To start receiving an email when a comment is made, just follow these steps:

1. Click the “Your Account” link in the upper right of the site:

2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and check the box that says “Send me an email when someone adds a new comment”:

3. You’re all set!

Now when someone adds a comment on your site, you’ll get an email letting you know.

The email will include:

• Who made the comment
• On which message was the commented added
• The actual comment
• A link back to your site so you can read all the comments on that message

You have two options to export your messages: one message at a time or a month at a time.

How to Export a Single Message

Visit a message page and look for the three icons under the message title:

Print

Click the printer icon and you’ll see a printer friendly version of your message. It will include all your pictures and comments.

Word

Click the Word icon and download your message in Microsoft Word format (.doc). You can then easily make any changes to the file and save it for later.

PDF

Click the PDF icon and download your message as a PDF document (.pdf).

How to Export a Month of Messages

To export a month’s worth of messages, visit the “Archive” tab at the top of your site.

Click a month from the list that appears.

On the individual month’s archive page, you’ll see all the messages from that month.

At the bottom of the page, click the “Download all these messages to a PDF file”:

To bring these memories back into your life, it is important to scan your print photos and slides into digital form, add these scanned photos to your photo collection taken with your digital cameras, and then organize your entire digital collection by tagging each digital photo.

Scanning is easily outsourced to companies that do this professionally. Tagging is more personal and does take some time and effort to complete. The effort is totally worth it however. Once tagged, you can employ power search tools to find the photos you want, and you keep critical information about the photo stored within the photo itself. With thousands of photos on your computer hard disk, you will quickly wonder how you ever survived without tagging!

Why Scan your Old Photos and Slides?

Scanning your photo and slide collection offers several valuable benefits. Once scanned, you can:

• Protect your photo prints and slides: We all worry that photo prints or slides can be misplaced, damaged beyond repair, or destroyed in a catastrophic event. By having a digital archive of your originals, you have the comfort of knowing your scanned images can be reprinted at any time.
• Restore them back to their former beauty: All photo prints fade over time and images get washed out. Slides and negatives decay. Loose photos get scratched, bent, or ripped through years of mishandling. Have a close look at some of your older photo prints and you will notice these changes. Professional tools such as Photoshop™ can reverse the years of decay and damage in your originals and make them look as clear and vibrant as the day they were taken.
• Share them with friends and family: You are already sharing digital photos through “Family Says”. Now share your print photos as well!

Why Tag your Digital Photos?

Tagging involves storing information about the photo within the photo image file. You can tag any information you want, but standard tags typically include:

• Location: Where the photo was taken
• Time: When the photo was taken
• Keywords: These keywords capture anything you want to record about the photo. Common keywords are people’s names, and event type (e.g., wedding, birthday)
• Caption or Title: Tagline to go along with the photo

There are two main benefits from tagging:

• Photo organization and search: Storing your photos in a series of folders quickly becomes limiting. For example, do you store your family 2010 vacation photos in a vacation folder, in a family folder, or in a year folder? Years later, which folder do you look in to find a particular photo? The problem gets exponentially worse as we collect more and more photos. Photo tagging lets you organize, then easily search for the photos you want. Imagine how nice it would be if you could immediately find “All the photos from our vacation in Italy” or “Just those photos that contain you and your kids” or “Photos of Jeff when he was 10 years old”?
• Keeping critical information with the photo: I recently created a family tree. The only person who knew the people in the photos was my aging mother. Some photos had names written on the back, but most didn’t. In another case I had a photo of my daughter taken on one of our camping vacations, but I couldn’t remember where it was taken. Tagging lets you keep all that information with the photo for as long as the photo exists. You can edit it at any time, and update it with additional information at any time.

Most advanced photo library applications provide automatic facial recognition to help tag the people in a photo, and newer digital cameras will automatically tag (GPS) location and time into each captured photo, but on the whole, tagging is still mainly a manual effort. That means it can take a lot of time and effort, especially if you have lots of photos. The effort is totally worth it however. Once you have your photos tagged, you will wonder how you ever managed without it. With thousands of photos on your computer hard disk, it really is the only way to go!

One last note about tagging. It pays to experiment with various photo library applications before you embark on tagging your entire photo collection. The quality of tagging and search varies dramatically between photo library applications. Secondly, most facial recognition information is stored in the application’s database, which means you will lose the information when the photo leaves the confines of the application (e.g. uploaded to a website or emailed to a friend). I personally use Photoshop Elements because I can easily organize my tags, employ facial recognition, search for the photos I want, yet keep all of the tags within the photo file.

About the Author
This was a guest post by George Swan, Owner of Aberscan Imaging. Aberscan Imaging specializes in scanning your old photos and slides into digital form. We can handle any number or size of photos or slides. In fact, if it fits on a scanner, we can scan it: letters, scrapbooks, old documents, newspaper clippings, and much, much more. We also offer great scan quality, image enhancement and restoration using Photoshop™, and miscellaneous other services such as image tagging and DVD slideshows. Turnaround time is usually less than two days.

There are two types of people that you can invite to your site: authors and guests.

Authors can write messages. Guests can only read messages and leave comments.

This video shows how to invite friends and family to your family blog:

You can write a message for your blog by clicking the “Write” tab in the menu at the top of your site.

This video will show you how to add a message or post to your family blog:

You can customize your site’s colors, name, design, and pictures.

Your design options are accessible via the “Site Management” tab and then the “Design” link.

Here is a short video showing how to customize your family blog:

1. Choose Your Audience

For whom are you writing your blog? For the grandparents? For friends?

Decide who you want to read your blog and write accordingly. Perhaps family will want to see videos and pictures. Remember to share the story and context of these pictures so people know what is happening.

2. Choose What to Share

Think about the highlights of your day or week with your family. These are the things that you should share on your family blog. If you document absolutely everything that is happening, you’ll get burned out.

3. Let People Know About Updates

Make sure you let people know when you’ve posted something new on your family blog.

You can manually email family and friends but this may be tedious. Look for a family blogging service that will send out automatic email notices sent to subscribers or provides a feed that people can use in their blog readers (like Google Reader).

4. Post Regularly

Your family blog is a wonderful way for others to see what is happening in your family. Keep your family and friends aware of what is happening in your life by posting to your blog regularly.

5. Encourage Comments

You can encourage people to comment on your family blog posts by asking questions. Questions will prompt others to answer. Additionally, you can share some amazing family pictures or video to spark conversation.

6. Write For You

Think of your family blog as a family journal. This is your chance to archive what is happening in your family. Write posts and share information that you’d like to know about when you look back a few years from now.

7. Have Fun

Posting to your family blog shouldn’t be a chore. Keep things fun by including funny anecdotes about your family, stories of a fun family trip, or a video that made you laugh.

By following these family blogging tips, you’ll be on your way to having an amazing family blog that your friends and family enjoy reading.

You can create a family blog in 4 easy steps.

1. Choose a Family Blog Provider

You have two choices when creating a family blog: do it yourself or find an online service that handles all the hassle for you.

The do-it-yourself route will require some technical expertise that is beyond the scope of this article.

If you choose to use an online family blog service, make sure you can try it out to see if it will work for your family’s needs.

2. Private or Public

Decide if you want to have your family blog visible to the entire world or just those you invite. There are advantages and disadvantages to both public and private family blogs.

If you are concerned about privacy and keeping your family’s information, pictures, and happenings private, then you should consider a private family blog.

Make sure the family blog provider you select allows you to keep all information private. Be careful with some sites with complicated privacy settings that make it hard to tell what is or isn’t being shared.

3. Start Writing

The foundation of creating your family blog consists of the stories, pictures, videos, and news that you want to share. Start by writing a couple of posts about the highlights of your last week with your family.

4. Invite Family and Friends

Make sure you have some posts and messages in place before you start inviting people over to read your family blog. You don’t want to make a big deal about inviting people over if there isn’t anything to see yet.

Check to see if your family blog provider has a way to automatically let others know when you make updates to your family blog. This will save you the time of having to both write a post and manually inform people that you’ve got something new to read.

When an account is created, the site administrator chooses a personalized address like:

http://smith.familysays.com

To login to your site:

1. Type in your custom address (like http://smith.familysays.com) into your browser’s location bar.
2. Enter your username
3. Enter your password
4. Click the “Sign In” button

If a family member invited you to a Family Says site and you don’t remember the address, double check your email inbox for the original message your family member sent you. That email will contain the address. Alternatively, you can contact your family member directly and ask that they resend you the invitation.

If you are having trouble logging into your site, please let us know and we’ll help you out.

You can add a “Quick Thought” on your “Home” tab of your site and quickly share that thought with your family and friends.

This video shows you how to add, edit, or delete a “Quick Thought” on your site:

Who can add “Quick Thoughts”?
Site administrators and authors can add “Quick Thoughts”. Guests can see these thoughts but can not add them. Authors can edit their own thoughts but not those of other authors.

How many “Quick Thoughts” can I have?

Like messages on your Family Says site, you can have unlimited “Quick Thoughts.”