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Your computer now contains several hundred family photos, all properly labelled (as per info you've gathered from this website). So, what to do with them? The main goal is to be able to share these family treasures with other relatives. That can be done both digitally and also using more conventional paper methods. The following are a few project ideas that will allow you to share this information in creative and interesting ways. Your Computer - The first thing you might want to do is to check your computer to see what resources you already have available in order to output your digital data. This would include such things as a genealogy program, a word processor and CD/DVD writing software. Take stock of what these programs can do, for instance many CD/DVD programs include the ability to produce photo CDs and DVDs. You might be surprised at what resources you already have on your computer. Genealogy Program Output – most genealogists use a computer program to store their family tree information. Most of these programs have the ability to hold photos and to output them in various formats (i.e. charts and reports). Some genealogy programs allow you to produce "books" which packages together various presentation methods of your genealogical data (charts, reports, photos, etc.) These can be distributed as paper copies or digitally as PDF files. Check your program to see what it can do. Multimedia CDs or DVDs - In 2001 and 2003 I created home made CDROMs that were sent to the relatives. These contained various items including photos, documents and family trees. They have been detailed on this website in the sections My 2001 Project and My 2003 Project. For those who might find a do-it-yourself from scratch multimedia CD or DVD a bit intimidating, a commercial program that does much of this work for you is Passage Express. This is a program designed to create genealogical multimedia presentations for output to either CD or DVD. See my Passage Express Page for more information. Photo Video - ever wished you could do a Ken Burns style of documentary which involves panning and zooming in on still photos (providing a sense of motion)? Well you can with free software from Microsoft called Photo Story. It allows you to assemble still photos, provide motion (panning/zooming), transition between photos, add text, narration and background music. Photo Story runs on Windows XP and requires Windows Media Player v.10 or above. See the Microsoft Photo Story 3 page for full system requirements and download details. Note Cards – you can get blank card stock and print your own notecards. If you use some of your genealogy photos, these can make nice personal gifts for your relatives. Cards can be easily set up in a word processor (i.e. Word, WordPerfect, etc.). Choose a nice photo of an ancestor or family grouping and make a card. I use wonderful card stock from www.cardblanks.com but there are other offerings, do an Internet search for "Blank Card Stock" and see what you come up with. Letter Transcriptions – a family treasure that some have are old letters. Similar to old photos, these can be digitally archived by taking digital photos or scanning. I find that the best presentation format for these is to create a word processing document set up for double sided printing, with an image of the letter on one page and the text transcription of that letter on the facing page (since old letters are often hard to read – I try to transcribe them all). I then print or photocopy the document onto high quality acid free paper (i.e. a cream linen texture paper) which I bind in a clear front 3 hole report cover to create a book that I can send to relatives. I include a CDROM in a pocket in the back that would include JPEGs/TIFs of the photos and the document in both PDF and RTF text formats. Photo Mosaic – this one is just a bit of photo fun. There is software available that can create a photo from many smaller photos. From a distance it almost looks like a normal photo but when you look at it closely you see that it is in fact made up of hundreds of smaller photos. I’ve used this to print portraits of my parents using all of my genealogy photos, so that for instance my father’s portrait would be made up of photos of his ancestors and siblings. I used a little shareware program called PhotoMosaic (blackdog.massberg.com) but there are other offerings out there - do a search for "Photo Mosaic Software". So, what have I done .... well ....
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A smaller project this year - the main feature of which was a personalized fan chart printed on photographic paper of x generations of relatives for each of my uncles and aunts. In addition to the colourful chart, I included the yearly update of "what's new" on the genealogy discovery front.