You have stacks of photos and shelves of photo albums that
you would like to preserve for your family members? Well,
Ancestry has a mobile app that can help you digitize your
photos quickly. There are some things that don't work really
well so pay attention to this video so you can see some
mistakes I made and avoid them when you are digitizing your
pictures. So, here we are on the Ancestry mobile app and I'm
going to take you to the image gallery, the media gallery. So,
if you come up here to this image stacked icon, stack of
images. Click on that and then you're going to see your
gallery of all the pictures you have. Now, a lot of the
pictures that I have right here come from Ancestry's yearbook
collection. You can see it with this picture how there's
partial cropping of the other people that were on the page
for my uncle Bob. Let me go ahead and click into him real
quick. And you can see that it can came from a yearbook page.
Now, as of this recording, there is no way to crop the
image. There is auto cropping and I'll show you this in a
moment. If you're scanning pictures into your file but on
the desktop in so on your mobile app, you cannot actually
crop this in and make it. So, we're just looking at my uncle
Bob and not the rest of the people. So, there's not a way
to change that just yet. We're going to go ahead and get back
out of Uncle Bob. So, we're going to actually scroll down
here to my dad's first cousin, Anita. I met her. She's a
lovely person. So, we're going to do her picture. And
we're going to come up here to this edit up here in the top
right. Click on edit. And now you have three options. We can
colorize it. We can restore this or we can do both of them.
So, let's go ahead and do the restore. Restore is usually my
favorite. It smooths out the image. It takes away some of
the fading and in just a few moments, you can zoom in and
see the difference. We can go back to the original. You can
see because it was a newsprint or a printed book. It's faded.
It's got some little dust spectacles and things of that
nature. But if we go over to the enhanced version, the restored
version .aAd if we zoom in you can see they still have a
little bit of that pixelation going on. It was kind of a small
picture. But it's smoother and it's less faded. So let's zoom
back out and we're going to click on the difference, So just
a nice little back and forth. Smoothing and taking away the
fading. and I I really like this. So I'm going to go up here and
I'm going to click save. And now if we go back out to the
gallery you can see this little icon that is showing up for
Anita- that little squiggly. And that means that I have edited
and enhanced that picture. So I can click on tap to the
original at any time and then the enhanced version- back and
forth. But we need to talk about the other two features in this
app. so let's go back to edit. And this time we're going to do
the colorizing feature. So click on colorize. And now we
have a decision to make. Does that look better than the
original? I'm not particularly fond of this colorizing. So,
instead, I'm just going to keep the original. and I can do the
restore. Now, I haven't done the enhance. The enhance is a
combination of the restore, which reduces the fading, and
smooths things out and the colorization. So, let's make
sure that we start on our original. Then we're going to
come over to enhance. When we click on enhance, then, we have
the smoothing, the strong colors, and combine that all
together. So, that seems a little better of the
colorization feature than if we just did the straight
colorizing. You can see the difference here. But to be
honest, I really just like the restore on some of these
pictures better. So, let me know in the comments what you
think. Which of the pictures of Anita did you like better? The
ReStore, the colorize, or the enhance was a combination of
the Restore and the colorization. But what about
scanning pictures? You can scan single pictures, loose
pictures, pictures, and books, pictures, and photo albums. So,
let's go ahead and walk through how you would scan pictures or
digitize pictures whichever you would like to say. So, we're
going to come down here and we're going to click on this
green button down there and we're going to do the scanned
photos betas test. And then it's going to walk you through
some prompts. It's going to tell you some of the best ways
to capture your pictures. So, it works best if your pictures
aren't curved and you don't have to put your finger in the
camera. But all you have to do is click on this button when
you're ready to take the picture.
And now it's taken the picture. It's going to crop in the
image. It's going to rotate and in just the image. And now we're
going to go up there and click done. So when we click into the
picture you're going to see there's a bit of glare up here
on the right and then into the pants. And that's my fault
because the picture isn't very flat and it doesn't have the
best lighting. Bt it's a start. Snd so you always have to start
with what you have and improve as you go. So I am going to
recommend that be very mindful of how you take your pictures.
Try to get the best and most optimum conditions possible. So
now I'm going to do a cluster of pictures on my desktop. So
I'm going to click the plus button. I'm going to get to
scan photos. Now I am I've rotated my camera. So I can try
to get them all in. But know that there's a glare because of
a curvature. There's more curvature here. Um I'm going to
try it again with some more flat pictures here in just a
minute. But let's go ahead and give this a try. Press and
hold. And now the magic's going to start. I noticed it
cropped and rotated the first picture, the second picture,
The third picture, enhanced and the fourth picture. I'm
going to go back. I'm going to click done that up there at the
top and all four of those pictures are now in my gallery.
So, looks look at the one that had the glare. Click on the one
that had the glare for sure. And you can see that actually that
is pretty good color correction of my grandmother and my
grandpa. So, in the original image, there's a little more
background. So, my grandpa's head gets a little bit cropped
off compared to the original. And so you have to be mindful
of that. So let's go get some pictures that are more flat.
Okay. these are more flat. We don't have all that stuff out
there. We don't have just this. So now we're going to click on
that button. And when the check mark happens then we know it's
good. It's going to do the magic. So the first one, the
second one, and it cropped it. Oh, that's too bad. So if you
don't like how it turned out in the beginning then just do a
single photo. So we're going to do this one again and that
looks a little bit better. So what about if you have [photos] in
a photo album? nNw this is in one of those magnetic albums.
And you want to try it. You want to get your pictures out
of these albums pretty quickly. But we're going to go ahead and
do the same process with it. Ican see that there's some glare
particularly in this picture. So I'm going to try to do what I
can to not show up. Can you can you see this happening right
here? I'm going to try to see if we can avoid that. So, might
have to move around. There's still some of my shadow. So,
maybe I'm going to try to stand off to the side. And I'm tilting
my camera to just try to improve it. I think I'm not
going to get very much improvement. So, I'm just
going to focus on this one. Click and hold and let it go.
Unfortunately, that auto crop didn't work very well. If that
happens, if there's pictures we don't want, we can click on
select. And then we can click in the circles beside the
pictures. I'm going to click on that one. I'm going to click on
that one. I'm going to click on this one because you can't
rotate it. I'm going to click on that one because it cropped
off my grandpa's head. And then I'm going to come down here to
the trash bucket and delete it. And in just a few moments,
those images disappear. Now, I'm going to try another page
of photos to see what it looks like with multiple pictures. And
there's a little bit of overlap. So we're going to have to move
these pictures so there's no overlap. Keep angling it so that
it looks pretty flat. I mean you don't want to have this. You
don't want to have that. You want to get it straight on. And
sometimes you just have to keep playing around. And then when
you get as close as you can hold it down and let's see if
the magic improves. That one turned out great. Ooh I like
that fix. That one turned out not too bad. Unfortunately
didn't get to her feet. Ooh I like that one. That looks
really, really, really good. So as of this recording there
really isn't a an easy way for me to attach my mother to her
profile from the gallery. So when I try to click on my mom
and I click on this icon down here. And I click on the
dotd, I can edit the photo. I can edit the details. Give her the
picture different description. But if I try to click"link to"
it doesn't do anything. The edit only does edit. If I come
out and I go to her profile and I click on her profile view
profile and I click on gallery, it tells me there is are no
media items here. If I click here to try to change it, take
photo upload from device. I can't pull it from the gallery.
And when I click on this button right here, it says scan which
I just did, take photos or upload from device. So, it's
really great to scan with. In the future, I hope that
Ancestry will make it so that you can attach pictures to
your gallery right then and there. So, the only other
option is to go through that entire process and do it
straight from your person. So, I would have to pull out my
picture of my mom and come to this view right here and then
start the scanning. So, hopefully there's nobody else
in that picture. Or then it becomes a little bit of a
problem. One of the things that we can do as we come across
problems on Ancestry's mobile app is give feedback. And so if
we click on this, we can explain you know, "I was
scanning photos and my mother's feet were caught off in her
picture." "I am trying to attach this picture from the gallery
to the family tree and I can't do it." I have to go into those
profiles. So, there's a couple of wonky things but let's say,
alright, my pictures are in the gallery and I really want to
attach it to something. What do I do? Well, that's when we're
going to have to go to the desktop. So, in the desktop
version of your tree, you can fix your media gallery by
clicking on the overview of the tree. Click Media Gallery. Now,
I'm here and I can click on this picture. and I can click on
attach to person. Type in the name. Select the person, and
attach. And now, if I return to the gallery or rather the tree,
keep going backwards, keep going backwards, and then we
just go to the tree. Click on view tree, you're going to see
that picture right there is right there. The first picture
you attach to a person is going to be their profile picture. I
can go into the profile and now we have her gallery picture
with that one really picture Now,
during some training that I received before I made this
video, there was a demonstration where you can
take a published genealogy or other published work that may
have some pictures of your ancestors that you can scan and
put into the Ancestry mobile app. When I was there with my
colleagues, there was a big concern about doing that. So, I
want to take a moment and talk about whether you should or you
shouldn't. If you have the copyright release to scan a
book and put the picture into the tree then go for it. But if
those pictures are protected by copyright, based on the book or
the image within, then I'm going to counsel you against doing
that. UInstead leave a note in the source section of your
family tree that there is this book that exists, nd there are
the pictures that are there. Or go track down a copyright
release from the author that compiled that book. If you do
get that copyright release or if it is in the public domain,
then, the one thing I'm going to ask that you do is that when
you upload the picture, you need to tell people what book
it's from and the page number. And do all of that source
citation. Please be respectful of that copyright
because I don't want us to get in trouble as we're taking
advantage of this new mobile technology. If you found this
video helpful, be sure to give it a thumbs up and leave a
comments of the struggles that you're having or the things
that you're finding successful. And we can work together to see
how we can take advantage of this great app. Remember, the
app is free. If you want to learn more about how to use
Ancestry in general, be sure to check out the video that pops
up right here. Do you have stacks of fun?