FotoBridge | Digitizing Photos Blog

Hot off the press, and recently reveiwed on this blog, "Organizing Your Digital Life" is the new book by Aimee Baldridge and National Geographic aimed at helping you master your digital universe.  Chock full of useful resources and helpful insights, this book details the best ways to store your photographs, music, videos and personal documents in a digitial world.  We especially like the sections covering photo scanning, from the DIY approach to using a scanning service - Ms. Baldridge presents practical how-to advice and pertinent information.  The book contains 192 pages with 100 illustrations and retails for $19.95 at online bookstores.

Now, for a limited time FotoBridge will include your free personal copy of Organizing Your Digital Life with your 1000 Slides-to-Digital Scanning Package order before February 28th, 2009.  Qualifying orders must be received online prior to 11:59PM ET on February 28, 2009 and must contain the keyword "digitallife" in your online order comments field.

MemoryMiner has been on our radar for some time. It almost had to be, why? At FotoBridge we pain- stakingly shepard volumes of private images, with the upmost care and respect, to the digital universe. Beloved memories of family, friends, personal and historic events and achievements --- priceless, meaning soaked keepsakes.  As we like to say, once digital, these treasure troves are not only protected forever - perhaps even more importantly, they are unleashed from the shackles of their prior form.  And here inlies the appeal and promise of MemoryMiner.  That is of a tool that enables you to spin static, one dimensional slices of time (newly digital photos and other digital items) into cherished memory gold.  With MemoryMiner the idea is to evlove your one-of-a-kind photo collection into a living network of links, relationships and purposeful content. The program works simply and intuitively by helping you capture and preserve precious information about the people, places, times and events captured in any collection of images, sounds, documents, etc. and provides the digital "thread" to knit togther meaningful context.  It treats photos as individual frames in an endless story.

In addition to photos, the stories can contain video, documents, ULRs and other digital media.  As elements are linked, the value of your photo collection starts to benefit from the network effects - more links, more relationships, more information, greater meaning, deeper context and utility - pure memory gold! From personal histories, educational programs, artistic projects to business marketing the uses are nearly limitless and varied.

We tested MemoryMiner v 1.1 for windows and found it to be easy to use, powerful and even fun.  It includes slick implemetations of features found in the latest versions of Apple's iPhoto like face recognition and live mapping.  But unlike iPhoto, MemoryMiner is a complete personal digital asset manger for everyone with memories and a PC.  The version we tested sells online for an introductory price of $30.00 (Mac Version $45.00).  There are also school grant programs and higher education discounts available.

Our take? We give MemoryMiner a rare 5 stars (out of 5 stars) for it's ease of use, nice implemantion of cool features (like instant web publishing among others) and the huge value adding effects for newly digital photo collections of all kinds.  To see creator John Fox tell the story of how and why MemoryMiner was developed to the Los Angeles Idea Project click here.

The so called Web-Ready images included free with all FotoBridge scanning packages provide our community members and customers added versatility and utility for their newly digitized images.  In fact, "Web-Ready" may be a bit of a misnomer because these pint-sized, exact duplicates of your new full-size digital images are ideal for devices or applications that don't require full sized files.  And the list of handy uses for Web-Ready images continues to grow.  Often, these scaled down JPEGs load faster, cycle quicker and take up much less storage than full-sized images on devices like mobile phones and digital photo frames.  Less space equals more great photos to share per device.  And online, these images are misers when it comes to bandwidth for loading, posting and emailing photos.  While these image files will not enlarge or print like the full sized JPEG files, in many circumstances they fit the bill and save time and resources.

Ok, so you've finally digitized all your old family photos - the trip to the Grand Canyon in 1952, Yosemite hiking in 1968, London with the kids in the early 70s, your 57' Chevy at the drive-in and that once-in-a-lifetime cruise to Alaska just a few years back.  Now what?  A PhotoBook maybe?  Absolutely, and probably not just one.  Today, online services like MyPublisher, Apple, Blurb and many more make it easy to quickly turn digital photos into themed, book-store quality PhotoBooks.  So in addition to all the great things you can do with your newly digital photos - (the usual stuff people do with their digital camera shots) from online galleries, email sharing, instant slide shows, iPhone albums, photo products (mugs, calendars), etc., etc. - newly stylized, eye-popping PhotoBooks take your old treasured images full-circle.  

Nearly all these services provide premium quality books you'd be proud to place on your credenza. Price? Some services start as low as $4.95 with fast turnaround, rarely more than 10 business days.  MyPublisher is currently offering a coupon for a free PhotoBook on your order of 2 or more books.  The offer expires March 2, 2009.  Blurb offers quanity discounts for 10 or more of the same book.  Check them out!

To say the folks in the FotoBridge Community get around is one way to put it. From Antartica to Tibet, Machu Picchu to Galapagos, Tikal to Cape Town photography and travel go together like a memorable two-part harmony.  Jodi and Neil took this shot while riding down a rural road on their Backroads Honeymoon trip  not too long ago.  The photo, taken near a village in Vietnam, landed in the annual Backroads Photo Contest.  Of some 4,200 photos submitted of Backroads trips in 2008, this gem was selected in the top 25 competing for the Grand Prize.  The winner will be determined by online voting and announced on February 16, 2009.  Anyone can vote, and voting will automatically enter you in a drawing to win a $200 Patagonia MLC Suitcase.  So vote here for your favorite Backroads photograph and automatically enter to win the suitecase.

Creating quality digital images from more traditional photographic mediums like prints and film may seem straight forward.  That is, of course until you start to tackle the task and discover how many things you can get wrong.  Image quality itself can be hard to define with all the factors adding and detracting from our perception of an image. Clearly, digitizing photographic prints, film negatives and slides presents a whole host of challenges.  Many of the potential pitfalls have analogous problems with good old fashioned photography such as tone reproduction, still some live only in the digital world like compression.  We know there is definately an art to this science, informed by experience, specific knowledge and aided by technology.  

So whether your launching your own scanning project, reveiwing digital images for enjoyment or about to engage a scanning service to finally archive your vast, treasured family photo collection - we believe there are ways to maximize the benefits of digitization.  Knowledge is key.  Thats why we'll endeavour to share tidbits about what we've learned about creating great digital images in the Scan Tips Series.  The series will cover common problems, how to best reproduce tone, filters and settings, resolution, color balance, bit depth considerations, minimizing noise, effective sharpening, common terms and much, much more.

We have loved SmugMug for years.  What's not to like?  OK, so it not free?   You know what they say. . at SmugMug you get a top-notch service, no spam or ads, unlimited storage & traffic, custom goodies, video, strong privacy and image protection, commerce functions and oodles more.

We'll attempt to keep you up-to-date on developments at SmugMug.  They, like us, are constantly refining and updating their offers, features and functions.  The latest is the addition of Bay Photo as a printing option for Professional subscribers. Going forward, Pro subscribers can choose between Bay Photo and EZ Prints for prints. Standard and Power SmugMug users will still go through EZ Prints, the lab used for quality results for years.  All merchandise, like mugs and calendars will go through EZ Prints.

Does today's economic turmoil spell the end for Eastman Kodak?  A perfect storm about to swallow the 130-year-old venrated tall-ship of all things photography and popular imaging?  No doubt, Kodak's business is deteriorating - crippled in the last few years by a slow move to digital and declining traditional film markets, now Kodak's critics are asking where the value lies.  Last week, CEO Antonio Perez acknowledged the ongoing problematic transitions but held up hope for digital.  Mr. Perez said he was "very happy with the perfomance of digital" in the first 3 quarters if 2008.  In an abrupt turnabout, the consumer sales swooned in Q4 - causing Kodak to rethink it's strategy and prepare to eliminate up to 4,500 jobs.

Well, we ceratinly hope and pray better days are on the horizon for Kodak.  Why?  We are hard-pressed to think of another company that has devised and popularized so many products that strike at the heart of our collective American experience - our memories, our lives, our families, our history in images.  Kodak's legacy is a trillion slices of life - fiercely guarded, treasured, preserved and shared among the national family that is us.

We stumbled upon this Kodak video clip, its strikes a chord for us and captures our sense of wonder and gratitude for the legacy that is Kodak.