Google Photos has free unlimited storage and some really cool features. But what's the catch? Should I be using it to store and share my family history photos?

If you don't "prune" your family history assets, the sheer volume of them will obscure the "fruit" that is worth keeping. Without care and pruning, you could lose the whole "tree."

"Have in your houses nothing you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." I was recently explaining to a client how to pare down the hundreds of potential photos she had set aside to put in her family history book. It struck me then that Morris' advice could also apply when choosing what photos and keepsakes.

There is nothing more heartbreaking for us than to talk to a client who has spent hours and dollars digitizing their photo collection, only to find out that the files are too small or too low-quality for archival purposes. They may look fine on Facebook, but when printed in a family history book or newspaper article, they will look blurry or pixelated. In many cases, the originals have already been sent back to their original owners or worse, destroyed, making proper re-scanning impossible.

If you are in the process of gathering images to supplement your life story writings, you will generally be using photos from your own life.

But don't feel you have to limit the images in your book to what you have on hand. If you want to fill in some holes or jazz up the visuals in your project, there are a lot of places to get great images that are free, high quality, and don't trample on someone else's copyright.

"Use them or lose them." There is more to preserving your family’s history than tossing it into a cardboard box and handing it down to the next generation. Without context and “curation” —the careful gathering, sifting, selection, and preservation that takes place in any worthwhile collection—your family’s history can be lost to confusion or apathy as easily as it can succumb to dust or mold. 

A letter signed by Abraham Lincoln, as anyone who has watched “Antiques Roadshow” knows, can be worth thousands of dollars. But such a document’s worth to us as a nation is far greater. Some of your family’s documents—letters, photos, diaries, ephemera—can be as valuable to your family’s history as Abe’s letter is to America. But do we treat our own with the same care and respect?

Google Photos will store all your smartphone photos and videos FREE. Is it too good to be true?

Don't you hate it when this happens? You find a great old photo from your grandmother's collection; itchy with anticipation, you flip it over, hoping to find some enlightening runes there. Alas, you see only the cryptic phrase, "Me and Papa in front of the house."

Whaaa? Who is "Me?" Who is "Papa?" What house? Where? When? Sigh. It's almost more frustrating than finding nothing on the back, because there was just that microsecond there when you saw writing and...sigh.

This Saturday Tom and I will be presenting at the UGA South Davis Family History Fair in Woods Cross, Utah. (See details here.) One of the classes is entitled "Pixel Wrangling: How to Tame Your Digital Photos Once and For All." If you aren't able to join us, I thought I'd post some helpful past articles on the subject. Because everyone needs a little help when taming this beast.