Paperless Kids' Art, Memorabilia & Snapshots with Google Photos and Photoscan

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I use Google Photos to electronically keep kids arts, memorabilia and old photos.  This is part of a series on Organizing and Accessing photos digitally. 

Those of us with small children or crafty older ones can find ourselves overwhelmed with the products of our kids talents -- paintings, drawings, crafts, 3D sculptures, pinch pots, etc.  Maybe you have an extra annex to house all of that stuff, but I do not.  I quickly determined I needed some policies for purging and saving.  Thankfully, my kids' egos seem to be able cope with watching me immediately recycle some of their treasures, but some are particularly dear to them or nice enough that it seems reasonable to keep them in some way.  

Just like with non-artsy paper, there are 3 options: Pitch, Keep Physically, Keep Digitally.  

Pitch - I'm a little merciless in this area.  Anything that looks like it took less than an hour to create -- pitch.  Anything that are iterations of a single theme -- I only even consider keeping the best of.  And, anything where the whole class did the same project - mostly created by the teacher -- and very little extra kid creativity went into it (here's a perfect example) gets pitched.  The exception is if my kids are looking over my shoulder as I'm going through this process -- sometimes I have to wait until they are not around!

Keep Physically - this is obviously totally subjective.  For me, I tend to keep things that really show creativity.  I keep diaries, notebooks of essays, journals.  I try to keep a little bit from different parts of their lives so that they can see growth and change when they go back and look through it.  But I really limit storage to one under-the-bed container per kid and one cardboard magazine holder in my office as a temporary spot before I take it upstairs to put into their respective containers.  

Keep Digitally - with this kind of limited physical storage space, you can see why I might have issues parting with things.  My solution is taking photos.  If it doesn't make the cut to keep physically, but it's not easy for me to pitch, I take a photo and keep it with all of my other photos.  After all, I think of photos as a way to remember people and events -- why not objects as well?  I use this for a wide range of things like the baby blanket that was lovingly made for my son, but no longer works with his room decor.  Or the giant bunny that was made for my daughter, but makes her sneeze.  Taking pictures works great for art works and projects that are contemporary. Then the date stamp is accurate, but often we are going through old stuff and making decisions to pitch or keep them.  For those older objects, I change the date stamp on the image file using Picasa or Google Photos, so that it accurately reflects the date created.  I might also put a caption that indicates what child created it and potentially under what circumstances.  Watch my videos on using Picasa and Google Photos for more info on how I organize photos and change date stamps.

Old (or new) Printed Snapshots

Sometimes you find yourself with old-school printed photos, right?  Some people just aren't on the digital train yet or you just can't get them any other way - like school, team or wedding pictures.  I like to turn these snapshots into digital photos as well.  But, as anyone knows who's ever tried to do this, the problem is that you get glare and it just looks like a poor quality snapshot of a snapshot.  Then I discovered a great app owned by Google called Photoscan.  You can download it for free from the App Store.  This app has you snap pictures from 4 different angles in order to remove glare from photos.  Here's a quick demo.  So, here is photo taken normally and with PhotoScan.  Good, right?  Again, change the date stamp on the photo to properly reflect the photos time frame and store with your photos chronologically.  

I have my photos randomly scrolling in digital photo frames and screensavers in my house (video coming soon about this!)  If I've stored memorabilia and old printed photos digitally, then I figure I'm seeing and appreciating them WAY more than I would if they were in bins in my basement.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!