Today, we have a special guest, David Vascovich, the CEO and founder of Mylio.com, a revolutionary digital photo organizing site. David’s insights into photography, memory, and organization have led to the creation of a unique platform that helps users manage their digital memories efficiently. In this episode, we delve into the inspiration behind Mylio, its innovative features, and how it stands out in the crowded field of photo organization tools. Whether you’re a casual photographer or a professional, you’ll find valuable tips and insights on how to keep your digital memories organized and accessible.

• Key Features of Mylio
  • The Life Calendar: A unique way to visualize decades of memories.
  • Automatic face recognition and its efficiency.
• Multimedia Support
  • Support for photos, videos, and documents.
  • Integration with other tools and apps for editing and management.
  • Compatibility with third-party editing tools like Photoshop
  • Metadata management and its importance for organizing photos.
• Support and Resources
  • Mylio’s help system, user forums, and support team.
  • Options for professional assistance and bundles for new users.

Related Episodes:

Episode 228: Joseph Quaderer: Democratizing Biographies with StorySavor.com 

Episode 221: Permanent Digital Storage Solutions with Tammy Kirby of Forever.com 

Links:

• Sign up for my newsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Page so you get notified of my Facebook Live videos.
• Need help organizing your photos? Check out the Essential Photo Organizing Video Course.
• Need help identifying family photos? Check out the Identifying Family Photographs Online Course.
• Have a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation.

About My Guest:

David Vaskevitch’s career as visionary software architect, business innovator, and author spans more than 50 years. He built one of the first three email systems in the world in 1971. After joining Microsoft in 1986, he held various senior executive positions during his 23-year tenure, including chief technical officer. The founder of several software ventures, Vaskevitch is founder and CEO of Bellevue, Wash. Mylio, a software tool enabling the management of a lifetime worth of photos, documents and memories . 

About Maureen Taylor:

Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective^Òhelps clients with photo related genealogical problems. Her pioneering work in historic photo research has earned her the title “the nation’s foremost historical photo detective” by The Wall Street Journal and appearances on The View, The Today Show, Pawn Stars, and others.   Learn more at Maureentaylor.com

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

The post Episode 234: Transforming Photo Organization: Insights from Mylio’s Founder David Vascovich appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

This week Maureen Taylor, The Photo Detective, is joined by Jeff Looman, a software developer who is the Vice President of Engineering at FileShadow, Inc. FileShadow is a software platform that categorizes your files based on metadata and content. It’s a secure vault for all of your files.

The two discuss how saving our images and documents, collaboration with family and friends, and preserving our digital footprint are critical components to preservation. 

Related Episodes:

Episode 134: Unlocking the Shoebox : Digitize, Identify and Organize Family Photos

Episode 95: How to Save Your Family Archive with Permanent.org

Links:

• FileShadow
• Sign up for my newsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Page so you get notified of my Facebook Live videos.
• Need help organizing your photos? Check out the Essential Photo Organizing Video Course.
• Need help identifying family photos? Check out the Identifying Family Photographs Online Course.
• Have a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation.

About My Guest:

Jeff Looman has been working in software development for over 38 years, both as an engineer, in engineering management, product management, and product placement strategies. He is currently the Vice President of Engineering at FileShadow, Inc. and has worked for a variety of large companies such as WordPerfect, Novell, Apple Computer, and Corel and small companies such as AccessData, eDepoze, and FileShadow. He has been involved in the production of numerous software packages predominantly focused on business productivity in a collaborative environment, focusing on the needs of individual entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and everything in between.

About Maureen Taylor:

Maureen is a frequent keynote speaker on photo identification, photograph preservation, and family history at historical and genealogical societies, museums, conferences, libraries, and other organizations across the U.S., London and Canada.  She’s the author of several books and hundreds of articles and her television appearances include The View and The Today Show (where she researched and presented a complete family tree for host Meredith Vieira).  She’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart Living, Germany’s top newspaper Der Spiegel, American Spirit, and The New York Times. Maureen was recently a spokesperson and photograph expert for MyHeritage.com, an internationally known family history website and also writes guidebooks, scholarly articles and online columns for such media as Smithsonian.com. Learn more at Maureentaylor.com

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

The post Episode 200: Organize with FileShadow appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

Collecting is often a hobby that starts when we’re in grade school. Did you have a childhood hobby?  I did. I loved learning about family history and old photos. I’m still passionate about it today.  

My guest’s hobby of collecting old photographs of famous stars of television and movies is a lifetime pursuit. At some point, he began gathering bits of New York’s picture history one box of glass negatives at a time. When I asked him about the size of his collection, he laughed. Yup…that a clue to how many pictures in his collection. A LOT.  Prints get saved (sometimes) but negatives are often discarded, but to Ray Simone, those pieces of history are worth a second look.  We chatted about his lifetime of saving the past, how he preserves his collection, and how you can obtain a print. 

Related Episodes:

Episode 103:  Organize, Preserve, and Share with Collectionaire.com

Episode 101: Rediscovering an American Community of Color 

Links:

• Original Vintage Fine Art Photographs
• Sign up for my newsletter.
• Watch my YouTube Channel.
• Like the Photo Detective Facebook Page so you get notified of my Facebook Live videos.
• Need help organizing your photos? Check out the Essential Photo Organizing Video Course.
• Need help identifying family photos? Check out the Identifying Family Photographs Online Course.
• Have a photo you need help identifying? Sign up for photo consultation.

About My Guest:

Ray Simone has been a professional photographer for over 20 years,  shooting fashion throughout NYC and product photography.

He has been collecting original vintage photographs since he was 10 years old and when he started shooting professionally he decided to start collecting original camera negatives. Ray would search the city far and wide for them. 6th Ave between 14 & 34th Streets was a treasure trove before the 1990’s came along. There were many empty parking lots on weekends where people would be selling everything you can imagine, but his eye was focused on negatives.

One day about 10 years ago after cleaning up his photo studio Ray decided to start to retouch & restore those negatives and make fine art prints.

All of his prints come from the original camera negative and are printed at the highest HD possible on the finest fine art paper available.

Ray is a born and raised New Yorker.

About Maureen Taylor:

Maureen is a frequent keynote speaker on photo identification, photograph preservation, and family history at historical and genealogical societies, museums, conferences, libraries, and other organizations across the U.S., London and Canada.  She’s the author of several books and hundreds of articles and her television appearances include The View and The Today Show (where she researched and presented a complete family tree for host Meredith Vieira).  She’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, The Boston Globe, Martha Stewart Living, Germany’s top newspaper Der Spiegel, American Spirit, and The New York Times. Maureen was recently a spokesperson and photograph expert for MyHeritage.com, an internationally known family history website and also writes guidebooks, scholarly articles and online columns for such media as Smithsonian.com. Learn more at Maureentaylor.com

Did you enjoy this episode? Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

The post Episode 136: A Lifetime of Love: Collecting Old Photos of New York City with Ray Simone appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

Kondoizing is good for your clothes but not for your heirloom photos. But what is a person to do?

This episode offers tips for tackling your images–from digital overload to ancestral images. What to do and how to share/ store them.

The post Episode 33: Spring Cleaning Your Photos appeared first on Maureen Taylor.

Sounded great. Sort by category. Feel the joy or discard the rest.

She was fired up about how tidy her house looked and how she felt without the mess. Until she go to the part where she had to deal with her family photos. Not just the ones she’d taken, but those handed down for generations. Each picture brought back a memory and an emotion.

She struggled with getting rid of those precious items and asked me what to do.

There’s organizing information for everyday contemporary photo albums and then there’s advice for historic pictures. They’re not the same thing so the advice on caring for them should be different.

This recent organizing trend encourages folks to clean up their stuff tossing almost everything including photos.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for downsizing. I’ve done it myself. But when a multi million dollar-organizing expert tells her readers that “the correct method is to remove all your photos from their albums and look at them one by one” I have to speak up. no. No. NO.

This mega organizer doesn’t differentiate between your vacation albums and the ones put together by your ancestors. I’m sure she’d thinking about all those contemporary albums (digital and real) we’ve compiled, but she doesn’t clarify her advice for family history photos. Would you really toss pictures of great uncle Ben?

I believe that ever picture tells a story and a photo albums tells a tale of a person’ life.

One of my missions is to save those stories. Those images give us a connection to our past.

By sharing those pictures with our children we’re reinforcing family connections. In a disconnected world where family rarely lives next door, those images become valuable icons of who we are and why.

It’s time to rescue those historic albums from the current “too it” organizing mentality. Be a hero, save a family history picture or a whole album.

Touching the Past

Think about how you feel when you sit down with a photo album. If you’re like most people there is an instant connection with the person who took time to put it together.

By touching the pages and viewing the images, you know who and what was important to them. The paper feels different. They’re heavier and more substantial than a snapshot. And those old images come in all sizes–from tiny tin pictures to large card stock cabinet cards. Snapshots too. Blue, beige gold toned, and purple hued images stare out at you.

They beg you to answer the question: Who are these people?

We live in an image-based world surrounded by people taking pictures of every moment. For our ancestors, a visit to a photo studio usually marked a special occasion. Even candid pictures from the 1920s documents the everyday life of your great grandparents. They are pictorial moments worth treasuring.

Here are a few pieces of advice for dealing with albums old and new.

Your Albums: Weed the Present

We take more photos in one year than all the pictures ever taken in the 19th century. That makes the ones taken by your ancestors more special than that tenth shot you took of the Grand Canyon last year. Weed out of your own collection all those multiple shots of the same location. Choose special ones to save for your descendants.

Great Aunt May’s Albums: Save Them

Don’t touch those older bookish looking albums and those on black paper. They’re fine the way they are. Removing all those pictures usually damages the aged album pages, too.

And by taking them apart (as suggested by Ms. Kondo), you lose track of what goes where and destroy the context of the story contained in those images.

Who’s depicted? Who’s not? The placement of each picture in the album provides clues to the relationship of the person in the photo to the person who compiled the album.

A person I know took apart a black paper album to see if anything else was written on the back. (There was nothing there.) In their desire to see if their ancestor had written names on the back, the pictures got jumbled.

They didn’t photograph the pages first to be able to put it back together, so all the photos ended up in a pile and stayed there.

Laster, they found their aunt had kept a diary to go with the album. Together the album and the diary chronicled her travels as a young woman. Unfortunately the pile of pictures and the diary no longer fit together. Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again.

An Old School Toxic Combination

Unless you’re drowning in vacation photo albums, the only ones that really need to be taken part are the toxic creations sold beginning in the 1970s. Labeled as “magnetic,” they consist of poor quality paper, plastic, and glue.

Those gummy glue stripes or sticky pages grip onto pictures, leave behind yellow stains, and won’t cry uncle and let go. There are special techniques to remove those pictures safely. You’ll learn about them in my Essential Photo Organizing course. 

For now, put them aside with the intention that you’ll deal with those later.

Leave Them a Legacy

Take time to think about the photographic legacy you’re leaving your descendants. Pick significant images from your life and do what Great Aunt May did, put them in an album.

Give your heirs a picture story to cherish. By doing so, you’ve gotten rid of unnecessary stuff (the point of all good organizing advice), but kept the best for the future. Great Aunt May would be proud.

The post The life-changing magic of tidying up is wrong! (And What you should do instead.) appeared first on Maureen Taylor.