4 Steps to Make Your Digital Photos More Valuable

In January I wrote about "12 Genealogy Projects to Put on the Calendar". I'm tackling each job in turn, and I'm so glad to get them done. I rearranged a few of the months, and I had to change one project.

That project was to "Digitize more pages" using HandwritingOCR. It turns your document images into text files. I've done this with a few books written in different languages:

• I photographed the pages with my iPhone or scanner.
• I converted them into text with HandwritingOCR, saving the result in a text file.
• I translated the text with Google Translate, saving that result in the same text file.

But I have nothing left to digitize. So I changed my May 2026 task to "Download and categorize my Google Photos". I hadn't done that since March 2023!

Take these 4 steps to add tons of value to photos and genealogy document images.

Years ago my iPhone ran out of room to store new photos. I'd heard about Google Photos and started using it in 2013. A free account gives you 15 GB of storage, and 13 years of my photos take up one third of that. Since Google Photos is always backing up my photos for me, I can remove them from my iPhone if I want. My current phone has plenty of storage, but I'd rather streamline what's on there.

Keep in mind, anything you store on Google Photos is accessible via an app on your phone or the website. So all your photos are still portable.

I created several albums on Google Photos and assigned every photo to one of them. My albums have names like House, Woofie, Family, Cars, Maine 2021, and more. Then I went through the albums and downloaded everything newer than March 2023. But there's much more to do.

Let's concentrate on the genealogy-related photos today. I have lots of family photos and old photos sent to me by my cousins in texts:

• A typical downloaded photo saved from a text has a file name like 20200406_171047_1648666454076_001.jpg. You can see it begins with a date, but the rest isn't helpful.
• Other photos have names like IMG_3806.JPG. That's useless other than keeping photos in chronological order.
• Still other photos have names like 2592.heic. HEIC?

I found out HEIC stands for High Efficiency Image Compression. These don't open on my computer the way JPGs do. For me, they launch Photoshop. I downloaded a free HEIC Viewer from the Microsoft Store, but it keeps asking me to rate it. While it can convert the HEIC files to JPGs, that capability isn't free. So I'm going to use Photoshop to do the conversion.

There are four steps we all need to take with our digital photos:

• Rename your photos to something meaningful. I can identify "DiAnn and Chris Summer 1992" a lot easier than "20211215_115628_1639588924940_001.jpg". I'd know which photo it was without seeing a thumbnail.
• Crop and enhance your photos as needed. Some of my photos from texts are screenshots that a cousin sent. I can crop out the surroundings. And if it's an old damaged photo, I can clean it up.
• Give your photos metadata. Metadata is information you enter into the photo's properties. This information stays with the photo file. It can include a title, tags, a comment, date taken, and more.
• File your photos to make finding them more intuitive. Since I categorized my Google Photos into albums, they're already in good folders. But I can make sub-folders. Then I can keep all the family photos from Bella's 2025 graduation party together.

Let's take a look at these four steps.

1. Rename your photos to something meaningful

I have four photos of my husband Paul and my late cousin Carmine, taken at my cousin Paula's birthday party in 2023. They're all in the HEIC format that iPhones use. My first step is to rename them to include the subjects. I'm keeping it simple: Paul Ohama and Carmine Mollica 1, 2, 3, and 4.

2. Crop and enhance your photos as needed

Opening the photos in Photoshop, I see the color is a bit yellow. When I clicked Image > Auto Color for each one, they looked much better. There's unnecessary space above their heads, so I can crop that out.

With these adjustments, I can save each image in JPG format with its new name. I'll delete the HEIC versions, knowing they're still out there on Google Photos.

3. Give your photos metadata

For years I've been adding metadata to my genealogy document images. I give them a title which carries over to Family Tree Maker when I drop them there. And I add comments that include the source citation.

Not long ago I learned something new about metadata from a video by Thomas MacEntee. You can add metadata to several files at once, as long as they're all getting the same metadata. So I will:

• Select these 4 photos
• Right-click and choose Properties
• Click the Details tab
• Fill in a shared title, the tag "family", a comment about where I took the photos, and the date I took the photos.
• Click Apply to save this metadata to all four files at once.

Having added family as a tag, I can now go to Windows File Explorer (or Finder on a Mac), and type tags:family in the search box. The four photos of Paul and Carmine are at the top of the results list. I'm new to using tags, so I'm keeping it simple for now.

4. File your photos to make finding them more intuitive

These are the only photos I took at cousin Paula's birthday party, so I won't put them in a sub-folder. But I have several photos from cousin Bella's graduation party. I'll give them their own sub-folder. Most of those photos are group shots. I can identify key people in the file name, and identify everyone in the Comments section of the metadata.

I have a lot of work to do, and the plan was to complete this project in May! I'll try to plow through the photos in a few long sessions or commit to an hour or two a day. Then it's on to my June 2026 project (I started it yesterday). That project, "Add more war casualties", was my April project until I reshuffled the deck.

Here's what's involved in the war casualties project. I have a spreadsheet of the men from my ancestral Italian hometowns who died in World War I. The province of Benevento has their actual military records online for download. I'll check to see which military records I haven't downloaded yet for men who are in my family tree. Then I'll add the record and its source citation to my tree.

Which family tree projects have you been putting off? Why not jump into one now and get the ball rolling?