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Want to preserve your old family photos and use your TV screen to view your photos, memories, and albums? Read on!

Learn how to digitize your old photos, organize them, enhance and crop for best effects, and create logical albums for viewing on your TV or any other electronic device.

You already have the computer or laptop; the only software you will need is a photo editor/organizer such as Windows Photo Gallery (WPG) or Picasa. For scanning you may be able to use your all-in-one printer/scanner or you might want to invest in a new flatbed scanner for around $200 that can also do slides. The flatbed can also do the basics like cropping and color correction. Google also has a great app for your smartphone called Photoscan. It does a good job at removing glare and yields a scan with decent resolution. As you may know Google dropped support for Picasa, but it remains a great desktop application for editing and organizing. With Picasa's successor Google Photos you can edit, organize, and backup the masses of current photos we acquire in our everyday lives. However, this is not a great way to deal with the historical photos we are scanning, which is the focus of this class.

Using Picasa or WPG, you can add "tags" to each scan. This is the equivalent to writing on the back of a paper photo. Using the tags feature you can enter any information you know about the picture; the who, what, when, where. This information will follow the picture to most platforms.

So now let's edit those photos if you haven't already done so in the scanning process. You can straighten and crop them, adjust the color, shading, and fill light, and correct red eye. Blemish touchup and sharpening are also available. There are many special effects such as borders- both sharp and soft, sepia, soft focus, and more. In Picasa you can add text to the body of the photo to identify people along with dates, places, or events.

Another great feature in Picasa is the collage. This allows you to place one or more pictures onto a single image...as well as tilt the pictures, resize them, add text anywhere, and choose the background and text color. This is very useful for single vertically oriented photos. Put one such image in a collage and now you can put text off to the side of the image.

The variety of albums is endless: Family history based on lineage, dates, and places; recent trips or special events like graduations and weddings; office parties or memorial services; a "family journey" album for each year with events, travels, kids, holidays, etc; even your household inventory becomes an easy chore.

So now what's your story to share and preserve?