No Museum-Quality Scans For Me
I needed to properly scan my grandmother’s old photograph albums to do them justice. It was a project to do before I could do much else with them.
High resolution. Careful handling, white gloves, even! Useful, consistent file names. The whole museum-quality project.
I never did it.
What actually unlocked the albums was my iPhone.
I started taking quick photographs of the pages. Nothing fancy. In a bright diffusely lit room, I tried to steady the phone at a 90 degree angle to the prints.
Once the pictures were in iPhoto, I could enlarge them, crop individual faces, reorder them, compare photographs from different albums and use iPhoto’s facial recognition to suggest possible matches. © 2026 Anastasia Ashman
Suddenly I was looking at the pictures all the time.
That mattered.
As my genealogy research moved farther back — eventually eight or ten generations in some branches — the photographs and the family tree began working together. A name in a record could lead me back to a face. A face I had seen in my lifetime occurred repeatedly through history.
I began attaching identified photographs to people in the tree and getting much more familiar with who belonged to whom.
The proper scanning project still exists somewhere in my future.
