Earlier this month at RootsTech, the world’s largest genealogy conference, the Mylio team had a chance to present education, and to connect with family historians of all kinds. The attendees’ passion for organizing and preserving their family media, memories, and history was truly inspiring.
Visitors to our booth and live classes shared common challenges. They told of feeling overwhelmed or confused about how to manage a growing number of digital photos and videos, along with older family media. Many had inherited boxes of printed photos, slides, negatives, home movies, letters and other family documents, and weren’t sure what to do with all of it.
How to build your family’s digital legacy
On the RootsTech main stage, Mylio product lead Richard Harrington and CEO David Vaskevitch shared successful strategies for organizing and protecting a digital legacy. They also showed how Mylio Photos can help families bring a lifetime of photos, videos, and important documents together in one library that’s always accessible, private, protected, and easy to share. Watch the replay to learn more.
Why metadata matters for truly organizing family photos
Popular “free” cloud-based photo services like Google Photos and Apple Photos do an impressive job of using artificial intelligence (AI) and information embedded in image files (metadata) to auto-organize millions of photo libraries – mostly composed of pictures taken with smartphone cameras.
But when it comes to being able to find specific photos quickly, or to have the ability to organize images in specific ways, these apps tend to fall short. That’s also true if you want to add scans of older media. Once scanned, photos and slides become digital files that can be added to any photo library. Unfortunately, they lack metadata except for the scan date (not when they were taken).
It’s easy to add and change metadata in scanned media (and any photo) in Mylio Photos. A few examples:
- Face tags
- Photo capture dates (or estimated date ranges)
- Geotag data (enter a known location or drag an image onto the Map view)
- Caption, title, keywords, category, label, star rating, and much more
Once metadata is added to scanned images, they’re integrated seamlessly into Mylio Photos’ universal library. For instance, they appear in the Calendar view in the right order. And it’s easy to find photos by person, location, keywords, and categories. To see all that’s possible, watch another RootsTech class: Faces, Places, Dates, and Text: Why Metadata Matters.
Technology is helping families connect with the past and preserve the future
In Mylio’s mission to change the way the world remembers – and to help families organize and preserve their digital legacy – we’ve found people tend to go through three stages.
Collect. We take thousands of photos every year, and often have abundant old prints or slides. With Mylio Photos, it’s possible to bring together all that family history in one universal library that connects to all personal devices. Easy-to-use organization and search tools make it easy to quickly find any photo.
Protect. Backing up your library is essential if you never want to lose a photo. With Mylio Photos, files are protected on your local devices, where they’re secure and accessible at all times – including for generations to come. If users want to add a cloud service, they can – and opt to encrypt the backup. When sharing photos, the app protects privacy by removing sensitive personal data.
Reflect. With all priceless family memories in one place, it’s easy to reconnect with forgotten memories. Users can create, preserve, and share a rich family story written by themselves and their ancestors – one that can be handed to future generations to write their own chapters.
For a limited time, new subscribers will get two great gifts when they sign up for a year of Mylio Photos:
- Premium photo book from Printique ($30 value)
- Scanning and Organizing Your Photos course ($50 value)
Our customers always enjoy a 30-day money-back guarantee. To subscribe and get the offer, visit this page.
Susan Enfield is a Boulder, Colorado-based writer who covers healthy lifestyle, outdoors, food, and travel. She first fell for photography in the darkroom developing shots from a Nikon F-50 and now takes photos with her iPhone as well as a Sony RX100.
