Posts in photo legacy
Google’s new app: Great way to preserve your old photos before they fade away

The new Google PhotoScan app allows users to digitally capture their old family photos with ease—and without glare. While the app isn't ideal for scanning high-resolution images for use in print, it has enormous value in quickly and effectively scanning those precious boxes of old family photos you—and your extended family members—have lying around your homes. See why it's a recommended download.

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When a bad photograph is the perfect picture

Throwing away photos that hold no meaning (or are duplicates, or are just plain bad) is a requisite for organizing your visual memories. Think before you toss, though. Sometimes that blurry shot—or an old, ripped black-and-white, or the one where you are so small you're like an ant!—are worth keeping. Here's why.

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“His are the sepia eyes that passed through me.”

“His is the broad nose, the high cheekbones, the determined mouth, the face not like an oval or a heart, but like a square. He died long before I'd ever meet him, but I carried him in my blood.” In Beth Kephart's contribution to our “Pictures Into Words” series, you’ll find inspiration for writing about a photograph that holds more mystery than memory. Sometimes it's the wondering, the imagining, that brings life to an old photo—that carries your ancestors from the past into the present and finds the narrative thread in our connected lives.

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“Honoring Mamita”

Yuliana Gomez Delgado reflects on a favorite photograph with her grandmother, a shot that has taken on new meaning now that Yuliana herself knows what it is to be called Mother. As she poignantly writes, “Burying her was saying goodbye to my childhood—it was the first time I realized time went forever forward, and so many happy memories were destined to stay behind.” And yet, she finds a lasting way to honor her Mamita, and create a loving legacy for her family.

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“My Mother, the Most Beautiful Woman in the Room”

You don't have to call yourself a writer to write meaningful vignettes about your life—and photographs make wonderful prompts. In this series, “Pictures Into Words,” Rachel Brodsky offers up her own vignette as inspiration. "Even as I—and the photo of us together—grew older, my mom still never seemed to age. Perhaps part of that has to do with the fact that she’s blessed with enviable genes—even today she’s well past 50 and still only has a smattering of barely visible gray hair..."

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