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Documenting my family's history - Part I

I have been documenting various family, friends, work and events over many years. I am so happy that our paper photo collection as well as the VHS tapes are all on my external hard drive now, thanks to http://www.BaysideDigital.com

I owned my very first camera on my life-changing trip to the USA from war torn Beirut. The date was, February 12, 1976. I was flyer to NYC via Pan American Airlines (PanAm). The very first purchase I did on that flight was buying an instamatic camera. Who remembers the instamatic cameras? I am not sure what happened to it. I haven't come across that pocket camera over these 40 years yet. Most probably on my first trip to visit my family, I might have given to my siblings.

When I worked at the United Nations, the very first club I joined was the "Camera Club", which later on changed it's name. Then, that club was vibrant and friendly. Real professionals guiding and teaching. As well as we went on several trips. So I bought my very first professional camera, a FUJICA. Graduated from the instamatic to this manual camera.

Now that all my photos are digitized, the challenge is how to sort and weed them out. I started the process of going thru boxes and envelopes of photos documenting various moments captured over the years. We had 12 shoe boxes full of photos, in addition to two xerox full of photos I found in our storage! Also one xerox box full of VHS tapes!

Getting them digitized was the fastest and easiest part. Weeding them and eliminating all that space they occupy is the hardest and very time consuming. You look at the photos, they evoke emotions and revive memories. Some still so sweet, others remind of the change of heart of some people, you study their expressions and analyze, comparing the past with the present. Disappointments and illusions. However, the best part is, while weeding, I started making piles and keeping those that are dear to my heart. Those moments that still give so much joy to me. Others I kept to remind of some particular moment in time, which is there not for joy, but to remind of some realities and hurts. After all they were part of my life narrative.

There is the weeding of paper copies. Followed by going thru the digital files. Yesterday I spent over three hours just going thru and picking the best of the digitized photos. I plan on writing a book and adding those photos, as part of the narrative.

I will keep you posted of my progress.

I would love to hear from you about your experience: are your photos and videos digitized yet? If they are, how did you go about weeding and keeping only the ones you care about?

What makes a photograph memorable?

We all have family photos in albums, envelopes, boxes. Occasionally we look at them. Most of the time they are not touched. They are stored somewhere, in the basement, the closet or the attic. What's the status of your photos? If they were all digitized, how would you go about discarding them? Here is a great article. Your thoughts, experience is welcome to share What makes a photograph memorable?

Backing up photos videos from your cellphone

At the end of December 2015 I got the new Apple iPhone 6s. It took me a while to get used to it. As I always had android Samsung cellphone and I was very comfortable with it. All my friends were raving about the Apple iPhone, so I decided to give it a try.

However, since then I hadn't backed up my digital files. I had tried to connect to my PC as I used to do with my Samsung and tablet, however I didn't get anything going alerting me about my files. It forced me to sign up with iTunes, which I disliked. Today I gave another try to figure out how to download my files. Bingo, I managed to find my files. I clicked on it and found the DCM folder where there were 3 files, within those folders there were total of 2136 files. It equaled to 4.47gb

As I always like to backup my files, I got my main Master external hard drive. I created a new folder there for my iPhone backups: "iPhone backups to May 16 2016" and there I quickly uploaded the photos. It took me a total of 30min to upload, pretty good. Then I had my second backup external hard drive, which is the Archival backup of the Master drive. That took only 6 minutes!

After all was archived in both locations, I deleted all the files on my iPhone.
I just check storage and iCloud Usage: storage and it shows I have used 6.6gb and available 4.8gb. I am supposed to have 16gb hmmm... where is the rest of the 5gb?
I believe the rest might be all those text messages, whatsup etc - got to go thru all that and get rid of.

June 1st we have a session on backing up photos. This seems to be a major issue.

Check the June 1st meetup session in Bayside at:
http://www.meetup.com/Bayside-Digital/events/231160721/?comment_table_id=465299839&comment_table_name=event_comment

What's My Line? - Sophia Loren; Johnny Carson [panel] (May 28, 1961)

Here is the biography of Arlene Francis, Actress, radio presenter, television personality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlene_Francis

Nudist Camp Owner on "What's My Line?"

Let's go down memory lane of TV entertainment. This used to be the series "What's My Line" - they would try to guess what line of business someone is. Very interesting and amusing indeed. Have you ever seen those series? No comparison with all those so called "reality" shows.

The glossary of happiness

We encounter many people along our life path. Some are always happy no matter what adversary they face. Others, there aren't any apparent reason to be negative, however they seem to always dwell on the negative. At times, words in translation get lost. Filling the gap in our vocabularies, specially those who know several languages. Here is a great article I hope you will find it useful: The glossary of happiness in the New Yorker by By Emily Anthes , published on May 12, 2016 http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-glossary-of-happiness?intcid=mod-most-popular Your thoughts and comments are welcome!