Preserving your past

Cheril's devastating house fire and Scott's near-miss house fire have me convinced that I need to get busy digitizing our Foley family photos. Cheril lost nearly everything when her mobile home burned a couple of months ago, while Scott was far more fortunate - he and his wife Lauren were in the middle of moving, with everything packed already, when a fire started in the kitchen ceiling. They didn't lose anything but got a hefty scare.

So I've begun scanning family photos, creating labeled folders in My Pictures on the computer and naming each photo with pertinent info, such as who's in it and when it was taken. I intend to burn CDs and lock them in a safe deposit box. In the meantime, though, I've created an account with a free online photo service, Flickr.com, and I've begun uploading to it. My goal with that is to link my Flickr account to our family blog. That way, not only can the extended family post info about what we're doing, we can also swap family photos and information about who's in the ones already posted. Seems like it take a funeral to pull us all together, so I'm hoping this blog and photo account will help improve that.

To anyone who's been thinking about doing something like this with their own photos but hasn't yet, it was pretty easy to set up the Flickr account and to upload photos from our computer to the website. You have options about who can view your photos - everyone or only those who you invite. I like that. Same thing with our family blog, which is also hosted on Blogger.com (also called blogspot). If you already have an email account with Yahoo.com, you can use your Yahoo user name and password for Flickr, since Flickr is affiliated with Yahoo. Likewise, Blogger.com is affiliated with Google.com.

One thing to note: If you create a blog or photo account and want to keep it private for only those whom you invite and not the rest of the world, the people whom you invite will have to have an account (ex., Google mail for Blogger.com, Yahoo for Flickr) to open your blog and to post to it. This doesn't seem to be a big deal to people who are online a lot, but for people who do very little on the Internet, it could take some hand-holding to walk them through the initial set-up process.