In this practical, hands-on webinar, Maureen Taylor—The Photo Detective®—guides you through the best modern methods for improving historic photographs. You’ll learn how to make smart decisions about enhancement, when colorization is helpful (and when it isn’t), and how today’s software and AI tools stack up for genealogists.

We’ll explore a range of popular options—including Vivid-Pix Restore, MyHeritage’s photo tools, Google Gemini’s Nano Banana, and other AI-powered solutions. You’ll discover what each tool does well, its limitations, and how to choose the right approach for different types of images: scans, snapshots, tintypes, cabinet cards, slides, and more.

Whether you want to gently clean up a portrait, sharpen a faded scene, or experiment with tasteful colorization, you’ll walk away knowing how to get better results with confidence—and preserve authenticity along the way.

When: December 17, 2025

Time: 2 pm to 3:30 pm ET on Zoom 

This will be recorded.  Attendance is limited to 100 live participants. 

Participants will receive a handout

You’ll learn:

• How colorization happened in the past

• When and how to use historical enhancement methods

• Safe approaches to colorization for genealogists

• Strengths & weaknesses of today’s top editing tools

• How Vivid-Pix Restore and MyHeritage compare

• What AI tools like Google Gemini can (and can’t) do

  • Prompts and Results

• Tips for improving difficult images (fading, color shifting, blurriness)

• How to maintain preservation-friendly practices while enhancing images

Perfect for family historians, photo collectors, and anyone who wants their images to look their best without losing their historical integrity.

Who This Class Is For:

• Family historians and genealogists

• Anyone with a box (or hard drive!) full of old photos

• People curious about using AI tools without losing control of their images

You don’t need to be a tech expert—just someone who wants their photos to look as good as the stories behind them.

The post Revitalize Your Memories: Smart Ways to Restore, Colorize, and Enhance Your Photos appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

Unlike traditional search engines, Perplexity offers direct, conversational answers and cites its sources, allowing users to quickly gauge the credibility of the information presented. In this class, we’ll explore how this tool can complement your existing research methods and help you dig deeper without drowning in tabs or unreliable results.

Through guided examples and real-world research scenarios, you’ll see how Perplexity supports fact-checking, uncovering obscure details, and accelerating your learning curve on any subject. It’s not just about getting answers—it’s about asking smarter questions.

This class is ideal for anyone curious about how AI can be used responsibly and efficiently in academic, professional, or personal research. No technical background is required—just a willingness to experiment with a powerful new tool.

Join us to learn how Perplexity can become your research sidekick—making your work faster, sharper, and more insightful.

We’ll take the Google versus Perplexity challenge too.

What You Will Learn:

• What is Perplexity and how does it work?
• Comparing Perplexity to Google, ChatGPT, and traditional archives
• Genealogy-specific use cases
• Case studies–photo identification, consistency checking, image searching, family narratives and more
• Ethical considerations and limitations

Why This Class? This class is more than just a technical walkthrough; it’s an interactive exploration of what’s possible and not (yet) with Perplexity.ai.  Whether you’re a hobbyist or a professional genealogist, you’ll find invaluable resources and expert guidance tailored to making the most of your historical photo collections. Bring your questions and we’ll run some tests.

The post 2025 Unlock the Power of Perplexity.ai appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

Every photo tells a story. I believe it, do you?  Each clue reveals bits of family history. It’s true.  From the faces in the images to the person who took the picture, there are clues that can’t be overlooked. 

It’s not uncommon to feel overwhelmed when faced with an unidentified photo. My clients express frustration and anxiety about what to do with these images. Should they be tossed or kept? Many folks feel so stressed by these mysterious images, that they toss them. GASP!  This FREE 30-minute webinar has tips to cut through the misery of mystery photos.

I’m on a mission to prevent that last step and enable you with the skills to tell the story by uncovering the details.  Before you can say “picture puzzles” you’ll be on your way to identifying and saving those images for the next generation.

As one of my clients said, “photographs provide us with a connection.” Each of your pictures is a piece of family history. It could hold the missing pieces of your family story. It’s a proven fact that photographs provide children with a sense of identity, belonging, and connection.

When: September 30, 2021

Time:  2 pm  ET

Where: Crowdcast (you’ll be registered) 

In This FREE Webinar

In this FREE webinar, I’ll present five clues to help you uncover the story in your pictures whenever and wherever they were taken

• Questions to ask to put a name with a face
• Overlooked clues that are game-changers for family historians
• Metadata will help you keep track of all the new data. I’ll show you how.

The post Photo Clues That Reveal Family History appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

Did you watch our three-part class at Rootstech?  You can still sign up for FREE. 

Here’s an overview of our three sessions.   Watch the class and sign up for our FREE Q & A follow-up. We can’t wait to hear your questions!   We’ll be using Crowdcast for this event. You’ll be sent details.

Session 1

Unlock the Shoebox: Digitizing Your Family Photos

Speakers: Maureen Taylor and Chris Desmond

Are you sitting on a stockpile of old family photos and mementos that you’d love to digitize but you just aren’t sure how to start such a massive project?  This session will provide tips that can help you tackle your digitization project with greater efficiency and will also cover how to make sure you use the best practices and processes to preserve and protect your mementos for the near and long-term.

What you will learn: Best practices for preparing and scanning photos such as how to group photos into batches, what types of equipment to use for digitizing, what file formats to use, tools for enhancing photos and how to label digitized images so they automatically help with organization efforts.

Session 2

Unlock the Shoebox: Identifying Your Family Photos

Speaker: Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective

Are you the lucky family historian who’s been charged with preserving, researching, and sharing your family’s archive of photos? Are there some photos that both excite and frustrate you because you know they likely hold clues to your family history but you’re just not sure how to interpret the visual details to solve genealogy riddles?  This session will provide you with tips and guidance on how to identify and use photo attributes to help crack the case.

What you’ll learn:  Tips for using family photograph elements such as clothing, photo materials/shape, and furniture to identify details such as date, location, occasion, and more.

Session 3

Unlock the Shoebox: Organizing Your Family Photos

Speaker: Nancy Desmond

Do you have a bounty of digitized images but aren’t quite sure where/how to organize them? Do you wish you could find any photo easily and also be able to share collections with others in a meaningful way? Are you curious about how you can add details to your photos that will be saved as metadata?  This session will provide you with guidance on how to use various photo organizing tools to capture and share details that bring your photos to life for you and your family.

What you’ll learn:  Tips for prepping your photo archives to be “upload-optimized” before adding them to photo organizing tools, guidance on how to add new/missing details to photos as metadata, and examples of ways to share your collections with family.

The post Unlock the Shoebox: Digitizing, Identifying, and Organizing Your Family Photos appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

During this pandemic time, I’ve spent a lot of time organizing things—my pantry, my closets, and whatever photos I hadn’t had time to work on.  From your emails, it seems like I’m not alone. Finally, we have time to tackle those photos. But it still seems overwhelming, right?   This FREE webinar is for anyone with a box, bin, or closet full of pictures. 

A gift of a box or more of photographs can be seen as such an overwhelming task that it’s easier to leave them for the next generation. The problem is the next generation doesn’t always know what to do with them either, so the images get tossed.  This FREE webinar has tips to solve this problem.

I’m on a mission to prevent that last step and enable you with skills to tackle those images.  Before you can say “prevent picture puzzles” you’ll be on your way to identifying, preserving and, organizing your photos.  Photo preservation and organization used to be complicated and expensive, but that’s no longer the case.

As one of my clients said, “photographs provide us with a connection.” Each of your pictures is a piece of family history. It could hold the missing pieces of your family story. It’s a proven fact that photographs provide children with a sense of identity, belonging, and connection.

In This FREE Webinar

In this FREE webinar, I’ll present three simple tips to cut down on that sense of being overwhelmed (and the guilt that goes with it).

• We’ll talk about the biggest challenges that get in your way for organizing images and why minimalists are wrong.
• There are easy ways to climb that photo mountain and that includes my signature 5 questions for putting a name with a face.
• Metadata will help you keep track of all the new data. It sounds scarier than it is.
• Think of your collection as being two separate piles–vintage images and those taken in your lifetime. The two w’s of weeding and workflow are key to ending up with images you’ll be able to share with a click.

O.K. I admit it.  I give homework <smile> and like a scout, I have a pledge.

Once registered you’ll receive an email confirmation, email that tells you how to access the program, and a reminder. If you don’t receive one, check your spam filter

The post Tackle Your Photos Today! 3 Simple Strategies for the North Yarmouth Historical Society appeared first on Maureen Taylor.