 Whoa, we're off to our first technical glitch of the day Hi guys, I'm Angela and I'm here to help you navigate the world of house cleaning and decluttering and today. We're talking about Hold on photos. I know I'm a huge photo fan. I love my photos I've been taking photos for about 30 years and I remember the first time I got my first camera I just went crazy I started taking photos of all kinds of things that just made my heart sing and now I'm on the other end of that and I'm looking at all the old photos and I'm going What was I thinking because now I have to organize them when I got to do something with them, right? So we're gonna have that conversation today and hopefully We're gonna have a chance to discover some solutions to all those photos that are just Stored either improperly or they're just stored and we're not actually getting the full use of those photos So if you want to keep the photos, this is that conversation now I have a pre-recorded video that's gonna kind of set the stage for today It's also gonna provoke a lot of questions and I love questions So we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna get our questions answered as soon as that video is over We'll jump over to that video right now. I Have got 1 million and four photos on this table stop for just a second. Let's hear a great big collective It took me 30 years to collect these photos What I want you to do is I want you to analyze the things you have and the reasons why today We're taking a look at photos now. I'm very organized and this is it, right? This is awesome a table full of photos. The problem is I have a table full of photos Okay, when I got my first camera It was one of those clunky cameras and it had a little tiny sugar cube square that you would hold up to your eye And you hope to be able to take a good picture if you were able to take a good picture When you sent off the spool of film to the developer, they would send you pictures back Okay, each picture was about 24 cents and you got a discount if you bought two of the same picture So I always bought two one for me and one for the other person in the picture Then they would come back in these little envelopes, right? Little envelopes of pictures that had the pictures and the negatives And then we would put a rubber band around them to preserve them until we were able to put them in our photo albums Okay, the interesting thing about the pictures is sometimes they would send us pictures back that were grainy or it was just a picture of Someone's leg that we couldn't identify but we never tossed those photos We put the good photos inside the photo albums and the bad pictures we saved We saved them because they cost money, right and we did not want to throw away good money So we saved our bad bomb photos. I don't know why okay So over the years I did toss them and I narrowed it down to just a few packs But what was cool about this? I was good with photos I was really good and I would label the back of every photo with a person who is in the photo and the year And I did it as I went so one day I would never get old and have big boxes of photos that I had to sort through So as I sorted through the photos, then I put them inside great big photo albums that have the big plastic sheets where you Open the sheets and you pull it back over the picture and so that you can preserve the picture And you'll see that some of the pictures are missing family members have stolen them over time Okay, so family members come and they're like, oh, I like to have that picture and they take it with them But what I did was I made little tiny photo albums these each hold about I don't know 24 or 30 photos And so what I did for birthdays is I would make little photo albums one for me and one for the person that was in The photo and I would give them a little photo album for their birthday or for Christmas I thought it was a great way to say hi. I appreciate the time that we were able to spend together Okay. Well, the good news is I got gobs of these right boxes of these little photo albums And then what happened is one day they introduced Scanners and I said scanners this is so awesome when I started scanning my photos So I have digital copies of them so it have an electronic version and we saved them on a zip drive We later saved them on CDs and then I had lots and lots and lots of CDs at one point I had boxes of CDs then I transferred the CDs over to Hard drives and so now I have hard drives like you see I have gobs of hard drives probably 15 right here in front of us These are all five terabyte hard drives So lots and lots of storage of photos right because as a house cleaner I would be inside lots of people's houses and I never wanted to have hundreds of photos Where I had to dust all the frames and get out a makeup brush and go through all the little crevices and Dust all the pictures themselves. I wanted to have digital versions Okay, so I was really keen on storing all my digital versions and I've got boxes of these Right photo albums of CDs of photos and photos that I've transferred over now that are on hard drives And I still have all the little photo albums that I printed and bigger photo albums That have pictures in them as well, right photo after photo after photo But the reality is this Most of these photos don't mean anything To anyone except me and the person that was in the photo and I already gave them a copy So who are all these photos for and what's really interesting is if you were to look at some of my photos You'd say wow, that's a really interesting photo. There's probably a story here But if I wasn't here to tell the story this picture of an alley in Venice is not going to mean anything To anyone except me and my husband who are in that alley for four hours, right? There is a story there, but it's not going to mean anything to anyone unless I am there to share the story All right, so a relationship to stuff. Do you have photos and what are you going to do with them? And why do you still have them the reason I ask is this I'm really organized when it comes to my photos But the reality is I'm probably never going to print another photo in my life I'm not doing photo albums anymore And it's because not because I don't want to share it with you But now I want to share it with everyone the way that we share photos now has changed I was in Cancun a couple of weeks ago and there were some cool things there So I took pictures of it and what did I do? I posted it to facebook and instead of Saving it in a little photo album that I could show three or four of my friends when they come over Now I can share it with everyone, right? I can post it to all my friends and go whoop did you do? I'm now in Cancun check out this really cool thing and a lot of you've jumped online and you're like, you know Wow, that's really awesome, right? And you gave it a thumbs up or what have you and that was it That was the end of the picture and it still lives on facebook and I still have a digital copy of it The cool part about it is this The way we share photos has changed the photo albums that we have are now online. They live in a cloud And so my suggestion to you is what are you doing with your photos? And do you need to do something different than what you did in the past? Okay? The problem is this if I were to leave this earth today and none of us know how much time we have There's a table of photos that someone has to deal with and like I said, who do they mean anything to except me, right? Wouldn't it be more impressive if on my funeral program as I'm leaving the earth? They say thanks for participating in Angela's life Here is a link to her journey if you want to explore a little bit more people could go online They could look through all the photo albums. They could look at all the different trips that I've been on They could see all the cars and all the fancy homes and all the stuff that I had While I was on this earth if it even mattered to them One Link wouldn't that be far easier than an entire table full of photos that somebody has to sit there and say Oh my goodness. What do we do with all this now? All right, I want you guys to start thinking about your photos What kind of photos do you have do you have a program for your photos? Are they digitized are they accessible to the people who they might mean something to? What are you doing with the tables of the photos in your house? I want you to make a decision I have got 1 million and four photos on this table Stop for just a second. Let's hear a great big collective whoop. Didi do it took me 30 years to collect these photos What I want you to do is I want Whoa, we are on technical glitch number two I guess I get a prize if I get to three or maybe I strike out I don't know I'm still learning the technology thing and I'm so glad you guys are still here I'm curious how many of you have a bag that looks like this Do you guys remember back in the old days? The film came in these little tiny tugs They were little rolls and they were kind of expensive Then you'd put them in the back of the camera and you'd stretch very carefully Trying to hope for a dark place so that it didn't expose itself to the sunlight You'd close the camera then when you took the picture you didn't have a viewfinder like we have on our phones It's just this little tiny And we hoped that we were centering the pictures My balance was so off or my eyes were bad. I'm not sure which but half the time the person was like cut in half Or it would just be that really lousy photo. Okay, then we'd send our photos in an envelope. These envelopes were free They sent them to us every time we would get photos They would send like the next one for the next roll would pop the roll of film in we put the extra postage on it We'd ship it away and it took like two weeks Two weeks to see what the picture looked like to see if we enjoyed that moment, right? And then all of a sudden we would wait every day by the mailbox hoping and hoping the mail was going to come And then when it came we would get the packet of of photos And I don't know if you guys are like me but going through some photos guys I found duplicates And triplicates and some of the photos I had like six versions of it because there were six people in the photo and I wanted to give them each a copy For whatever reason I didn't so now I've got like five copies of some of those photos And some of them were just bad and I hate to say this I didn't throw the photos away because they cost good money How many of you guys have kept photos because they cost good money not because there's anything in there that's worth remembering If you have bad photos, we're going to call those bad photos just for whatever reason they didn't turn out They're off centered. The face is too dark. You've got red eyes Or the person is like this tiny inside the photo and you can't even see them guys I'm telling you let's get rid of those. Okay So the first thing uh in in the comments write bad photos if you have bad photos I want to know if I'm alone or is it the rest of you guys Also, I have a link here if you guys want to jump up on uh on camera and join me I have some fun questions that I want to ask today And I want to hear how you guys are are dealing with your photos now So hopefully we can come to come to some solutions Of the first thing we do in the clutter corner And this is one of the the concepts of today is we take all of our stuff to one spot And I have a table that I want to highlight today and this table is uh, it's kind of a heavy duty resin table And I've linked to it below so that you guys can either get one or you can you can see what I'm talking about But this comes in three different sizes. It has adjustable legs and it's 24 inch 29 inch and 20 36 inch So this is really small for children or check it out If you're going to be scanning photos while you're sitting in front of the television at night And the reason that I talk about the the table is because if we are going to If we're going to scan our photos and we're going to hang on to them or we're going to sort them We need to have the proper tools and equipment now in the clutter corner when we bring that table with us And we are focused on Finding a resolve in that moment one of the things that's really important is that we are distracted from everything else So for this particular session when we're dealing with photos, I'm going to break the rule big time Okay, this is the only time you'll ever hear me break the rule big time where we want to be isolated We don't want to be disturbed by family. We want to just Have our own moments so that we can make new rules about our stuff when we're sorting through photos I'm going to request that you are in front of the television and hopefully it's a riveting movie because what happens is this It changes the emotional state of mind that we're in So if you're going through photos the really important things that stop and they they they just connect you to that moment It's not going to be as strong if you're watching a really riveting tv show You're going to be looking through going. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah That was a really important moment of my life and you're going to put it in the key file There will be other moments of your life that you sort through that you're like wait a second Those are people from church 20 years ago I don't even know those people anymore and it goes right in the trash bin, right? But if we stop to think well now, how did I know those people and we get really caught up in the moment That's where it gets really involved and we never actually get rid of any of our photos So for this particular exercise unlike all of our exercises We're going to get that table We're going to put it in front of the television and on that table We're going to put a couple of tools the tools that we're going to put on art is a scanner And we're going to put a laptop computer And I say a scanner for this reason we have lots of important documents in our lives and these are Documents we need to digitize you need a digital copy at some point for security reasons And the security reasons are going to be in case there's a flood or a fire or some catastrophe We've seen lots and lots of homes that have gone up in smoke like the california fires Or the florida floods or the hurricanes or whatever and all of the special documents that people have like the deeds to their home Their birth certificate their social security information their green cards their driver's licenses all of the marriage license The high school diplomas all the things that are really important to you should be scanned And so I request that you have a flatbed scanner I'm going to show you the setup that I have and this is the setup for my TV in front of my tv for this project I've got a little shoe box there a clear plastic shoe box that has Um some photos in it and we're going to be scanning these on a flatbed scanner Now the scanner that I have is a really great scanner. I'll show you a couple of pictures of it But this is a it's not the cheapest scanner on the market But it is a flatbed scanner and one of the reasons that I like it best is because let's see if I can do this it goes along with my Echo dock and so this is also an alarm clock and so instead of me clicking every single time to say Uh, let me scan this particular image I can tell my echo dot to do it and my echo dot will do it for me So it's it's linked and that's the scanner that I've that I linked to today Now one of the things that I like about that scanner is it's also a four color printer So if you're printing any business materials any brochures anything like that for your business It's an all-in-one machine. It's fairly reasonable But I don't want you guys to buy a bunch of tools that you're not going to use I want you to buy the best tool only one time. So that's the reason that I've highlighted this I've actually highlighted two printers for today Uh, they're both scanners and they both do the same thing But the one that I'm I'm showing you which which is this particular one is the um, let me see if I have a picture of it here It's a brother. So it's fairly inexpensive and the ink cartridges are fairly inexpensive This connects with the usb port, which is really awesome. That way it connects to any Portable device and I use a laptop for this reason If you're like me and you have been scanning photos for 30 years You're going to probably want to save a backup copy on a hard drive And so this particular scanner like I said, it will do your your uh, high school diplomas your college diplomas your marriage certificates your birth certificates kids birth certificates Important documents greeting cards. I know you guys don't save greeting cards Some of us do But you can scan those greeting cards as well and make a digital copy so that you don't have to store the actual hard copy So that's one of the reasons that I'm pointing this out today It looks like this from the front And like I say, it's just kind of a bare bones machine But it's an all-in-one and it does all the stuff that we're going to be doing to get our papers Organized inside our homes from here through the rest of our lives. This is it if we have the right tools We can do this as long as it takes every night in front of the tv When we're sitting there watching movies and just relaxing and having fun. It's just scan scan scan scan Once the the digital scans Are uploaded and I say uploaded we're going to save them on a hard drive and let me bounce back out of here Um, this is a hard drive. This is a five terabyte hard drive and I label them I just put a a little mock-up label here and I put a piece of packing tape over the top of it So that I know what it is But these have all of my records and all of my data on them And this is just a hard copy But one of the things that I want to highlight That's really important is that we're in an era now where technology wins And so when we talk about photos Technology wins right now There are apps with apple and google and some of the other major platforms that have storage databases that are connected to our smartphones They're also connected to storage clouds and stuff like that. They now have facial identification Facial recognition and so when you upload photos you can turn that on and all of a sudden We'll start recognizing the faces in the photos So if you've ever been looking at old photos going I don't remember who this is If there are other photos of that person at that age It's going to do a really great job of trying to match it up And I know that with some of the pictures with me and my sisters I might pull up two of my other sisters and say Which one of these is it and I know because I know my sisters and I know who was in the picture I can choose which one and it gets smarter and smarter as you go So with the technology that's available to us I do recommend that you back up a copy in the cloud. If you have a laptop The laptop will allow you to do that The laptop that I've chosen for today is It's a nice laptop But it has all of the high processing if you play games if you do online learning If you watch how to tutorials on youtube it has all of those Capabilities the other thing that I want to mention is the hard drives and the computers now Have what's called the usb 3 plug. It's not like the old usb plugs. It's like a new usb plug That's like 10 times faster when it comes to the transfer rate And so that becomes really important for someone like me who doesn't have the time to sit there and wait While it transfers. I want the fastest speed available. So even though I have technical glitches. I'm learning new stuff You guys I'm so glad that you've joined me here. This is so exciting It's so exciting to see all of you guys here and some of us Some folks here have jumped into our our room here. Let me bring you guys on I've got rita here rita. Are you ready? Give me a thumbs up if you're ready to come on and say hi And I have heather heather. Give me a thumbs up if you're ready to come on and say hi How are you guys today? It's good. How are you? I'm very good So I have a question. Have you guys digitized your photos or are yours still all printed copies? Um, well, I personally have not printed photos in a couple of years now In college I used to do it because it's like a dorm room thing to put your photos all over the walls But honestly since I've graduated I keep everything on my iphone Which probably isn't a good idea if I ever lose it, but that's where all my photos are right now So you don't you don't have a backup of Your photos they're just that you're just storing them on your phone Yeah, I mean, I know like you can sync your phone to your laptop I really don't do that very often. I don't think I've done it in that least a year now And I'm probably over over 3,000 pictures in this last year. Oh, no, will you do that? Will you do that for me this week? Yeah, I will definitely save you our own for my degree With um, one of the charging cables you can plug it right into a laptop And you can just make a folder there and you can copy it over under your hardware It will however eat up a lot of memory on your hard drive, which is why I really recommend the five terabyte External hard drives and in the event I hate to say this because I don't mean to sound like oh catastrophe But in the event that there is a fire or a flood and you have a little clear shoebox of your hard drives You can grab that shoebox and take that with you. It's very compact Everything else you can replace and if you have digital copies, that's also great But if something happens and there's an accidental erasure or if somebody gets into your account or whatever could happen It is possible That having a backup could could be beneficial at some point But I don't need to lose 3,000 photos read it. Don't do that. No, I know I definitely need to get a hard drive. I'm gonna I'm gonna look on Amazon later and see Um, Heather, tell me about you. Are you still printing out photos or are you all digitized? Um, I print them out sometimes But only if I'm going to do something specific with them like put them in a frame and put them I kind of have a frame wall at home But um other than that. Yeah, there's my frame wall. So I I designed that and put pictures in it and That's beautiful My husband hung all this for me Oh my goodness Every time I go all the way to the ceiling, how did you get up that tall? You must have a very tall ladder My husband does yeah Okay, so I have to ask, you know, I have to ask an off and off photo question. Um, how do you how do you dust all those picture frames? Well, every time I walk up those stairs, I look at them and I think oh angel would hate these picture frames I would I would for that reason only I love the fact that you're celebrating your family's life But the the the dusting that's my first thought is oh no, it's got to dust all those I use my duster and I try to only get frames that were pretty good about wiping off easy, you know stuff like that but Yeah, I also do these photo books that I just have printed and you can get them printed anywhere But if you can see them or not, but for instance, this one is of my um crews that I just went to I'm gonna make you bigger on the screen so we can see the full screen of you. Hang on Here you go So this is a book that I printed off of my um latest crews Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, you just send the pictures in and then they print them out Whoever you go to and you have a book and then it lays flat and it can go on a bookshelf or something and it's small and Yeah, I tried to do that other than just printing off because I have Thousands and thousands of pictures. I also have one of these cases that I bought I'm for oh, wow. That's impressive Yeah, it's a case. It's a big case and then when you open it up, it has all of these little Boxes and each box holds, you know Pictures and you can even like write on them and say oh your child's third birthday or whatever it is to remember it by And they all they all store in the bigger storage case Yes, yes, all of the little ones go into the big one And then it's organized But it does still take up a lot of room and I'm only using that for pictures that I used to print off all the time You know, probably 15 years ago. I used to print every picture off. So you go girl I mean that wow, that's organization. That is um display perfection I mean hats off like I am not worthy That's fantastic. Oh my goodness Thank you for hearing that with us. Thank you I've never saved or put any of my pictures in Like what you were saying to do but I think that that is a really good idea because like you said I have pictures of Things that might not mean something To you know anyone else but I could maybe put them on my computer and then send them to someone and that might Be a better option. For instance, I sent a huge box of pictures to my grandmother's sister After my grandmother passed away because I found all of these pictures and I had them and I didn't know who they were But I knew it was family. So I sent them all to her but now I'm thinking maybe I should have just done like a digital copy And been sent it that way because I spent a lot of money on on mailing it So speaking of digital copies, and I'm glad you brought that up There are services that you can pay for where they send you a box and you pop your photos in them And you send them off and then they'll scan them for you And I'm curious if you guys feel safe sending your only original copies off to someone else that you don't know That's a third party company I've talked to a lot of people and I've interviewed those companies and the companies say oh, we're totally secure We we totally follow through and I'm curious to know has anybody used a service like that or are you guys Scanning your own because you want the control of making sure that you actually have the digital copy and that it gets followed through on If you have used a service like that type in service And if you have if you're if you're scared type in the word control I'm curious to know if you've used this service or if you want the control yourself Personally, I would want the control myself, which is why I went with the scanner And I don't have the time to sit there and scan But I can do it, you know absentmindedly kind of while I'm while I'm Watching tv I thank you so much rita and heather hang out if you want to if you want to pop off screen That's cool But i'm going to show a short video That is of how i'm scanning while i'm watching the tv so that you can get an idea of The process that i'm using It's a very simple process and I I just do it while i'm sitting there hanging out All right, so this is it and this is the table And I I usually eat dinner first and so I eat dinner at the table and I make sure that everything is closed All the photos are put away the computer is closed the scanner is closed There are absolutely Nothing that's going to get food on it and then I make sure that I have like a little tray that separates my food from the From the table itself I'm just using that as kind of a place to eat my dinner if i'm in front of the tv Then when i'm done I put the food and the dishes away I wash my hands and make sure that my hands are clean and that my table is wiped down Before I start scanning and then when I start scanning the photos themselves I'm just scanning one at a time and i'm not in a rush and you can scan multiple on a flatbed scanner You can scan multiples and I only scan one or two if it's like the same person And i'm okay to archive them together because then at some later date I have to go back and I have to cut them up or I have to resize them or whatever and that's extra work So I usually just do one and then when I archive them then I It just pulled up that image and so I'm only doing one at a time and in front of the tv I have plenty of time to do that and so for this particular scenario I'm literally just looking at the photos. Do I want to keep this and my husband is also in this video We can't see him because he's sitting on the other side of me But he's watching tv and if there's a photo. I'm not sure of like maybe this is a relative of ours Should I keep this photo? I'll hand it to him and he's also Watching tv so he's not like in the emotional state of Uh, oh, yes, we haven't spoken to this person in way too long. It's not like. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's cool Let's keep it or now we can let it go But what we're doing while we're sorting these we're sorting them Then we're scanning them and then at the end of the session before I go to bed and I'm done with this project I'm going to drag them all over onto the hard drive and then we're completely done with the project There's there's no extra work after this and what I'm going to walk away with is that little shoebox right there Is going to go over to the shredder now. I use a shredder for photos only that cannot be That the old photos the old photos that we have I have to stop and say this for a second The old photos that we have that were way back when like in my my mother and grandmother's time They cannot be recycled. You cannot put those inside a recycling bin the old photos have to be Shredded if you're going to shred them and then they have to be discarded in a landfill that takes Paper like the photo paper And so you'll have to check with your waste management company to discard of the photos properly because like if you Try to rip them and they don't rip easily it has the old material on them Which is like silver and mercury on those and it's photo chemicals that cannot be Recycled properly so we don't want to just discard of those in the in the recycling bin So we want to shred them just for protection of privacy of people that I don't know Maybe didn't want their face shown or we didn't want the photos misused or somehow So we will shred those up and with a really nice shredder and I've highlighted a couple of shredders today One of the shredders that I would like to recommend is if you're going to get one Don't get the cheapest one on the market and don't get gouged at getting a really high-end one get one That's under the $200 range And one one that I would recommend is that it has about 18 Sheets that it will take at a time because if you have old documents and you have old tax records And you have old business records And I know especially this is true for me to sit there and do like two or three pages at a time Is such a waste of time You'll be happy that you spent a little bit of extra money to get a good one that accepts staples CDs old credit cards and all that stuff and it will shred them and it will discard them properly Those photos that cannot be put in a landfill you can shred those And then put them inside like a box or a Garbage bag and when you go down to the waste management plant I say like this like it's down here It's down that way about six miles down the road When you go there just let them know I have photo paper here And then they will put it in the proper bin so it can be discarded of But it's it's really interesting when you start thinking about How are we using the photos right now? And so this particular uh sitting here while i'm doing this At the end of the evening has been really really helpful because it has also Given me something to do but then not get emotionally involved in each of the individual pictures Heather you're not in your head. You have you have emotional attachments to some of your photos I have emotional attachment to everything, but yes, I have emotional attachment to my photos I laughed when you said something about the um, you have a photo that doesn't really it's not clear or whatever But you saved it anyway Well, my oldest son this ages me he's 24 now, but he had his first smile while I was You know taking a picture of him And it was on just a cheap camera and it didn't focus and you can barely even see He can barely even tell that it's him But I know that that was his very first smile ever So I look through there and and somebody else say why do you why did you keep this picture? That picture means to me so I kept it But I think I could do do your way though. It didn't give me too much anxiety. So So It's important that you bring that up because there are photos that are important to every individual person And I love how you've categorized yours by the little boxes Because with the little boxes what you can do is you can say these these are heather photos These are important to me. And so when your family heaven forbid, but when your family should inherit those photos They'll know that those that are in that box were the most meaningful photos Not all of them that you kept but those specifically that were like these are my these are my prize and joy As I was sorting through my photos. I found a handful of photos that were kind of cool that were Really a handful of photos when I was growing up We didn't have cameras like we did today and nobody had them on smartphones or anything And so I've got five or six photos one of is me With my dad and we'd gone to like this church daddy daughter party or whatever And I wore this special dress and you know, it was me and my dad But I don't have a lot of pictures of just me and my dad There were all the other kids in our family in all of our photos because photos were kind of hard to come by And so the fact that this sounds weird But the fact that you would get a photo with just your dad was kind of like this memorable moment They're like, oh my gosh I had this moment with my dad where at the church they took this photo of us and it's just the two of us Right, like I was important in that moment And so like you said with your son taking his first smile That's that's so awesome that you have a photo of that And so I would put that in a memory book to keep that safe because that does mean something to you You know Yeah, I also have one of those plugin It's like a picture frame and you put your your digital photos on it and it sits on your table And it kind of rotates through your pictures and as you take new pictures you can update it And so I like having that because it's it's kind of like an artwork But then you get to see all your pictures kind of scroll through throughout your day Oh, that's a great way to utilize photos You know, I should have I should have discussed this with you before we had our our session today That's awesome My mother got one of those for Christmas or something And she gets to see all of her grandkids because like during covid like none of the grandkids came And so they sent her this picture album where any of the kids could upload their photos And then it would show up on ma's photo album So it's like this revolving picture album that granny gets to watch and see all of our grandkids So I I think that is such an awesome idea and I don't have one of those I just what a great idea Yeah, Christmas present for you You know what it's really interesting because any of the items that we're talking about today would make excellent Christmas gifts And I know I know I don't know why but I've been over the last couple weeks as we've been talking about this topic I've been asking all of the men in my life about their photo habits Like did do you take a lot of photos growing up? Do you have photos now? Do you have boxes of photos? And it's overwhelming to me how many men say no no no my wife does that And I'm like what like you know, they're like no I was I was in the moment Observing what was happening in real time The wife was taking the pictures and she does all the categorizing of the photos or whatever she does with them And that's kind of their opinion That's how they felt about the photos the wife took all the photos and I was like, oh my goodness That's us too. I'm the one that takes all the photos and I'm the one that archives them So I asked my husband. I said do you have like boxes of photos somewhere? He said why would I do that if I have you, you know And it's it's this I don't know. Maybe maybe women Are more nostalgic. Maybe we I don't know. What do you guys think are women more nostalgic? I'm not I'm not trying to stereotype But I think I think maybe we're guilty of these these fun photo habits are Is it an arts and craftsy element to our personalities? I don't know. I think it's a need we feel this need to remember it and and My son said to my middle son said something to me at a concert one time recently that just made me think Totally different about how I think about everything because I Record everything and I take photos of everything and first off He mentioned that I'm never in the photos because I'm always the one taking the photos And it's not that I don't want to be in them But someone has to take them and but he also said, you know, like be in the moment mom let's remember this and you know that we did this let's we don't need this picture for it and To me in my mind growing up you had to have a picture or you wouldn't remember it and so that Yeah, I think our youth is kind of coming around to a hey, let's just remember these memories We don't have to have You know proof that they happened We know they did and who are we showing them to really honestly? I mean so Well, you know and it's interesting Thanks for bringing that up because I think being in the moment and being present is incredibly important for Not just the longevity of our souls but for the the connection connection moments And I think if we can use our photos right now to reconnect with people Teresa says I scan mine and I would have I would have a service I would prefer to hand carry them rather than mail them And that's true. Maybe the service is is secure, but maybe they get lost in the mail or they never arrive or something like that I didn't even think about that So there are people that are scanning them right now And I recommend that we do scan them if we're going to hang on to them But like you said Heather, I recommend that we use those moments to reconnect with people Where if we have photos like I have photos of like my siblings I could call them up on the phone and say hey, I've got these photos of you Let's grab a cup of tea. We'll sit down and we'll visit and I'll you know I'll give you these photos and then by giving the photos we could look at them together We could share our collective memories about that and now we've actually enjoyed that moment again together And so I know even especially since the pandemic it's been really hard to reconnect with people if we haven't had um If we haven't had reason to do so or if we've gone our separate ways and kind of like we don't have anything in common This photo says we had one moment in common and oh, wasn't it a blast? You know what I mean? Yeah I also noticed I was just looking through these photos while while I was the video was on and I noticed that I have like 13 pictures of the same exact moment I think I snapped on hoping that I would catch a really good one because you know kids are always moving and But then all 13 of them kind of turned out okay So somehow I ended up with them and they're all a little different But I definitely could go through there and just pick my favorite one and start there. That's somewhere, right? Yes, and I I love that you said that because I'm guilty of that as well I have multiples of the same the same photo and then what's really sad is if I go back to This moment in time where I have the envelopes of the photos that came in the mail If I look at the photos, what's really frightening to me is some of the people in the pictures are only like this small And I didn't know like you have to like get closer to them so that there's a focal point I didn't understand that there was a focal point and I didn't understand anything about lighting And so like their face is completely in the shadow and I don't even know who's in the photo They've got nice hair and they've got nice clothes, but I have no idea who's in the photo and so Uh, why would I save that? I mean not to be crude or crass or anything But as I'm scanning the photos and I'm watching this riveting movie on tv I'm like, oh, that's piece of crap, you know, and I'm throwing it away Knowing that whoever's in there. I'm not going to honor them by keeping it And if I hang on to it and I ever leave this earth, somebody's got to go through it They're going to go who is this they're going to waste time and attention and energy Try to figure out who was was this important because like Angela saved it. Obviously it was important No, it's not important get rid of it already. You know what I mean? Christina says tip from Christina always disconnect the external drive from the computer when you're done scanning A power surge could damage the contents Plus a surge protector lightning happens. Yes, um a surge protector may I recommend a surge protector? It's really really important that you have one the one that I use is let's see. Do I have it here? I do the one that I use is just a basic simple one. It looks like this And it has eight different slots and they're all grounded plugs And so this is like an extension cord so that if I'm sitting there watching tv in front of my In the in the living room and I have the the table there Um, I don't have a plug that's going to go out as far So you need some kind of an extension cord and this is also a grounded three prong plug And if you will use this um With the surge protector that's going to help you because like Christina said if there is I don't know a lightning strike or something that's going to prevent Hopefully all of your um your data from being raked So plug in your laptop plug in your scanner and plug in your hard drive So that everything is linked to that For that very reason Christina. I'm so glad you brought that up. That's just an awesome awesome suggestion I love that we've got so many folks here you guys. Hi, jony hi desi marianne diane Shawna debbie lurking Karo eileen Um, you guys this is awesome. I love the old antique family photos my mom has I figured i'll just keep them because they're fun to look at You know photos are fun to look at and because they're fun to look at I want to stop for just a second I'm not going to get rid of the photo albums that I have and the photo albums that I have I have lots of these little tiny photo albums that I've made Lots and lots of these and I do enjoy looking at them But one of the things that I've noticed is The way we look at photos has changed When family numbers come over And this kind of breaks my heart. They don't say here and go through my photo albums they Grab their phones and they take the phone and make it go to the tv screen And then they show we swap photos of things that are on our phones, right? We're not even looking at printed photos And so if we're not looking at printed photos anymore We can save the paper we can save the chemicals and i'm not knocking photo companies But what i'm saying is we can we can start thinking moving forward about living a digital life that then still Allows us to share our photos and with all the social media platforms You can now post your photos and share and tag and post and repin and like and love and you know All that stuff with your friends for cool photos And so now we have an opportunity to share photos in a different sort of way If you have photos and I went through a lot of the photos that I have here. I got a really cool photo Here's a cool photo. I'm going to make myself big here for a second heather So i'm going to remove you for just a second So you guys can see this photo. There's a photo of all my brothers and sisters at one point of our lives And those were our bookshelves back in the day. They were milk crates with books in them And that was that was the life that we live. Okay, so that was kind of fun um, and this was Just a happy memory for me So i'm not going to get rid of this because this is dear to my heart and it makes me smile But in order for me to smile like that probably everyone in my family that's in that picture would love to have a copy of that photo I just happened to have it And so it makes sense and i'm not trying to create new work for you But it makes sense to scan those make those digital Because I might have the negative somewhere But I don't have any way of reading the negatives and in order for me to print out new copies I would have to know which negative it was and I wasn't very organized that organizing the negatives And so I would have to scan that photo and then I could share it with everyone And so in order to honor the people that really were important in our lives My recommendation is that we actually scan them and we make a commitment that hey I'm going to do this as part of my my my new habit I do have one more video that I want to share with you This is of me going through some of my photos Here's another one of those rare pictures I had of me with my dad That was the day that I got baptized and this is a picture I have to stop that for a second That was a picture of a bride in a groom and both the bride and the groom had their backs turned to the camera And I have no idea who the bride is or who the groom is and yet I have a photo of them I was at that photo and I was at that wedding and I took this photo and I have no idea who the bride is and I have Again shadows, right? Why did we save these pictures? These are people doing hoolas and I think this is the first time I ever saw hoola Uh, I don't know who the people are This is a picture where no one in the picture is looking at the camera And I can't identify half of the people there junk. These are junk photos Back in the day And I wonder if I can just pause this back in the day check out this photo of this old car I didn't have any money. I was really broke and they sent us on this exercise Like one of these self-help people sent us on this exercise They were supposed to go find fancy things and then pin them on a board and then say like that's for me Like one day I'm gonna have that And I took a picture of this car. I didn't even take a picture of the whole car It was only half the car. I guess that's half my dreams, right? And then I saved this picture. Well, I was never going to buy a car like that. I mean, it's a cool car, but I'm looking at it now going. Okay. What why did I I know why I took the picture because I wanted some nice things in my life But there's this kid that I don't know in front of a half of a car What what and I'm hanging on to these photos like Angela throw them away already These are people that my mom and dad went to church with I didn't know these people. I have to stop for a second I don't know these people And I went to my mom's house and I was taking a picture of my mom and my mom says Oh, let's get a picture of this family and I said, okay guys stand by the fireplace So they stood by the fireplace and I took a picture of them and it ends up on my camera roll So I paid for the photos. I don't know who the people are I never knew them. This is after I moved away from home and there are people that my mother went to church with what Do you guys have photos that are and I call them I call them bad photos because for whatever reason They're not serving you in any way, right? This is my brother. Well, I got to stop here for a second This is my brother he and this one the guy in the white shirt is my brother So my brother gets on an airplane He meets a guy then they have a conversation like they had a nice chat or whatever We met him at the airport this back in the olden days when you go inside and you go up to the gate And then he's like hey, I meet my new friend and I was there to take a picture of my brother But instead he highlights his friend now I got a picture like front and center of the friend from the airplane That my brother met one time. It wasn't even like a real friend It was just like somebody that he met on the airplane ride. What who does that and now 30 years later I still have that photo. Okay. I'm I'm tossing some of these All right, the reason that I I bring this up And that's me way back when but check it out I'm like really really tiny in the middle of these photos here My brother's cut in half with a child. I don't I don't identify it's it's a niece or a nephew, right? In this stack going through and I really go. I really want you guys to go through your photos for this reason I went through a photo box and I found all of these like camera guides and quick start guides and the CDs to the printers that you print the photos off on or their camera startup CDs or whatever And there's all this stuff. That's I don't know 10 15 20 years old Like nobody nobody even has these cameras anymore that certainly we don't And so I can get rid of all of that stuff And going through all of these different photos. I just ran into some weird stuff If you go through the photos, I know I know we don't want to go through the photos Because if we go through the photos, we feel like oh, no, I'm going to be sad But going through these photos what I discovered was They here are some pictures and this is one of those where there are multiples of the same picture But what happens is you end up And I'm going to bounce out of this what happens is this you end up saving a whole lot of photos and I know this is true for me The outlasted the marriage You guys have any of those photos that people are not together So I've got all these multiples of this wedding and I'm like, oh, I could send them to the bride and groom Oh, wait, they're not married anymore That would like be offensive and then they would have their feelings hurt that I'm celebrating this moment of their life That now is a biggest failure, right Do you guys do you guys have some of those moments? Guys, we got to go through our photos. We got to go through the boxes. We got to pull out all the extra stuff I have a photo that's um in this photo frame And it's an awesome frame. It's so beautiful. Someone gave it to me as a gift. I think it's made out of cement It's the heaviest photo frame that I've ever owned And it's so heavy in fact that I've never displayed it worse than that It's like I don't know has like leaves and flowers and stuff etched into it So not only can you not dust it but you can't wipe it down So if I were to display it, it would get dirty really quickly And then that's the end of that every time I'd see it I'd be like, ah dust And it's really really heavy. So it can't even hang on a wall All right, I have to break here for a second and go over and say hi to jony And oh my goodness you guys we have ann We have eileen. We have bluegrass girl. We have judy's bakery. Hey judy judy joined us a couple weeks ago We have penny penny says i'm laughing so hard. That's really funny I'm not sure what she's laughing at probably because I I Have photos of people that are no longer married. I got a lot of those. I went to a lot of weddings I don't know why I went to a lot of weddings and then I have all their photos and Now most of them are divorced Okay Savannah says I have a photo of someone left in my car 19 years ago Of their newborn baby Do you know who the person is And would they want it back or was it just like a stranger? I ran into so many baby photos and I don't know who the babies are Now I will share this with you and this is for people that keep photos because this reminds me savannah There's a really good point in these photo albums that I did save like this is a photo album of one of those weddings that didn't work out On the back of the photos What I did was And I'm really happy about this I I made a sticker and these were inside my printer And so like if I go to a family reunion I type everybody's name in and I printed those little labels out And it says this is Jake's son Caleb with anti angela and the family reunion was 8 28 of 2004 We were in provo, utah at a picnic And so now I know who that is. I know who I was holding and I know where I was and the date Okay, now that has a little bit different meaning to me And so if you're going to save the photos I recommend that there's some kind of a solution But I love what heathers said Heather. Can I bring you back on for a second? I see that you're still here with us Give me a thumbs up if you're ready Thumbs up. Here's Heather again. Hello Heather again Hi Will you show those little photo boxes to us again that you had because I think that's a really awesome way to store those photos Okay, so here's an empty one that I just took the pictures out of And you just they they hold, you know any size photo. Well, not any size They do have them though that hold like eight by tens You know things like that if you want. I just realized how bad I was at taking pictures back then Why don't I have me too me too and like like this one has like it's my son but like They're so blurry and why would I have kept that but I do have a suggestion that I wanted To show you after I show you these boxes. So they're all these little boxes. Is that a polaroid in there? It is that's me at 16 getting my goodness. That's one of those. It's not recyclable Yeah, I didn't know that by the way. So I'm glad that you told me that but one thing that I did and I did this I'm kind of bad about starting things and Not always finishing them or not I saw your photo wall and I saw your your stash of organized photos I did but one year for Christmas when I was going through these pictures and I had like several that Almost all of my pictures have duplicates like they'll be like me smiling and then me over here, you know Like they're all the same So I would take them I would take a picture and I would Hole punch like a little hole in it and I would tie it to a christmas present And I would just oh horn Yeah, and you would be able to see who you know the present was for because it had a picture And then the person had the option they could throw the picture away or they could keep it But then it got it out of my hands and I didn't have to be responsible for Throwing it away if that's what they wanted to do That's really a great uh opportunity. Thank you for sharing that with us. I had not thought to give them as Christmas tags on gifts. That's a great idea And then the last suggestion that I would have is most social media now you can Simply have them make books out of your pictures. I'm sure it's expensive and I've never done it But I did see that the other day They'll take all of your posts the pictures that you've posted on whatever social media and they will Combine them and make like your your your book, you know a book in your pictures for the year or whatever So I thought that was kind of neat and something that Might be interesting to do That's a great idea I love that. I love that idea of Of printing out some of those because because that happens. We are already on social media We're tagging the photos where we are who we're with To to make that like a an album of whatever your event is I think that's an awesome idea And I love I love the fact that you have yours categorized. Is that categorized by By child or is that categorized by holiday or event vacations? I haven't finished it yet But I did start on it and I was doing like time frame like it would be, you know My son's first year, you know, and I put most of his pictures and I did notice that My son the oldest has way more pictures Than the other two and then the baby kind of has way more digital photos, you know Yeah Yeah, but I think camera I think cameras with phones changed everything for everyone And I know lots of people are just buying bigger phones because they have more memory because they haven't downloaded their photos And if they would download the photos they could Not have to pay so much for such an expensive phone And I'm really bad about telling myself and I Surely other people are doing this too, but I tell myself I don't have to have the backup of that photo or whatever because oh, I have it on my social media And oh, it's all in my social media, but that social media could go away. You could get locked out You could get blocked out the social media could go away. Just yeah, that's happened. That's happened And that's a really good point Because if you get banned or you get blocked or something then how do you how do you access that information? That's a really good point Stephanie says seriously what about antique photos turn of the century roaring 20s artistic photos? This is a fantastic question Stephanie. Thank you so much for asking it One of the things that you can do is I know a lot of the historical societies will accept photos I know a lot of schools accept photos Especially if it's talking about a turn of the century event or if it's talking about a war Or if it's talking about a particular event in history Or if it tells a story of a particular thing Another thing that you might consider is there are services that are I know that as a as a youtuber We we license a lot of photos from some of the the houses that stock photos And so there are opportunities there as well to upload your existing photos that might be of a specific time or place But again, that would be a digital copy And so there are people that are willing like my own company We are willing to pay for those photos And so if you're willing to stop and spend the time to scan them you have other options But I love what heather said earlier about having the opportunity then to share them with family and friends The the printed copies, you know for gift tags But as well as then sharing them on social media so that you can then tag people and again share that memory With just a digital copy. I love that. That's awesome. Um, rita's back. I'm hoping. Hey rita. It's good to see you again Hello, good to see you Thanks. Um, how are you using your digital photos? Are you sharing those with friends or what what is your strategy for that? So I think with like you said with the cameras being on the phones now and technology being so prevalent I feel like I kind of use my social media platforms as my like photo album slash scrapbook Because they have like the story features or you can post things to your feed Um, and even you can have like group chats on social media platforms where you're sharing pictures And so most of the time if I have an event and we have digital We take pictures and then we'll send them just in our group chat And I send them immediately after taking them. So the relevant people have them I will say I'm pretty bad about deleting Bad photos similar to like not getting rid of the physical photos that are bad because you tend to take 20 30 photos at a time on a phone because it's so easy to just like you're hitting the button Um, and then I never go through and actually delete the ones that I don't want to keep Which is how I've ended up with 3,000 photos But I and also you screenshot a lot of things online too, right? So kind of like how you're talking about scanning things in front of the tv I feel like I need to sit down and go through my digital photo album and delete photos while watching tv Well, you guys, thank you so much rita for sharing that with us the um, the digital photos I think is the new way Of how we're going to be able to justify Taking the photos that we take And finding a way to balance the time and energy that we spend with them And then also not have these boxes of photos that we're hanging on to for 20 or 30 or 50 years Hoping hoping that one day we're going to sit down and find the time because I will share this with you And this is the bad news of what I have to share with you today. The photos will never scan themselves I know let me repeat that the photos will never scan themselves You're going to have to take some time at some point and sit down and just do it All right, I am curious to have More conversations about this and so we will talk about this again, but thank you guys so much for joining me here today This was really awesome. Thank you rita and heather for jumping on camera with me And thanks to everybody on all of our different platforms that jumped in and said hello and spent a little bit of your time with me today I hope this was helpful and I had so much fun hanging out with you guys So until we leave tell me meet again leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it