5 Genealogy - technology links for photos and videos

Photo: Caroline M. Pointer using Etchings, 1854.

It's important to use the right tools for the research job and for how you work. 

But? You've got to try them out and use them in order to determine if they are going to work for you.

Today I have a list of photo-related and video-related links that can be very useful in doing research as well as in sharing your research with others.

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• Take iPhone Video Recording To The Next Level With MoviePro by Brent Dirks on appadvice.com ~ This is a very nice video recording app with some stellar features that would be great for interviews at family reunions and such. Check out Brent's review.
  
• PholiumCurrent Version: 1.3 by William Porter on macworld.com ~ While William's review seems a little negative but honest, I still think there are many family history folks who might really like this app and its features. I can see a lot of these being done in time for holiday family gatherings that are coming up rather quickly. So give it a whirl. He also lists 2 other apps that are similar.
• Vimeo Partners With Dropbox for Automatic Uploading by Angela Moscaritolo on pcmag.org ~ This is awesome news for those who prefer to house their videos on Vimeo's nicer online video platform.
• [Video] Camera+ iPhone App Review -- AppVee.com's YouTube Channel ~ Available in iTunes. ~ Want some additional features for your iPhone's camera? Take a look at this great video review of the Camera+ app.

My Gran's images. Top left image I scanned within the app.

• Ancestry.com came out with version 4.0 of their app for iPhone and iPad a week ago (with a bug update yesterday, version 4.01), and it's slick! Randy Seaver gave a great review of it on his blog Genea-Musings. Moreover, I want to point out its camera feature. You can take a picture of anything (or use one from your iPhone or iPad photo library) and upload it directly to your online tree and attach it to the person or persons you want to. While there are no editing features available for the images, this is outstanding. Not only is this convenient when you're at Great Aunt Bernice's for Thanksgiving and she's allowing you to 'scan' family photos while you're there with your smartphone, but it's convenient for digitization of your own work. Think of all those printouts of census records you made back when we all first found out we could print them out from Ancestry. [And since in order to attach a digital image of the census record from ancestry.com is an annoying 2-step process involving saving the image to your hard drive then uploading to your tree, this is really nice if you already printed it out a while ago.] Then think about all those census forms you once filled out. And what about all those handwritten research notes? Yeah. You could 'scan' them directly into your online Ancestry.com family tree and attach them to all the relevant family members. And then if you sync your online tree to Family Tree Maker 2012 like I do, then the scanned images end up there too. Nice. What else can you scan and digitize?!?

Happy Researching!
~Caroline

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