Today's post is a guest post written by Paul Schneider of Remember Whenever, a media transfer company based in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He's going to share his expertise in this post to help you understand digitizing family media like video and audio tapes, DVDs, slides, film, and more—specifically for genealogy.
Guest Post by: Paul Schneider
If you’re like most people, you’ve probably got boxes of old photos stashed away somewhere, or tapes of family interviews. Maybe slides that you’ve inherited over the years or old film reels gathering dust, unable to be viewed because that projector bulb went out years ago.
A lot of people I come into contact with think of this as “clutter”. It’s the boxes of stuff that they don’t know what to do with but also don’t want to throw it away. Things that have been sitting for years, untouched.
I don't need to tell you that this is a goldmine for genealogy research.
That being said, if you can’t access them, they might as well not exist - and this is where digitization comes in.
In this post, we’ll look at why digitizing your family media isn’t just about preservation (although of course that’s important). It’s about making these treasures work for you and help you towards your goal.
Your Evidence is Trapped
Those photos, videos, films and audio recordings are incredibly valuable. Just as valuable as census records or death certificates.
But unlike documents you find online or at the library, these items often have unique problems:
- You can’t duplicate them easily. If something happens to that 100 year old photo, it’s gone.
- You can’t search them easily. You have a box of 1000 photos and you need that specific one, it’s going to take some manual labor and time to find.
- You can’t share it easily. Mailing photocopies to cousins or bringing photo albums to family gatherings is cumbersome.
- The media is degrading. Video tapes, photos and film are breaking down whether you’re using them or not.
Maybe most importantly for the work you’re doing - if you can’t access something when you need it, you’ll waste time rediscovering what you already knew. It’s the same problem Jennifer has discussed in her previous posts about disorganized genealogy research.
A Real-life Example: Unlocking a Civil War-Era Collection
I recently worked with a customer who brought in a treasure trove of family materials; documents, letters, photos with many dating all the way back to the Civil War. This was generations of his family history that had been carefully preserved, but in its current state, much was unusable for his purposes.
Someone in his family had begun the genealogy research process years ago, but it had stalled. He wanted to pick up where they left off but he realized that a lot of the materials were going to be very hard to use in their current state. The old letters had faded handwriting, the photos were fragile. Everything was trapped in boxes, unorganized.
After we digitized everything, he was able to sift through the newly-digital images with ease and he could finally dig into his research. But this is where things get interesting, and we’ll come back to this story in a minute.
What is “Digitization” and What Does it Actually Give You?
I should probably be clear about what we mean when we say “digitization”. Digitization is the process of converting your physical media (photos, slides, film reels, video tapes, audio cassettes, letters, documents) into digital files that you can access using a computer/tablet/smartphone, and then store, share, organize and use.
Here’s what that gets you for your genealogy work:
1. You Can Actually Organize Your Visual Evidence
Once your photos and videos are digital files, you’re able to organize them the same way you’d organize any other genealogy materials. By family name. By location. However your system currently works.
More importantly, you can organize your digital files in multiple ways without needing additional physical copies. For something like a wedding photo that shows two or four family lines, it can be easily duplicated into all of the right places with the touch of a button.
Modern tools can make this even more powerful. Software like Immich (which is a self-hosted photo management system) includes facial recognition that can identify people across your entire collection. Once you identify someone and match a name to a face, you tag them and the software can find every photo they appear in. Even photos you didn’t know they were in. For genealogy research, this is huge. You might discover connections or relationships you’d have never found by manually sifting through hundreds or thousands of photos.
2. You Can Search and Find What You Need
Digital files can be named, re-named, tagged and easily searched. That means that when I’m working on my Schneider line and I remember that old photo I saw a few months ago of the Schneider homestead somewhere, I can find it in seconds just by searching on my computer and don’t need to go digging through boxes of photos.
Beyond adjusting filenames, you can add much more information with metadata. Names, dates, locations, relationships; all easily searchable later when you need it most.
3. You Can Share Evidence with Other Researchers
When you connect with a family member who’s researching the same line, being able to quickly share photos, videos of family interviews, audio recordings and documents makes both of your research better.
Digital files are easy to email, upload to shared drives, or add to online family trees. All with the same quality as the original (or sometimes better!).
4. You Can Create a Backup (Preservation)
Preservation matters. Magnetic tape degrades, photos fade, film gets brittle. Digitization doesn’t stop the physical media from deteriorating but it creates a copy that won’t.
It also allows you to store these priceless artifacts safely off-site, so should disaster strike (fires, floods, tornadoes), it’s one less thing you need to worry about.
5. You Can Extract Information More Easily
Something that people don’t think about is that it’s often easier to study the digitized media, especially from the perspective of analysis.
You can:
- Zoom in on that group photo to see faces clearly
- Pause video interviews at the exact moment someone mentions a location or date
- Listen to audio recordings multiple times while transcribing
- Compare photos side-by-side on screen
You can work with the media in ways that aren't always practical with physical formats.
And here’s where AI tools are changing the game for genealogists.
Remember that customer with the Civil War-era letters?
After everything was digitized and a week or so had passed, I checked in with him to make sure everything turned out ok. We got to talking about his project and he told me how he was using ChatGPT to decipher the old handwriting in some of the documents and letters. He was feeding the scanned images into ChatGPT as digital files and it would transcribe them for him, turning the barely legible cursive into clean, searchable text documents in a matter of seconds.
Now he had all these names, dates, locations and relationships clean and searchable in ways that would have been nigh-on impossible with the physical documents.
This is one of those cases where new technology like AI transcription works perfectly alongside proven methods like digitization and organization. It’s not replacing traditional genealogy research, it’s making it way more efficient.
What Should You Digitize First?
If you have a lot of physical media and even the thought of starting this process seems daunting, here’s my recommendation for prioritizing and hopefully it helps you get started!
Priority 1: Anything Deteriorating
Video tapes, audio cassettes and magnetic media should be first. These are the first to degrade over time as they were never made to last. They have the shortest shelf life and the information can’t be recovered once they’re gone.
Priority 2: Unique and Valuable Photos
Older/vintage photos of ancestors, especially older generations. If there’s only one copy in the world, definitely make that a priority.
Priority 3: Documents and Letters
Handwritten letters, journals, documents and anything with information in someone’s own handwriting.
Priority 4: Everything Else
Once you have the irreplaceable and deteriorating items handled, you can work through the rest systematically.
“Doing It Yourself” vs Professional Services
I won’t tell you that you need professional digitization services (full disclosure: I own and run a digitization service, so I’m a little biased). But I will say this; consider your time and the value of your genealogy time.
One of the main goals with digitizing is to make your research easier and more effective, not to create a new time-consuming project. So if scanning or transferring media is keeping you from your actual genealogy research, that’s creating a brand new problem.
If you do decide to digitize photos yourself, my suggestion is to not just photograph them with your phone or camera. I know it seems like the easiest approach (and it is) but there are so many factors that will hurt the quality of your final images:
- Lighting issues can create shadows and hotspots and light bouncing off the photo surface creates glare
- Your light source (especially indoor lighting) can shift the colors in your photo and make them look different to the original photo
- Photos that curl or aren't completely flat will be distorted.
- Keeping your camera perfectly parallel to the photo is harder than it looks, especially if you take into account all of the above.
All of these issues become non-existent when using a flatbed scanner. It may take slightly longer per photo, but the consistency and quality of the scans compared to photos-of-photos makes it worthwhile to spend a little extra time.
I’ve often worked with people who have taken a hybrid approach to digitization; scanning photos and documents themselves, and taking complex or larger projects to professionals like video tape transfers, slides, film reels, and photo scanning services for large photo collections.
Making Digitization Work for Your Research
Here’s a few tips to help you easily integrate your digital files into your genealogy workflow:
Add metadata right away: While the information is fresh in your mind, add your names, dates, locations, etc to your files
Organize as you go: Don’t wait until you have thousands of files to start organizing. Get your system set up at the beginning and stick with it.
Back up your files and back them up often: I was always told, “If it’s not backed up in at least three places, it doesn’t exist”. Now that cloud storage is relatively cheap, using services like Dropbox or Google Drive are a safe bet alongside having everything on your computer. This keeps your files in another place so if anything does happen to your main files, they’re still accessible.
Share Strategically: Let family members know you have these materials digitized and allow them access. They might just have that piece of the puzzle you were looking for!
The Bottom Line
All those years/decades/centuries of family media are genealogy evidence, but evidence you can’t access, organize or share doesn’t help your research.
Digitization isn’t about technology for technology’s sake. It’s about making your genealogy research more effective (and less time consuming) by giving you the ability to actually use the primary sources sitting in your closet, basement or attic.
With modern, digital tools like AI transcription and facial recognition software, digitized materials gain so much value by becoming searchable, shareable, and usable for serious genealogy research.
Get it digitized. Get it organized. Then get back to the actual genealogy work.
Learn more about Paul's business Remember Whenever online, here.
