3 Easy Best Practices For the Photos You Take Today

Trust me. Your descendants will thank you if you follow these three best practices.

Our ancestors didn’t take as many pictures as we do today.

They had film cameras or had to go to a studio to document a moment. A photo do-over wasn’t as easy as it is today. Bad pictures were a costly mistake.

Our ancestors didn’t have cell phone cameras ready for picture taking every second of every day. This is one of the reasons we’re not swamped with images from the 1920s, versus the boxes and slide trays we have from our parents’ generation.

Here’s what you can do to save your descendants the trouble of going through all your photos.

1. Thoughtfully take pictures of significant people, events and places. Document your life, but imagine you can only take a few pictures not hundreds.

2. Weed out bad and near-duplicate pictures immediately. This is one of my husband’s best practices. He takes a lot of pictures, but he deletes droves of them. Out of focus, off-center and multiple images go in the digital trash can. He picks the best one.

3. Print out significant images. If a picture isn’t worth the price of those penny-a-print offers, then is it worth keeping at all?

Vintage albums are making a comeback. Remember what it was like to look at an ancestor’s album? Create that same feeling with your family photos by placing them in an acid- and lignin-free album. You can find archival-quality albums through these online suppliers.

Your children and grandchildren will appreciate the time you took to tell your story in pictures.
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