3 Tips for Sharing the Family History You Gather This Holiday Season
Family History May Just Be The Most Important History
There are several reasons family history is important to record and distribute. For one thing, you want to remember the good times and have a photographic record of how things change through the years. Sometimes a grandchild is the spitting image of a grandparent, and without a photographic family history, no one would ever know.
Sometimes the family has a black sheep who is causing enmity between family members, and this trend is invisible except through history. Additionally, there are often instances where a given family comes to play a central role in historical events. Even if only one or two members of the family ends up having this impact, keeping tabs on everybody is worthwhile.
In the world of yesteryear, people kept tabs on one another through portraits and home video. The quality wasn’t great, and such materials had to be stored in photo albums or on VHS, where they would only be brought out occasionally; likely when some non-family guest was paying a visit.
In the world of today, you’ve got a top-tier portrait studio on your smartphone, and all you’ve got to do is point and click, then organize it all later. You can become a family historian putting together top-tier records of your life together without even adding to your daily grind all that much. With that in mind, consider the following tips on family history collection and sharing.
- Co-Opt Social Media
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—these are all great repositories for family photos. You can add everyone in the family to a Facebook group, and share both videos and pictures there as it suits you. Your family who is living across the world in another country can stay up to date on what’s going on with your “tribe” and even provide commentary.
Additionally, this is a great way to group things in one place and organize them. Once you’ve uploaded everything to a site like Facebook, you can go back and “archive” it by storing photos and videos on your hard drive; you just drag them from the internet “window” to your “desktop”, and now you’ve got the photos.
- Use Increasingly Qualitative Cameras To Your Advantage
Today’s digital cameras are really something else. You can get a pretty qualitative slow motion through filters in your Android or iPhone, depending on the make and model. Filters are also available, and there are even editing options that will allow you to stitch together a video in minutes. There’s a reason entire videos are being put together with smartphones—and it’s not just to advertise for the tech companies that designed them. Qualitative convenience is at your fingertips.
The biggest issue you’ll come against if you go this route involves storage. Smartphones have finite storage, often under 100 gigabytes—though there are smartphones on the market featuring around a terabyte of storage. Certainly, storage limitations will diminish given time, but the software will be more qualitative going forward, making such times scarce.
Cloud computing is integral in ensuring all photos and videos are securely stored even if you’ve got plenty of space on the device which captured them. Mobile devices are by nature vulnerable to an incident, and you don’t want to lose the entirety of your visual family history just because you dropped a phone in a puddle!
- Spreading History Across The Family Through Print Options
Something many don’t consider, but many do, is that you can preserve family history through other means than traditional portraiture, photo albums, or smartphone capture. You can print leaflets, make artistic collages, and even put your favorite family pictures on various articles of clothing.
Using coupons for Vistaprint can get you more than just business cards at a reduced expense; there are also clothing, flyers, postcards, banners, pop-up displays, and more available. Depending on the kind of family history you have, you may want to preserve a particularly good Christmas photo of the family on a bunch of t-shirts you send to everybody.
Coffee mugs and more can be co-opted for this purpose; it all depends on what you want to do, and the extent of your imagination. Modern technology has made photography more accessible than ever before and simultaneously produced better presentation methods than in previous years.
https://pixabay.com/en/picture-frame-family-sunset-3031786/
Thinking Outside The Photo Album
When your family does something fun like explore an amusement park, you want to memorialize that event. The same is true for groups that finally find a way to take that dream vacation to Australia, or Hawaii, or Alaska if your “tribe” isn’t into the whole “tropical” thing.
Modern technology makes it possible for you to increase the number of pictures and video you’re able to capture and present what you capture in more diverse ways than ever before.
Such techniques make preserving family history more easy than ever. The importance of that history transcends monetary definition. It may end up being one of the most important things in you life. So use all the tools available to you!
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