Tech Tuesday ~ Shoe Box

Vintage Photo Backs (Photo credit: HA! Designs – Artbyheather)

Last night as I was preparing for bed, I found myself browsing the App Store on my iPhone searching for free genealogy applications. I found one that seems very promising for the family historian, it’s called ShoeBox. It’s downloadable for both iPhone and Android and it turns your cellphone into a photo scanner! I was so excited to try it out that I did just that, and jumped out of bed like my cozy two bedroom apartment was on fire. Go figure! The things that excite me and it’s not even a sale at the Coach store! (Although, I could use another handbag.) But I’m a frugal kind of girl, so I’ll just stick with the ShoeBox app. For now at least. What is so great about this app? Well let’s take a look..

This app allows you to scan all your old paper photos and send them to family and friends. Imagine having an old, vintage photo of your grandparents that isn’t in the best condition, or a photo of your mother or father from the 1950’s. I love photographs, both new and old. I love being behind the camera more than being in front of it. I think I have more photo editing apps on my iPhone than any other type of installation.

ShoeBox has edge detection where it detects the edges of your photos and also has perspective correction capabilities to make sure your photos are scanned beautifully every time. This is perfect for me! Not so long ago I was going through some of my mother’s old photos, knowing my sister didn’t have many of them. She lives in Florida and here I am in Hawaii. So the only thing I could do at the time was to scan them from my printer or just snap a picture of them with my cell, shoot her an email or send the photo in a text message. I am so very happy to have come across this app, because not have cell phone cameras advanced in technology, but with this app, I will be able to scan the images and the perspective will be much better. It won’t have that glare you sometimes get when you take photos and just see a reflection of its’ glossy surface, it will be a nice clean scan. No crooked photos that I have to alter and crop so they look straight and I don’t have to crop each photo because it has the edge detection built right in.

Your photos can be saved on your cell phone but they are also saved on 1000 Memories, which is the company that created such an awesome app. Really, the best part is that you can scan an unlimited amount of photos, whether you scan 2 or 2,000, it’s still free! What better way to preserve your photos than to utilize this program. Consider it your Plan B just in case a natural disaster were to happen. A fire in your home or a flood could easily ruin these photos and then you would be left with nothing. Photos are memories, these memories should be saved as they are irreplaceable.

Organize your photos into ShoeBox albums, maybe you would like to capture an event like a wedding or graduation, name the album accordingly and you are all set!

Privacy concerns? No need to worry because it has enhanced privacy controls so you can choose whether you want your ShoeBox albums public or set to private and each album has this setting. So say you would like to publicize an album of your recent vacation, you can broadcast this to your friends and family but you have photos in another album that you would like to keep private. You can do all of this with these privacy controls and this can be accomplished all on your mobile phone!

The link to the site is below if you would like to check out the program yourself. I hope you enjoy it as much as I am! I know what I’ll be doing later!

http://1000memories.com/scan

Billion Graves- Helping or Hindering the Research Process?

English: A scenic cemetery in rural Spain showing marble headstones. Copyright (c) 1996 Steven J. Dunlop, Nerstrand, MN (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Okay, I’ll admit I love my iPhone! I was just browsing through the apps that were related to my current research on genealogy and came across one called “Billion Graves”.  There is a website that is similar to Billion Graves called Findagrave.com; what will they think of next?

Billion Graves puts together cemetery content submitted by users for people to share. How you may ask? The contributors upload the photos of headstones to their database, and what’s really cool is that the app is constantly updating your location based on your movement from from one grave to the next! So each image that is uploaded, has its’ own specific location and shows where each grave is located. If one person has this app and decides to go to their local cemetery, can you imagine what this app would offer another person across the globe? Time that by the billions of people that actually own the iPhone and use the app to their advantage. You would then have access to hundreds of thousands of grave images and know exactly where they have been mapped, thanks to each user.

What I like best about this particular app, is that once the photos have been published online, family historians and genealogists alike can help to transcribe the headstones. How is that for an easier search! But there is a downside to Billion Graves; anyone (and I do mean anyone) can edit the headstone data which could lead to a potential problem with the authenticity. Can you say human error? Misspellings? Not much more data can be included with your photo upload, apparently it’s only for photos- no text files are involved. So how do they plan on the deletion of duplicate entries? If five people decide they want to go to their local cemetery and it happens to be the exact same one, they upload images to their database. How in the world would this NOT create a problem?

When I went to the site, I was disappointed to see that Scotland wasn’t on the list of countries in which to choose from, but other third world countries that I had never heard of, are listed. Maybe it’s only because no one in Scotland has uploaded or mapped any of the cemeteries there? 

The app is $1.99 and we do all the footwork? I’ll have to think about this before I utilize this particular app. But just in case you are interested, you can download the app via the App Store.