family photos | At Home with Tech

November 27, 2016

Best Recipe to Bring to Family Holiday Gatherings

Whipping up a batch of cranberry sauce from scratch is a quick and easy way to contribute to the holiday meal. But if you really want to make a bigger impact and don’t have the cooking chops, you might want to turn to your tech skills and use my recipe for success…

I started to sweat… It was our turn to host Thanksgiving dinner this year. We set the table for fifteen. My wife cooked up a perfect twenty-pound turkey. Family members and in-laws brought incredible side dishes. And what was my contribution…?

Let me simply say I’m not a gourmet chef.
Others in my extended family are far more accomplished in this arena.
(Although I can whip up a fine stack of banana pancakes… Which, of course, did me no good here.)

I’ve also previously created some mean chocolate bread pudding for the desert table, but I wasn’t on desert duty this year.

Suffice it to say, I checked the box by making some decent cranberry sauce from scratch…

It’s actually super simple…

24 oz of fresh or frozen cranberries
2 cups of sugar
4 tablespoons of water
A little orange zest

Cook it up, keep stirring and about a half an hour later… you’re done!
(Here’s the official recipe at foodnetwork.com.)

More than Good Food
It was a decent effort… though hardly a culinary stretch by any means.
I didn’t embarrass myself, and I received a dozen polite compliments.

But that wasn’t it for me.
It simply couldn’t be…

I had to contribute something more significant to this family gathering.
I had great intent… just not the skills in the kitchen.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not really about the meal, right? It’s about getting family together. It’s about remembering the good times… and giving thanks.

Bring Your Tech Smarts to the Holiday Meal
So the feast began to break up after all of the yummy deserts had been consumed. All of the young cousins had long departed the dining room, and my six year old was leading the children on some noisy adventure in the family room.

Then, the adults wandered in…

I was a few steps behind the pack, and when I got there, I witnessed them all hovered around my old 42” plasma Panasonic HDTV.
My family members were all smiling and reminiscing about what they saw…

A Trip Down Memory Lane
My HDTV displayed a magical, morphing photomontage, courtesy of my Apple TV’s screensaver. The series of 125 photos represented all of the kids over the past seven years at different family activities and events.

This digital display of recent family history was my true contribution to this gathering.

I brought the gift of remembering good times…

‘Cause let’s face it. Life is messy.
Thanksgivings are rarely perfect.
(Growing up, mine certainly had major flaws.)

Life just isn’t a holiday card.

But on the other hand, there are still plenty of amazing moments.
You’ve just got to remember them. Isn’t that part of what giving thanks is about?

And if someone could simply gather up all of those memories and serve them up… wouldn’t that be nice?

Well, that’s exactly what I did.
I served up some great family memories.

This is my pièce de résistance for large family meals.
And what’s my recipe…?

iCloud Photo Sharing on your Apple TV
If you often worry about what you’re going to do with all of those photos you’ve been collecting, (and sometimes not having the time to share) this can be your moment of reckoning…

It’s actually not at all difficult to pull off. The major ingredient is taking all of those photos over the years and keeping them organized in a program like Aperture 6.

Then, you simply export your group of photos into a new iCloud shared photo album that your Apple TV can access.

Here’s how you complete your visual feast using Apple’s connected ecosystem…

Go to your Apple TV and click on ‘Settings.’
Click on ‘General.’
Click on ‘Screensaver.’
Click on ‘Type’.
Click on ‘My Photos.’
Click on your new iCloud shared photo album.
Click on ‘Set as Screensaver.’
Your Apple TV will ask you to confirm. Click ‘Yes.’
Then, step back a few times to the main menu screen on your Apple TV.
Press the Menu button again. That will activate the screensaver program, and your photos will start to scroll up the screen in random order.

Voilà!

A few other notes…

You don’t have to use full-res photos.
(The pics look great at a fraction of the size.)
Your Apple TV will also activate its screensaver automatically after a few minutes of non-use
(depending on what delay length you’ve set in your screensaver settings).
You can also enjoy your shared photo album on your other Apple devices
(though not as a photomontage).

Problem Solved
As you may know, I fret a lot about how to manage and share my growing mountain of family pictures.

A good solution is to regularly funnel them through digital photo frames.
(Currently, I’m a fan of using Nixplay digital frames, although I’ve had some connectivity issues with them in the past.)

So why not expand on this plan and simply use your HDTV as a giant multi-image photo frame?
(Just use a connected 4th generation Apple TV to perform the trick.)

I think it’s a great way to fuel all of those good feelings when family and friends get together for the holidays.

It’s a recipe that can’t be beat!

March 6, 2016

You’re Taking Way Too Many Pictures

Does your picture-taking style resemble throwing lots of pasta at the wall to see what sticks? That can help you nail the perfect photo, but what about the mess you’ve also created?

Last week, I asked someone to take a couple of pictures for me on his iPhone for a project. It was something of a spontaneous moment… But everyone’s got a smartphone these days, right?
So no biggie…

Later that afternoon, he walked over and offered to AirDrop “the bunch” to me between our iPhones.
(And that was so much faster than receiving an email with the photos attached and then having to save the pics to my iPhone.)

So I stare at my iPhone’s screen. A message popped up that asked if I wanted to accept the incoming photos.
(They would get immediately stored in the native Photos app.)

I clicked “Yes” and voila, my iPhone ingested… 81 photos.

81 what?!
You read correctly.

Yes, the ‘few’ images I had requested ended up being a photo essay of 81 images.

I thanked him, but really… I didn’t want that many photos.
(I secretly grumbled about much time it would take me to go through all of them to find the best one or two.)

Tick Tock
Now, I’m sure he was just trying to be helpful by capturing a whole lot of photos to ensure he nailed some good ones for me.
(And now I’m feeling a little guilty being so ungrateful.)

But there’s a fundamental problem at play here that this kind of moment demonstrates.
And I think we’re all guilty of this when we start snapping photos…

We act like digital photography is essentially free.

And to a certain extent, that’s true. The only noticeable cost is the gradual filling up of your smartphone’s memory or your camera’s media card.

But trust me, this way of thinking is certain to create a time bomb down the road.
‘Cause you’re going to wake up a few years later and realize you’ve got 12,000 photos in your phone.

And what are you supposed to do with all of those photos?!
Are you spending the necessary time to separate the wheat from the chaff?
And more importantly, what have you been doing with your thousands of pictures along the way?

Overwhelmed
Here’s your true cost to taking thousands of your free photos every year:
You’re going to need huge chunks of time to manage your growing photo archive.
or
You will give up trying and figure you’ll deal with the problem another day.

And you know what that means…

You didn’t print them.
You didn’t share them.
You didn’t enjoy them.
And nobody else did either.

Whoa… that’s a bummer.

And you know how I feel about waiting too long…
Yes, I say that lots of your pictures actually have expiration dates!
Because beyond your immediate family unit, nobody really wants to see a three-year-old photo of your six year old.

People want to see fresh photos.

Sure, there are always archival benefits to your pictures, but they’re much more valuable in the here and the now!

Less is More
Remember the old days of film photography just before the turn of the century?
(Ahem… the 21st century)
Come on… it wasn’t that long ago when we used rolls of physical film in our cameras. There were only 24 or 36 pictures per roll, and it cost you about twenty bucks to develop each roll.

Trust me, you probably weren’t taking 81 pictures of anything back then.
I know I wasn’t.

The beauty from that pre-digital age was you’d take two… maybe three photos of something… to be sure you got the photo just the way you wanted.
(There was no way to know, because there was no screen in the back. How did we ever survive…?!)

You’d maintain a few family photo albums and probably a couple of shoeboxes with some disorganized pics, and that would be it.

Okay, let’s fast forward to the present….
How much physical space would it take to house… say… twenty thousand physical photos?

Well, of course the answer is zero, because most of these photos would either live on your hard drive, which will eventually go caput, or in the Cloud somewhere.

What happens if one day you forget to pay for your Cloud account? Then, you’ll lose access to those photos.

And then where will you be?
You’ll have no photos of your life… at all.
(You’ve got a stronger back up plan, you say? Well, bravo for you. You can skip to the end of this post.)

Okay, I know I’m being a little apocalyptic.
Perhaps, I exaggerate. But only slightly.

Your Sock Drawer is a Mess
I really feel we’re losing control of all the photos we’re taking.

(I know I’m having a hard time keeping up.)

Sure, many of us effortlessly post dozens or even hundreds of photos online to share our lives in the moment, but I believe this apparent fluidity masks the larger problem of what’s happening to the others 19,000 photos.

Imagine a giant sock drawer you haven’t opened in twenty years with thousands of unmatched socks.
Do you feel the problem now?

If you don’t pay attention to your digital photo library and to the volume of photo files you’re feeding it, you’re going be in a world of hurt down the line.

Magical Sequences
Of course, there’s often an exception to any rule….
And that’s when you’re capturing a series of related moments via rapid-fire picture taking. My wife has done this a bunch of times with me and my son using her iPhone 6 Plus.
(This art form is very intuitive for her.)

These magical photo sequences can represent a few seconds to up to a minute. You’d never be able to capture these wonderful connected images unless you simply snap away… as if the price per photo were free.

How Many Photos Do You Need?
So no, don’t take lots of pictures all of the time.
Except when sometimes you should.

Got that?

All right, so you’ve got to be a little flexible when confronting how to capture your family’s lives through digital photography.

Just always ask yourself this question-
How many photos do you really need to take to get what you want?

If you decide to take 81, that’s okay.
Just don’t leave it for another day (decade) to figure out which two or three you should keep.

And remember, nobody really needs to hold onto 20,000 pictures to tell their life story.

Sometimes, it only takes one.

1 Comment

January 24, 2016

Don’t Lose This When Organizing Your Family History in Photos

When was this picture of my grandmother taken? Good question. I’m not really sure. You shouldn’t let this partial answer cross over to future generations when it comes to your family’s history…

I never knew my paternal grandmother. And my father barely remembers her, because she passed away when he was just a young child. We’ve only got a few photos of her, but even with this limited view, it’s clear to me what a vibrant, beautiful and interesting woman she was…
And that’s all I’ve got… a few photos from the 1930’s and some stories from my father that others told him as he grew up. I’d like to know so much more about her, but sadly… her life is mostly lost to me.

My Grandmother’s Story through the Lens of One Undated Photo
I look at my grandmother’s pictures and try to use every detail to generate more of her story. They’re still in remarkably good condition, having been stored in a shoebox in the back of my father’s closet for decades. Unfortunately, these pictures aren’t dated, and there’s nothing written on the back. That’s a huge gap.

As I’ve digitized the photos and archived these priceless moments into my family photo collection on my iMac, I’ve had to ballpark their creation dates.

This is only one of two pictures I’ve got of my grandmother with my father. It actually reveals a few clues as to when it was taken. You can guess that my dad is about two years old here… so that tells me this is approximately May 1935. (That car in the back would also help with dating if baby dad weren’t there…)

Based on this one picture, I’ve tried to figure out the dates from the other pictures of my grandmother based on whether she looks younger or older…

The Problem of Exporting Photos Out of Aperture
You can imagine how frustrating this has all been for me… which is why I’m particularly interested in maintaining accurate dates in my larger digitized family photo collection.

That’s supposed to be a no brainer as that kind of metadata is baked into every digital photo you snap. But as you may have been following, I’ve been struggling to move the timeline of my old photo library in Apple’s Aperture over to Adobe’s Lightroom. Sure, I’ve figured out how to move all of my favorite edited ‘versions’ over. But when I tried exporting a couple of these versions, the dates on the exported files shifted from the creation date of the original photo to the export date.
(That’s understandable, since the new file’s creation date should obviously be the moment of the test export.)

But that’s no good.

The prospect of losing all of the dates on thousands of photos was a significant dilemma as I considered my photo transfer project. The passage of time is a key part of any family’s history. And I didn’t want to lose that. Having to eyeball my pics to figure out the date was not an option.
(Grandmother taught me that…)

Sure, I could place these photos in correctly dated folders, but future OS and software upgrades might one day corrupt the organization, and I’d be left with thousands of rescued photos representing the past hundred years… dated January 2016.

How to Save the Creation Dates when Transferring to Lightroom
There’s got to be a way to bring your edited photo versions from Aperture into Lightroom 6 and retain the original dates.

And in fact there is…

Are you ready?

So the answer is…
You don’t have to do anything.
(Huh?)

Believe it or not, the creation-date metadata is actually ‘secretly’ retained in the exported photo version from Aperture…

No, Apple’s “Preview” app can’t read that metadata in the photo.
And yes, the file itself has a different date, which “Preview” displays. And that’s where I got stuck.
But when you open the photo file in Lightroom, the origin date is still there!

Wow.
(Don’t I feel silly…)

But seriously, I found no documentation out there by Apple, Adobe or anyone else to explain this simple but somewhat hidden fact.

How did I figure it out?
I finally decided to ignore my incorrect assumptions and simply complete the test photo import, hoping I might somehow get closer to figuring out a solution.
(And I certainly did!)

Prepare Your Pics for Time Travel
The good news is the timeline of my family history in digital pictures is safe.
(For now)

But whenever I print out a photo at home on my Epson printer, I still make a point to quickly write the date on the back. My grandmother’s photos illustrate what a critical detail that is, as my current collection of physical pics will likely travel through a future timeline spanning many years.

In the back of my mind, I know if these pictures happen to survive more than the next couple of generations, someone may one day be in my shoes… trying to sleuth out a captured moment in time.

You may scoff at the value of an ancient physical photo surviving into the twenty second century. One can only imagine what photo management and archiving will look like in the distant computerized future.

On the other hand, if moving between photo management apps continues to be so challenging over and over again into future decades, it’s not hard to imagine how lots of digital photos may not survive the cold march of OS upgrades.

Throwing a printed family photo with a date on the back into a shoe box, hiding it in a closet and then forgetting about it for a hundred years isn’t the worst idea when it comes to a back-up photo-archiving plan.

It worked for my grandmother…

Tag: family photos

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