobby of organizing photos for family and friends into a full-time business in 2009. The photo managers boasts over 700 members worldwide who help people organize, curate, and take care of their photos, for sharing and storage and caretaking. Cathi welcome to Estate Talks.
CN: Thank you. Glad to be here. Good topic
EX: What is the importance of having a goal and what are some examples?
CN: We break it down into five steps because it’s overwhelming. Especially if you’ve inherit, or you’re dealing with an estate like you mentioned, there’s always going to be boxes of photos and old albums. Maybe with photos of a lot of people you don’t know! There’s going to be home movies on outdated media formats. There’s going to be slides and negatives and all sorts of things, right? So, the first thing we say is really, “What is the goal?” It’s like eating a elephant one bite at a time, so what is your goal in the process?
What we would recommend is curating the collection so that you’re really just getting it down to the top 10% of what’s in that collection. Nobody really wants to inherit a lifetime of somebody’s photos, that may include photos that they inherited from an estate. Maybe their parents had passed away and they never did anything with those photos and then those boxes have been moved down to the next generation. So, the goal would be to really think about what is what do you want done with all these photos [and] videos in the future, and who who’s interested in them, and who wants access to those.
EX: Those are all good questions and not obvious to the person staring at a box of Super Eight and 8 Millimeters, and slides, and pounds and pounds of “stills.” So, I think that is important to revisit those goals as you’re going through. As you say it can be so overwhelming.
CN: Next step, if we jump ahead, is gathering everything into one place. So, if you know what you have, it’s really helpful to just do an inventory so that you realize, “we have seven boxes of loose photos, we have 15 albums.
(Note: If you quickly open the albums you can see if there’s some dates, that somebody did write something, so you have an idea [of] the time. Maybe there’s some dates on the on the little cam quarters. Use an Excel spreadsheet so that you have an idea of what it is.)
If it’s in a estate, gather everything from the basement, and the bedrooms, and the closets and get it all in one place so that you have a good sense of what you have. I’m going to promise you that in there are just treasures from the past.
When you’re overwhelmed in that moment, you might just think, “I just don’t want to deal with any of this – let’s just get rid of it.” But I promise, that that is not what you want to do because in there are going to be photos and stories and memories that are just priceless.
You can ask for help. There are professional photo managers who would come in and actually take all that away for you curate the collection, based on some interviewing process, and digitize it, and do all that for you. There is help at the photomanagers.com for that process, and maybe the family members could divide up the cost of that.
But just say, that’s not possible… Once you have everything in one place, and you know what you have, the second thing we talk about is the curation, is to “go through”. This is going to take some time but you can do it fairly quickly. Get some big garbage bags.
(The VCR tapes and all the little camcorder [tapes] – those should be taken to an expert to be digitized. There are just treasures on there, and I wouldn’t throw those away, but they do need to be digitized. Many professional photo managers do that for a living. Once those are digitized, they’re in a media file format that you can store on the cloud; on an external hard drive and you’ll have access forever.)
The actual physical photos – if you have a big garbage bag, we recommend that you eliminate 80 to 90% of them. That means (just being brutally honest) you don’t need all the photos of the scenery shots, you don’t need all the photos of the travel vacations, the cruise ship, the Grand Canyon, the Coliseum in Rome, or the sunsets. What matters are the people in the photos. Maybe some of the historical – like old cars, or your house that you know from the 1930s, and what the trees looked like – those are the things that really people care about.
So that’s what you want to put aside. Get a large Banker Box, or a photo safe box, and we call those the photos archival worthy. Album photos just quickly put them in there and give yourself permission to be really brutal in terms of throwing things away that don’t really matter as much.
From there, you want to digitize those photos that are in that “A” box – the ones that you care most about. Again, a professional can do that, or you can box them up, and after the estate is settled, [you can,] when you have more time. You can certainly purchase scanners. It’s a tedious process, but it’s so worth it. You can also have many of those photos restored. If they’re yellowed, or they’re discolored, it’s amazing how those can be brought back to life.
If there’s any opportunity to get stories – especially if the family is gathering – set up your phone to capture stories. Get people talking about those photos and those stories. “Did you all go on vacation every year?” to “I remember when we went to Disney in 1964.” Gather some of those stories to go along with those photos once they’ve been digitized.
Make sure then you’re creating a backup copy and then you can distribute that to the whole family. Everybody can get a copy through an external hard drive or flash drive. Find a good cloud storage backup site as well. Technology today is amazing. People can go in and tell stories around those photos there’s lots of ways to do that because the sharing and enjoying is the last of those five steps we talk about. The best part is the sharing and enjoying that all those memories coming back.
If you’re cleaning out an estate before the funeral, and you have time, you can make beautiful boards – poster boards or a video montage telling the stories. People love to look at that, it brings back so many memories to see somebody lived, “I was here, they were here, they lived a life, they have a story”. That’s what’s captured in all those photos.
EX: I think there’s a cathartic process in this as well. You’re going through the 10% of the 100% and you’re for lack of a better phrase, “separating the wheat from the chaff” as you are with so much of the contents of an estate. It’s important to unburden the family from the chaff so you can move the best parts along.
What’s becoming popular are legacy books where you can take the better parts of what you find, “the treasures” as you say, and compile them. There is a healthy element to memorialize someone you’ve lost.
Cathi [regarding] negatives – is there a fidelity benefit or resolution benefit to recreating a good photograph from a negative as opposed to the print?
CN: The best reproduction of a photograph would come from the negative because it’s the original source. If you wanted to do that they can cost a little bit more, but negatives are the best source. If people already printed all those photos and then they kept the negatives, it is a decision to make. To scan the actual printed photo, and with photo restoration brought back to life, it’s okay to throw those things away
EX: So when you say scan, I know I can set my scanner for a PDF, I can set my scanner up for a JPEG, or a PNG, or a .TIF or a .BMP or who knows what. Do you have any advice about getting the best resolution, getting the best fidelity out of the photograph, when one does scan?
CN: We recommend for printed photos that 600 DPI is the best, it is what we recommend because you’ll be able to then reduplicate the photo in a better way. It’s all dots per inch. There’s a lot of mystery around, “what does all that mean?” but I think that would be the number one recommendation from The Photo Managers. A lot of our members do camera scanning now. They’re actually taking a photograph of the [photograph]. It’s not really a scan and can produce really great results based on the kind of lens that they’re using. You definitely want to you know there’s inexpensive ways to do this.
We joke about scanning sometimes. It’s like you know you’re booking a flight (I just did that recently) I got a really cheap [ticket]. I started out at $82, and by the time I paid it was up to $160 because I did want to bring a bag, and stuff. So it’s kind of that same idea with scanning [services]. Sometimes you can find a low price, but when you [consider] the DPI, the better quality, and things like that, suddenly you’re up to a higher price.
You want to make sure if you’re going to pay to have your photos scanned, you’re working with a reputable person. That the company’s going to do a good job for you.
EX: There’s obviously two ways to go. You can have a professional, and they’re doing this all the time and they understand these questions. DIY and you’re sitting there with a scanner and you’re sending it around to family members, one thing I’d point out is, be careful as you’re transmitting these photographs. What does emailing do to the size of the photograph?
CN: Yeah you don’t want to be emailing because it’s going to condense the file size.
First of all, to use cotton gloves. Here’s some tips so if you’re going through those boxes of photos – wear cotton gloves and mask. There’s mold spores and things, especially if nobody has opened them up in 25, 30 years. You do want to be careful because there’s dust and things like that.
Then when you’re going to do the scan yourself, get a soft cloth, and clean those photos. If you scan them, any of the dust that’s on those photos is going to be captured on the scan and then they get that grainy look. So, if you want them to look good, you want to make sure that you do that that’s really important in the in the process of what you’re doing and then just take the time to put them on a you know you can get external hard drives for really inexpensive today so you plug that into your computer and you’re scanning it onto to that and then you can duplicate that but it’ll keep the original size as opposed to like emailing photos excellent on Facebook you don’t want to put Facebook
EX: You have the original. Someone will ultimately be the steward of the originals going forward, and you don’t want to be putting those back into the to the box that your dad got at the liquor store in 1963. You want to have proper storage – I am familiar with Archival Methods.
CN: Good! Those are good friends of ours. Archival Methods out of Rochester New York – they’re really great, real helpful. You can get archival sleeves and boxes and things to keep those originals. The originals are still your source.
EX: The original source is really important. Keep them out of the sunlight, acid free boxes are important, sleeves of course, as you say.
This was very fun doing this.
There is a mountain of things to do with the estate, but you find yourself the steward of all this family legacy, family history. Maybe you have a brother or a sister or somebody can help with this while you tend to the fiduciary matters. You’re kind of the “legacy fiduciary.” You find yourself needing to move this on in a careful way.
Thank you very much for these tips that help us frame this; do this in in the right way.
The Photo Managers has a best practices paper on their website, ThePhotoManagers.com, the steps you want to take. 1. Establish your goals. 2. Sort and organize. 3. Save in the proper way. 4. Share. Keeping your goals first and formost, as you’re going through this pile, is very important. Such great advice Cathi. The Photo Managers is a good reference to turn to when you when you do need some help.
So, any other tips Cathi before we before we depart?
CN: I think one last important thing is people wonder, “Does the next generation really care about all these photos?” We say, “Yes. They absolutely do.” They don’t care about all of them, but they do want the ones that matter. Especially if you have kids – young adults in their 20s and 30s, right now they’re not thinking about it, but if they become parents someday, or the nostalgia starts, or then they want to know. I wish now – I thought I had asked my grandparents all the questions I wanted, but every once in a while, a new one will pop into my mind and I think, “Gosh, I wish I wish I had more photos.” I didn’t take the kind of photos in those days, but I wish I had more. I wish I had more of the stories around those photos. So when you have the families together – get those stories that’s what really matters, and it’s what connects us.
We’re human beings we’re wired to be connected, and the way we do that is really through these legacy assets of which are our photos, videos and keepsake items.
EX: I always say it’s not 2024, it’s 2044 and Uncle John is not here anymore. Aunt Darcy passed on and Mom and Dad are not available for those stories. Get the stories now. Attach them to the photos. You don’t want to attach them to 5,000 photos, you want to attach them to the top 50 photos. Make sure they’re there in 2044.
Every estate is different. Thank you Cathi and The Photo Managers for helping Executorium.com understand some of the basics of family photo management, and thank you for watching Estate Talks.
CN: Bye everybody.
Thank you very much Cathi for helping us understand Photo Management and the Family Legacy challenges of an estate.
Bio
Cathi Nelson
Cathi founded The Photo Managers in 2009. A long-time lover of both photography and storytelling, her passions have led her to be a vanguard for photography as history, particularly family history and legacy.
The Photo Managers – the world’s leading educational community in the rapidly growing field of photo management, serve Photo Management Professionals around the world. This growing profession of specialists who focus on the organization, digitalization and curation of photos and photo collections numbers many hundreds of certified professionals. An educational community built to exchange best practices, the management of photos and family legacy is their focus and mission.
Cathi is the author of Photo Organizing Made Easy: Going from Overwhelmed to Overjoyed and A Business Roadmap for Professional Photo Organizers. Cathi is committed to visual storytelling as a means of preserving and sharing personal life journeys.
Disclaimer: The opinions of Executorium’s Estate Talks hosts and Estate Talks guests are not necessarily the opinion of Executorium.com LLC, its principals, or its employees.