Organizing photographs to decide which to include in a memoir or family history book can be a challenge. One of the first choices is whether to scan your photos and work with digital images or to work with the actual photo prints.

If you decide to work with the actual prints we suggest you use a photo binder with archival quality vinyl sleeves to protect the photos from damage. Place two photos back to back in each sleeve. Place labels on the sleeves to indicate categories, stories or chapters to which the photos belong.

If you decide to scan the photos, you have a choice of using a scanning service or doing it yourself. Whichever you choose, your images must be scanned to at least 300 dpi which is the minimum level of resolution required by most digital printers.

If you are working with digital images there are a variety of photo management software programs including ACD See Photo Manager 12, CompuPic Pro, Picajet, and Google’s Picasa 3. These programs will allow you to tag, organize and index your photos.

Once you have decided on the system you want to use you can organize your photos by date, by person, by special event or whatever categories you decide upon. Working within the category you can decide which photos will make the best illustrations for your book.

Not every photo needs a caption, and documents also frequently speak for themselves. Consider grouping pictures without captions in some sections of the book. It allows the reader to enjoy a purely visual, non-verbal experience, and breaks up the “wordiness” of reading stories. Photos that are best without a caption are self-explanatory However, as a general rule, stimulating captions will complete your photographs and improve your book.

The most important job of a caption is to provide the information a journalist would seek to include in a story:

• Who are the people in the photograph?
• What is happening in the photograph?
• When and where was the photograph taken? (At times an estimate of time is the best you can do.)
• Why did you choose to include this photograph? Why did the person or scene look that way?
• How did the event occur?

Not all of the questions must be answered for every photograph. A good rule to follow in writing captions is that shorter captions are better than longer ones. Another is to avoid the known and explain the unknown. The caption should provide a full explanation of the picture to the reader by supplying information that the photo does not. For example, a photo might show a person competing in a beauty contest, but it may not show what contest or that she wins it. The caption supplies that information.

If you intend to discuss a photograph in the stories you tell a shorter caption can be used to provide brief information to identify the subject of the photo and the people included in it. The details of the photograph which are given in the text of your story need not be included in the caption.

Some variety in the type of captions used can help increase reader interest. Among techniques you might consider are:

• If you have interviewed someone in preparing to record your story, an excerpt or quotation from the interview might provide a caption.
• If you have kept a daily journal, an entry might be used as a caption for a photo.
• If you are interested in providing a context for a photo, you might choose a line or two from a book, song or poem that dates from the time of the picture.

If you employ one of these techniques it is a good idea to make sure that you have also included the kind of identifying information described in the previous paragraph.

The most important thing to remember is that good captions are tools to help your reader understand the stories you are telling.

The conventional wisdom says that a picture is worth a thousand words. It seems more accurate to say that a picture is better with a thousand words. As you create your memoir or family history book you can use photos, or scanned images of documents or family memorabilia, to dramatize and enhance the stories you are telling or even to picture stories you haven’t included in your text. Photos can bring your stories into sharp relief if you use them to:

• Identify people – Uncle Harry, or your best friend Susie
• Show relationships –you during childhood with your grandmother, or your grandfather with his poker pals
• Show locations – the house you grew up in, or your trip to the south of France
• Illustrate a moment in time – you in 1963, or you at retirement
• Emphasize a thematic tone – illustrate the topic family with a series of family group photos, or the topic accomplishments with a photo of your mother receiving the employee of the month award
• Document an event – your wedding, or the impact of a tornado on the family farm

One important decision you must make is whether you want to use images to illustrate words or use words to describe images.

If you decide that you want the images to be the primary organizing principle you will produce a photo book. This type of presentation was pioneered by the photo journalism in magazines like Life and Look where stories were told with dramatic pictures accompanied by relatively limited text. You might call it a Visual Memoir. In creating this type of book authors often select the images first and eliminate stories not directly tied to the images.

If you decide that your stories come first and images second you’ll use the photos to complement the stories. Images will be used:

• To emphasize points in the written story
• To clarify points in the written story
• To create emotional impact which expands that conveyed by the written story

Used in this way the photographs and other images allow a purely visual and non-verbal experience to break up the text.

[Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting articles on creating memoirs and family histories added to the Author Tools section of the Stories To Tell Website. Let us know if you find them helpful]

You’re the fortunate (unfortunate?) custodian of the family photo collection. How do you decide which photos make it into your family history book?
Sometimes the best way to begin is to decide what to eliminate. Some of the choices you might make include are to eliminate:
• photos that are flawed or damaged
• repetitious photos. Choose the best image.
• unknown or unrelated subjects or people
From the remaining photos decide which you should include by selecting those which:
• preserve history; if it’s the only image you have of your great-grandfather a damaged photo may belong in your book despite its poor quality
• are most relevant to the story you want to tell
• are of the best image quality and attractiveness

To read the full article on the Stories To Tell Website, click here.