Photo Management—Upgrades and Tips

Heritage Makers is excited to announce new and improved tools—designed to help you more easily navigate within your photo manager, organize your photos, and be aware of your file usage.

The photo manager update was introduced on July 24, 2012. If you want to get the nitty-gritty about ALL the photo manager updates and changes, follow this link which will direct you to a more detailed article and tutorial within the new HM Support website.

My favorite new photo management feature is the “photo details” box that opens when you double click on a photo. Here, you can easily scroll through photos in an album and see a detailed view of each one. You can add and change photo filenames and captions, see photo dimensions, file sizes, when a photo was uploaded, and best of all, photo usage!



If you click on the “show projects” button, you will see a list of any Studio projects the photo is used in. The “view” link even opens a Studio preview of the project!






Three Keys to Managing Your Photos

 

Your photo manager is a place where you upload, store and manage the photos you use to make wonderful custom keepsakes in Studio! To streamline, simplify and optimize your creative Studio experience, we suggest you:

1. Be selective. 2. Be prepared. 3.Stay organized.

Be selective with the photos you upload. Wonderfully, digital cameras allow us to take dozens and dozens of pictures of a single event or subject. However, you’ll want to use only your very best photos in the projects you create and publish—so select and upload the best—leave the rest. Then, when you’re working on your Studio projects, you’ll know the images in your photo manager albums are your most excellent. You won’t have to wade and search through images that you wouldn’t want to publish anyway.

Prepare photos before you upload. Your photo manager has amazing tools that allow you to categorize and organize photos and albums. However, it is not a photo editing program. So before uploading your images, we suggest using an outside photo editing software to prepare them—rotate into the proper orientation, fix red-eye, adjust lighting, exposure and color. This will ensure that your photos look their best and print beautifully in your treasured keepsake projects.

Organize the photos you upload. We all have our own ways of labeling pictures and categorizing our photo folders and albums—and often, we find we want to adapt and improve our methods. Fortunately, your photo manager tools make it easy to browse images, and arrange, rearrange and rename your folders and albums! The manager also helps you clean up and slim down your albums by showing which images are used in projects, and which are not. At a glance you can see (and resize) thumbnail images of all the photos in specific albums. With the click of a button you can view the Studio projects your photos are in. You can organize to your heart’s content—and know that the better organized your photos, the better your creative Studio experience will be!

Click here to start a project now. http://studio.heritagemakers.com/getStarted/

Go to my web site at http://HeritageMakers.com/Rebecca or contact me via email at Rebecca@OurPhotoStories.com to learn more about Heritage Makers.

Slow down and savor everyday moments.

I read this on Stacy Julian's blog and thought it was worth sharing:

Time moves so very fast and most of the time we do too. But, we can choose (with practice) to slow down and to savor simple everyday moments. We can pull out our cameras and take pictures and we can live with these pictures and let them work magical things inside of us. Doing so will make us more grateful, more content, more aware and more happy. There is so much that is overwhelming and challenging in life. Efforts to capture and share your memories should be neither.

Enjoy your day.
Take pictures of things that make you happy!

You can read Stacy's blog here: http://stacyjulian.com/blog/?p=9007
Here is a link to Stacy's video: http://youtu.be/u8WUZFgAmk8

Photography Tips

Face-free PhotographyPhotographing the graduation, wedding or Mother’s Day gathering? Capture a least a few photos that are face free. Relationships and settings are often more powerfully demonstrated with tight close-ups of things other than faces. Let’s look at a few shots you won’t want to miss.








HandsSnap grandma holding hands with grandpa or the newest member of the family. Grab a photo of the bride and groom hand-in-hand as husband and wife or capture the diploma in your young graduate’s grasp. Show Mom helping her daughter prepare for the prom or graduation. And too, if the event has associated traditions like a tea ceremony or signing a wedding certificate, those moments also deserve the power that a close up, face-free photo brings.







The DetailsGet in close and capture the décor, the jewelry, the shoes and socks, or lack of them, which make your family’s special occasion unique. If it’s a graduation, document the program, the flowers, and the school emblems that are displayed along with the Hawaiian print shorts your son will wear underneath his graduation gown. And if it’s a wedding, remember most wedding décor is chosen to be a reflection of the young couple. Will the bride be sporting jeweled flip-flops under her wedding dress? Are the paper lanterns a nod to her Chinese ancestry? Will one of the groomsmen be wearing purple socks? Let the personal touches they choose for their celebration live on forever in photos, and the memories made will be remembered long after the event is over.





The LocationTrying to get everyone in the photo and still see the scene behind is often just not practical. Always include at least a few face-free shots to help define the location. Whether it’s the celebration table, the high school sign, the outside of the church or a photo of the road sign; such scene-setting photos add context to your pages and projects.

Adding Context and DetailWhile faces are the mainstay of photographed moments, you can add rich detail and important context with your no faces photos. Never let them replace those smiling faces. Just think of them as the icing on the cake!

Click here to start a project now. http://studio.heritagemakers.com/getStarted/

Go to my web site at http://www.OurPhotoStories.com or contact me via email at Rebecca@OurPhotoStories.com to learn more about Heritage Makers products.

Spring Fling Fun

As winter wanes, spring blooms, and so does our optimism and our plans to tackle new projects. Often dubbed “spring cleaning,” these new chores are intended to help us ditch the winter blues and blahs for the bright colors and flowering hope of spring. We tend to tackle projects that help us let go of the old clutter in order to achieve a brighter, lighter feel…from closets to cupboards and even the JPGs on our computers and cameras.

As your Heritage Makers Personal Publishing Consultant, I have the tools and solutions you need to make it easier to sort, organize, save and share your best photos. I’m happy to help you “spring clean” your digital photos, and can even arrange for scanning those piles of pre-digital prints.

This spring at Heritage Makers, we’ve begun offering a new format for our in-home parties that we call workshops. These fun, fast-paced events teach you and your friends how to save your most precious photos and memories. We use our Idea Book as the basis for our interactive presentation. Plus, you get to keep a copy of the Idea Book, complete with all your notes and flagged “favorites.” 

Spring cleaning is more fun with friends so schedule a Spring Fling workshop with me to earn FREE publishing points for your own projects thanks to our generous host rewards. On average, hosts get $100 worth of free publishing just for enjoying a fun hour of learning and laughing with your friends and family. Best of all, everyone there will learn the latest techniques for photo storage, organizing, archiving and preserving.

You know you want to “spring clean” those JPGs on your computer and your friends probably have the same “photo problem” you do. Host a new Idea Book workshop this spring to offer Heritage Makers as the best solution for capturing and preserving your priceless photos and stories.

Contact me via email at Rebecca@OurPhotoStories.com to schedule your Spring Fling Workshop today! 

This is why I love photos.

Watch this thought provoking video.

This is why I love photos!  This is why I believe photos are important. But listen to the lyrics at 3:00. I can show you how to quickly and easily pair you photos with your stories so that people don't have to “read between the lines.”  www.OurPhotoStories.com

"Our Storybooks have the power to bring back the past, preserve the present and shape the future." - Heidi Arave