Preserving Memories: A Deep Dive with Angela Andrieux

Mylio website

Join us as we discuss the fascinating world of photo preservation with Angela Andrieux, a fine art photographer who balances her passion with a career at Mylio, a photography software company. 

Angela shares her expertise on organizing and safeguarding family memories, offering practical tips on photo archiving and the benefits of using Miylio Photos for managing digital assets. 

Discover how Angela's journey into photography led her to become a caretaker of family histories, mixing technical acumen with heartfelt storytelling.

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Find me on my website: jan-johnson.com

Transcript

[00:01] Jan: Are you looking for an inspiring listen? Something to motivate you? You've come to the right place. Welcome to women of the Northwest, where we have conversations with ordinary women leading extraordinary lives. Motivating, inspiring, compelling. Hello, listeners. Welcome to women of the Northwest. Today, my extraordinary guest is Angela Andrew.

[00:26] Angela: Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

[00:29] Jan: Yeah, so nice. Anyway, so you do some things with photography, and, I don't know, you're going to tell us all kinds of things that you do. I can't wait to hear.

[00:39] Angela: Well, I do a lot of things. So my own business is Angela Andrew, photography. I'm a fine art photographer, and I just. I love taking pictures. I love photo editing. My day job, I work for a photography software company called Mylio, and we sell a product called Mylio photos. It is a memory keeper. So it's an asset manager geared towards, well, pretty much anybody could be the photographer, it can be the individual, it could be the family, and it's geared towards preserving your memories. So what we encourage people to do is to get all of their photos from all of the different sources. So we all have pictures on our phones and in the cloud, possibly saved to social media. That might be the only place where they live, get them all into one place, ideally get them downloaded to a local external hard drive, make a backup copy so you can preserve and make sure they're protected. And then what our software allows you to do is be able to have all of your devices, your phone, your computers, all talk to each other and access those same pictures, no matter what device you're on. And the cool thing about this is it's super private. The cloud is optional, so we don't force you to keep your stuff in the cloud. It's an option if that's where you want to store things, but we really encourage people to have their own local storage. And if you want to keep things private and keep it private, if you want to have things more accessible and out there, you can totally do that, too. So it's all about flexibility. But the biggest thing is preserving memories, making sure you can find those memories when you want them, and then be able to share them with your friends and family and preserve them for the next generation.

[02:13] Jan: That sounds like a lot of fun.

[02:14] Angela: It is. I really enjoy it, and it's got me into my own family history. I've kind of become the de facto preserver of memories for my own family. And so I've been scanning in photo albums that my grandma has, asking questions, getting to know stories of things that happened long before I was born and preserving those memories and then being able to share those photos with other people in the family who may have never even seen those photos of themselves, which is pretty cool. Yeah.

[02:42] Jan: And so is there a place on there where you can add comments about things?

[02:46] Angela: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, it's got regular metadata. So we save all of your metadata to industry standard formats. You've got things like keywords you can put on there. You have titles and captions. We have amazing face tagging. So you can tag all the important people in your life and quickly go to a collection of all of their pictures. So let's say you're planning your mom and dad's 50th wedding anniversary. You can immediately go to all the pictures of them and even limit it to pictures of just them and then make a slideshow with those people. It's really, really cool.

[03:17] Jan: Huh huh. And can you fix the old pictures?

[03:22] Angela: Yeah, so we've got some editing tools in there. I like to call them essential editing. So it's not meant to be like a super powerful photoshop or something like that, but it does have some editing tools built in. A lot of them actually geared towards scan photos. So things that are faded, discolored, um, it'll do a lot of those contrast corrections, color corrections. If you have a major photo restoration to do, that's where you're going to probably want to step up to something a little bit more powerful, like a photoshop elements or full photoshop, if that's your, if that's your deal. There's lots of other options out there if you need to like fix scratches and tears and things like that. But just like those basic color corrections to make those pictures kind of pop after they've sat in an album for 30, 40 years and faded, it makes them look so much better without having to go anywhere. And it's just a couple of clicks.

[04:10] Jan: Huh. That's cool. How'd you get into this?

[04:12] Angela: Well, I've been working with my own photography business. I started writing a lot of tutorials on my own blog for the software that I use. So things that were helpful to me, I was like, well, you know, a lot of other photographers might be interested. And that kind of developed into working for a photography software company. I worked there for several years. Started out helping with just some of their social media, started helping with their support, got into product evangelism. So I was writing their manual. I was doing live streams for them, all sorts of stuff. And that just kind of grew and then I moved on to the company that I'm with now. And I'm doing everything from technical documentation. I get to give feedback to the product team. I teach people how to use the software. We're a small company, so one of the wonderful things that I love about working for a small company is you get to have your fingers in lots of different things.

[05:02] Jan: Yeah. Yeah.

[05:03] Angela: These are never boring.

[05:04] Jan: Yeah. Cause then you can use all the talents that you have.

[05:06] Angela: Right, exactly.

[05:08] Jan: Yeah. Yeah. Cause some of us have multi talents that seem to work in all different areas. Right.

[05:15] Angela: I'm not happy if I'm stuck doing just one thing day in, day out. Doing, you know, having the variety is really what keeps me on my toes and keeps me engaged.

[05:23] Jan: Yeah, yeah, for sure. What about, do you have any stories of any of the families you've worked with and how your packaging, whatever has affected them?

[05:34] Angela: Oh, my goodness, so many. So one of the things I do with Mylio is I hold three times a week different live streams, and they're held in Zoom meetings, kind of like what we're doing right now. So people have the opportunity to come on face to face and ask me about how to manage their families lifetime of memories. And in doing that, you start learning about them. And people who come over and over, each one of them has such unique stories. And what I found is a lot of people who get into this journey, organizing their families, photos and history, and getting stuff digitized. I hate to say they're usually coming from a situation of a loss, and they're scrambling to find a way to either gather this information, or maybe they've inherited all of these piles of photos. What do I do with them and how to sort through them and kind of preserve them and just be able to get to them when they want. So a lot of people have gone through a lot of hard things. It's like one of those things of life. We hit these points where you have to find pictures for certain events, not always happy. One thing I always like to tell people is Miley was awesome at finding things for those events, but also great for finding the happy events, too. So, like, if you have kids and your kid is celebrating a birthday, you can create a birthday slideshow, or they're graduating from high school or college, you can create that slideshow, pull together all those important pictures, and see their life in photos. So it's a great way to just kind of get all those memories into one place and then be able to find them when you need them. Because when they're scattered on all sorts of different services. Finding something when you need it is, can be really, really difficult. That's the problem. One of the big problems we aim to solve.

[07:14] Jan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's been the neatest, like family or grouping that you've done, people you've worked with?

[07:25] Angela: Let's see here. So one of the people that comes regular to leaked my sessions, he is in New Zealand and he is the memory keeper for his family. And again, he came into some sad events. He's the keeper for fit for good events and just getting to know him. And one of the things I love about this gentleman is that when he emails or he shares his stories, he also shares things in his native language and then translates them. So from the New Zealand language to English. And it's just, it's fascinating to learn the life stories of other people and kind of see the world through their eyes. And especially when you see the pictures and the pictures from their families, when they're willing to share those, it just gives you a glimpse into where we're all the same and then where we're all unique. And I love that about humanity.

[08:14] Jan: Yeah, that would be neat. Yeah, because it's people everywhere, you know. Yeah, yeah, that would be neat. Because everything's digital now. Almost everywhere. Not, you know, obviously, some places not, but, you know, I mean, it just makes it available worldwide. Really?

[08:33] Angela: Yes. Yeah, there's so there's some great opportunities. Once you get your stuff, you start getting organized. You could have a situation where you create even like a virtual family reunion, and you get a zoom together with family members and you go through some of these pictures and you start sharing those stories and cataloging them. And, you know, it's that preservation, making sure those things are available for the next generation because, you know, life passes pretty swiftly and you want to make sure that those moments are captured.

[09:03] Jan: Yeah. I have ten kids, and so when I retired, the first thing I did was go through all of the boxes of photos, actual physical photos that we had, scanned them all in, and then things that had group ones, I put them all on thumb drives for each my kids, you know, so they've got their pictures besides the box, but, you know, then they have the family ones and all of that too, but, yeah, awesome. Yeah, that's kind of. Kind of neat to have all of that together, but, yeah. Which again, sounds like that would be a lot of fun.

[09:36] Angela: Well, you know, that's something similar that my family did. After my grandmother passed, my dad had all the old home movies, you know, formats that I don't even remember what they are. He had those all digitized, and then he gave each one of us grandkids thumb drives with all those home movies, and I had those in my Miley photos library, and I can easily pull them up. And he was awesome. He went through each one of those videos, and everyone that he recognized in each one of those videos, he made notes of who was in those videos at what point. So again, it's about preserving that information, because I could go back and watch those be like, oh, that's cool. And I think that's my grandma. But I don't know who the rest of these people are. I can look at those notes and go, oh, that's who that is. I kind of look like that person, or whatever the connection may be.

[10:21] Jan: My mom had all of the photos. She had all the family photos, and she was getting Alzheimer's, and I thought, okay, I gotta get to this quick. First thing we're doing is going through the photos. You're gonna write down who all these people are gonna. I'm not gonna have a clue, you know? Yeah.

[10:38] Angela: Now, when you digitized your photos, did you scan them yourself or did you?

[10:41] Jan: Yeah.

[10:42] Angela: Okay.

[10:42] Jan: Yeah.

[10:42] Angela: See, it's a big job.

[10:44] Jan: Oh, it took a lot of hours even. I even did the slides, you know, and, wow. Peeled off the cardboard. That's great. Yeah, yeah, there's.

[10:57] Angela: I mean, there's a lot of different ways people can go about it. I've scanned most of my own stuff too, like the video stuff we had professionally digitized, and it's really a matter of what works for any given family. There's some great home equipment you can get to get really high quality stuff, but if you just don't have the time to do it, there's no shame in sending it out and having someone do it for you. And there's amazing, there's an amazing group out there called the photo managers, and they are professional photo organizers who do this stuff for people who just don't have the time or possibly even the technical know how to do it for themselves, but it can get it done. So it's something that's preserving history is pretty important.

[11:37] Jan: Yeah. Yeah, it sure is. And I suppose you could match that up with ancestry.

[11:43] Angela: Absolutely. Yeah. Our software actually integrates with familysearch.org, which is a free service to use. It has family tree stuff in there. It has tons of research that you can go in there and build your family tree. And so we actually have integrations with our software with that particular group. And you can go ahead and send pictures from Mylio photos directly to familysearch.org dot. We're talking with some other family history type organizations out there to further integration. So who knows what that'll come to in the future. But there's just so much information out there that you can do, and you can really fall down a pretty deep rabbit hole with the whole genealogy research thing. It's. It's pretty exciting.

[12:25] Jan: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it is. One of my daughters digs in deep, and she's, you know. Did you know that my great grandpa was. I said, no, I actually didn't know that. No.

[12:36] Angela: It's so cool.

[12:38] Jan: Yeah. Yeah. It is fascinating because it's your history, too, you know.

[12:42] Angela: Yeah. Well, it's cool to look back at some of those things and go, wow, my ancestors did some really neat things and were, you know, incredibly smart, talented people in their own right, regardless of, you know, what actual education level they had, things like that, what they survived, what they went through. And unless you go in and you start researching those things, you just. You don't know what came before you, and it gives you a whole different appreciation of life and what we have now.

[13:11] Jan: Right. I think, too, that it would be, you know, just thinking about this would encourage people to maybe start tagging or photos or doing something that. To put some information in them all the time, you know, just because we're not gonna live forever either.

[13:29] Angela: Yeah. I mean, even looking back at some of my old prints that I had, I've scanned them all in now, and I'm trying to remember, but even pictures from, like, junior high and high school, back when I had my film cameras before things went digital, I look back at some of these pictures, and, you know, when I was 25, I was like, I'm gonna always remember who these people are. Well, fast forward a few decades. I don't remember who the clue.

[13:53] Jan: Where is that yearbook exactly? Try and match them up to be who they are. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's really interesting. It sounds like it would be good things to make for gifts as well.

[14:09] Angela: Absolutely. So as you, you know, as you go through and you gather these images, you could put together stories. You could create photo books, even just giving somebody a print that they might not have ever seen of them and somebody else who was important to them. And those things are priceless. But also, as you're going through some of these physical prints, when you're scanning them, and if it's stuff that you don't necessarily necessarily want to physically keep, to send those actual physical prints to the people who are in them because they might have a different level of appreciation. You could preserve it in your own collection digitally and then pass on that physical copy. And that keeps the story going.

[14:46] Jan: Right? Yeah. And I think what I find is I'm going through them is to find maybe someone who's died, you know, and I have that photo that their family would love to have, you know, just that connection, so. And now you can keep two copies, your copy, in there, you know, I mean, exactly. So you have your own memories as well, but I think those things just are just something to hold on to, you know?

[15:14] Angela: Yes, for sure.

[15:15] Jan: Yeah. So that's great. Yeah. Anything else you want to share?

[15:21] Angela: I'm not sure, off the top of my head. Just that, you know, photos, the ones we make today and the ones that we have from the past are all important. What I would like to encourage people to do is whether you use our software or somebody else's, to make sure you have backup copies. If the only place something lives is on social media, make sure you download it and have a local copy, because a lot of those early social media pictures, for many of us, that's the only place that that image lives. And it's not guaranteed that those platforms are going to be around forever. So make sure you have your own copy. Make sure you preserve those memories, keep things backed up. I'm a big data protection advocate, and I probably have more backups than the average person, but it's always a good thing to follow that three, two, one backup rule. So you have at least three copies of your data. So photos, videos, other files on your computer, whatnot on at least two different type of media. So you could have a computer and your external hard drive, and ideally, to have one of those be offsite another copy off site. So that could be the cloud, that could be a hard drive or a thumb drive you keep at a family member's house or in a safe deposit box, things like that. So to have that kind of worst case scenario place that you keep things, and then that way when hopefully never happens, but if you ever have to, like, pick up and get out of your house quickly, you grab your kids, you grab your pets, you don't have to worry about grabbing the computers because, you know, you have that off site copy. So, you know, make sure you back things up. Think about the three, two, one backup, and I think that'll make a big difference for a lot of people.

[17:03] Jan: Yeah, yeah. Always wise words. Yeah. Well, Angela, thank you for joining me today. As today, I'm glad. And then if you want to send me links to any links that you'd like to have in the show, notes and.

[17:20] Angela: Absolutely. And if anybody is interested in Mylio photos, then go to Mylio.com. there's a seven day free trial. They can download and check it out. And we've got amazing education for anybody who wants to learn the software. They would probably be working with me directly on a lot of things, so they're welcome to get in touch. I would love to hear from them.

[17:41] Jan: Okay. Thank you. Perfect. All right, well, thank you. That was great.