Preserving your family history with scanned photos

Many of us have old family photos in frames, albums or boxes that are slowly fading and decaying. One way to preserve your family history is to scan the images and save them as archival quality digital files.

Mylio Photos is great for organizing and preserving family photos — the ones you’re capturing now, and the ones captured by previous generations.

Mylio Photos has several features that make organizing and enjoying scanned photos easy. The Date Picker lets you adjust the date, choose a date range, or mark an image as undated. Sophisticated facial recognition lets you tag people in photos so future generations know what their ancestors looked like. The Life Calendar is a beautiful way to browse your own life and family history.

Working with scanned images in Mylio Photos

I recently scanned an old photograph of my grandmother and great-uncle. When I pulled the photo out of the frame, I was ecstatic to find that there was information written on the back (which I also scanned). This provided important family history about when the photo was taken, who was in the photo, and where it was captured.

With Mylio Photos, I used that information to add a date range, tag the faces in the photo, and add approximate location (GPS) information to the metadata. Now, when I browse my photo library, I can easily find this image a number of ways. I can browse by date in the Calendar view, person in the People view or place in the Map view. Each of these parameters is also searchable so I can type my grandmother’s or great-uncle’s name into the search field and find their photos.

Adjusting the date for scanned photos

To adjust the capture date for an image in Mylio Photos, open the Info panel and scroll down to the Date Created section. Mylio Photos offers several options for adjusting the date and time on images. You can choose from:

• Date Range
• All Day
• Month & Year
• Season & Year
• Year
• Decade
• Undated

Based on the family history notes on the back of the photograph, I know that my grandma was four years old when the photo was captured. With her birth date, I can calculate that the photo was captured between July 4, 1936 and July 3, 1937. In Mylio Photos, I’ll select Date Range and enter those dates.

After adjusting the capture date, I can switch to the Calendar view and see my grandmother and great-uncle’s photo correctly placed in 1936.

Adding face tags with facial recognition

Tapping the Face Tagging icon engages the facial recognition tool and automatically recognizes each face in the photo. I was able to easily select their name to confirm their identity. In the future, I can easily find this image in Mylio Photos‘ People view, which lets me browse every person I’ve tagged.

Adding location (GPS) information

One of the family history notes on the back of the photo states “made in El Paso.” I can use that to add GPS information to the image. Switch to the Map panel, and use the search field to quickly zoom in on El Paso, TX.

If I had an address I could search for the specific address, but without it, I can simply drag the photo onto the general vicinity of El Paso to add location information.

Now, when I zoom in to the southwest region of the USA in Map view, I can see approximately where that photo was captured.

Preserving and enjoying family history with scanned photos

If you’ve been putting off organizing your family’s photographic history, check out Mylio Photos. It makes the process of organizing scanned family photos simple so you can preserve those precious memories for the next generation and beyond.