Get those photos organized on CD or in scrapbooks

By Jillian Daley
Staff writer

The future of photography may be digital but, in most homes, the past remains crammed in shoe boxes, stuffed in cabinets and piled under beds.

How to get that daunting mess organized?

October, Family History Month, is a good time to start, with at least two Tulare scrapbooking events scheduled. But you needn’t take a class to learn how to deal with those long-ignored family snapshots, the ones of everything from your wedding to your 1980 Pismo Beach vacation to your college freshman’s third birthday party.

“The best thing to do is not worry about that big pile of photos,” suggests Roland Wood, who owns The Scrapbook Nook in Visalia with his wife, Christine. “Go and develop the current roll that you just took, and start with that.”

Starting small is less intimidating, Wood says. Then you can work your way backward in time, reacquainting yourself with short-shorts, big hair, fingerless gloves and leisure suits.

Labeled photo albums work just fine. Scrapbooking appeals to the more ambitious, but the final product doesn’t have to be fancy, Wood said.

“Not every page needs to be gorgeous and extravagant,” said Wood, who’ll close his store in a few weeks because, he said, most scrapbookers now buy their materials online.

For many, though, fingering through stacks of prints is so 20th century.

The digital camera that Raymond Montez picked up six months ago is the first he has ever owned. A 24-year-old Lemoore resident, he photographs in-line skating as a hobby and posts the photos on his MySpace page or submits them to Be-mag.com, an in-line-skating forum.

“It’s not a big deal,” said Montez, a petty officer in the U.S. Navy. “It’s just something I do for fun.”

Organizing digital photos may also seem confusing and difficult, but various online services are available. Such services — including those offered by retailers like Costco — allow friends and family members to access online “albums” and view or purchase the images they like.

While digital storage is convenient, Robert Coz, manager of Mike’s Quality Cameras in Visalia, recommends that important photos be stored on compact disc. There the “electronic negatives” won’t be vulnerable to computer problems.

“That’s where we’re really storing our images to be accessed at a later date,” he said.

Still, Coz says, there’s nothing like an album of printed photographs for sharing your life with family and friends.

“They’re easy to access,” he said. “They’re organized.”

Cassandra Kilgore, 54, places great importance on being able to share family memories. The Visalia resident said that as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she’s interested in genealogy.

“In our church we would say families are forever, or they’re an eternal family,” she said. “So, we want connections with our ancestors.”

Kilgore uses both high- and low-tech methods to maintain those connections, creating online photo albums for her four children and others as well as hard-copy albums and history books.

“It makes our lives more meaningful when you see where you came from,” she said.

The reporter can be reached at jbdaley@visalia.gannett.com.

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