Welcome back to our Genealogy Basics series! In Chapter Four, we discussed what you can learn by examining old family photos carefully. In today’s post, we’ll talk about how to digitize and store your photos and documents.
Scanning and digitizing your documents is not just an easy way to preserve them for yourself and for future generations. It also makes it easier to organize, browse, and share files with other family members — and it means you can take advantage of online tools like MyHeritage In Color™ and the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer , which bring your old family photos to life with advanced colorization and photo enhancement technology. The Photo Enhancer brings blurry faces into sharp focus, bringing out details you may not have noticed otherwise, and it might even improve the clarity and readability of scanned documents.
The gold standard of digitization is a high-quality scanner. However, these days, it’s easiest to simply use your smartphone or tablet. Most mobile devices are equipped with high-quality cameras that capture sharp, high-resolution images. MyHeritage’s mobile app has a built-in scanner that produces excellent-quality scans using your device’s camera — and saves the images directly to the relevant profile on your MyHeritage family tree. The app includes filters that enhance the image, sometimes even making documents more legible or photographs more vivid. You can learn more about how to use the MyHeritage mobile app scanner here .
If you digitize your documents and photos but they come out blurry or low-quality, precious information might be lost. Keep these best practices in mind:
Once your photos and documents have been digitized, you can upload them to MyHeritage and use our groundbreaking colorization and photo enhancement tools.
MyHeritage In Color™ brings old black and white photos to life by automatically colorizing them. It’s super easy to do: you can upload your photos directly to MyHeritage In Color™ , or, if you’ve already uploaded them to MyHeritage, you can colorize them directly from the photo page on the website or the app. Click here to learn more about colorizing photos with MyHeritage In Color™.
The MyHeritage Photo Enhancer turns lower-quality, grainy photos into stunning, crystal-clear images, and brings blurry faces into sharp focus. The results will likely be even clearer than the original. Sometimes, the Photo Enhancer might even clarify text on a scanned document, making it easier to read.
Like MyHeritage In Color™, you can upload your photos directly to the Photo Enhancer, or enhance your existing photos on MyHeritage on the website or app. Click here to learn more about enhancing your photos with the MyHeritage Photo Enhancer.
Scanned files may be large and cumbersome to send via email. Sending images through messenger apps will compress the files and reduce their quality. Furthermore, though you may have the files neatly organized on your hard drive, it may be hard for family members to organize those files themselves.
Therefore, the easiest solution is uploading the files to your family tree website and granting family members access to your tree. That way, all the files will already be tagged and organized and family members can access them from anywhere.
Download the MyHeritage mobile app and start scanning! And be sure to give MyHeritage In Color™ and the Photo Enhancer a try.
