Privacy and Security

Privacy and Security

As you consider the many social media options and how you might use them, keep privacy and security issues in mind.

Most web apps make a stab at creating a secure environment but programming is complicated by the criss-cross of operating systems, browser technologies, web server software, high-level programming, lower-level scripting languages, telephony, cable systems, and so on. There are many potential vulnerabilities.

Posts and profiles are stored on servers you don’t control, disseminated according to their policies, shared with 3rd party partners, and subject to the rules of business which allow companies to change their policies to meet business needs.

Play it safe.

SMEs

Is Social Media for SMEs?

The internet is frequently claimed as the ultimate democratic media channel. Anyone can get online cheaply and spread their gospel. Over the past 15 years, I have heard again and again that the web makes it possible for small business to compete with large enterprise. Social media has even fewer obvious costs associated with it. Business people can tweet about their products and services for free 27/7. So do social media channels really democratize marketing? Are SMEs now as, or more visible than big business?

Recently I was directed to a post that claimed small businesses are more effective users of social media because they are more nimble. I was unable to post my comment on the blog because the comments field didn’t seem to be working, but that’s another issue (look under the tab for Technologies).

That aside, I think that large companies work social media to great advantage.

• They have public relations or marketing departments that can devote resources to monitoring and responding to social media events.
• These departments have the authority and guidlines to respond to most media situations without having to engage the upper echelons.
• Far from being bogged down by bureaucracy, large companies are often very nimble, especially in the face of criticism.

The Value of Social Media to SMEs

I can find no verification for believing that small companies are flocking to social media. Historically SMEs have been slow to take advantage of the internet. Almost half of small businesses are still without websites even though they can be developed free of cost  (see my page on web design). Are they wrong?

If SMEs don’t see the value of social media it may be because

• Most of their business comes from word-of-mouth referrals in a localized community. What is the point of selling your manicure service to people on the other side of the planet?
• The free websites take time to develop and paid-for websites cost money better spent on display ad like billboards or upgraded signage
• Social media eats time and everyone in a small company is already working 2 or 3 jobs.

Although I have no stats for this, I suspect that when small companies are successful online, it’s because their networks are intimate or began as a close-linked circle of friends and suppliers. This group forms nodes that explode out into larger circles.  The network forms to serve the needs of its members, is run by people who know the company well, and expands through personal referrals. Eventually, in some cases, the network grows into the 1000s and the communications change, but by then it has gained authority and credence.

I also believe that some companies are better served by social media than others. Products with global appeal that are easy to ship or can be downloaded may find social media opens new markets. I know a woman who took her home-based business global in only a few months through social media. Her product is aimed at new mothers and the testimonials prove that the product is as good as her word. Online word of mouth, mostly though Facebook, brought her to the attention of Moms everywhere.

There is only one sure way to know if social media will bring you paying customers, and that is to try it. If you cannot afford to hire someone and need to DIY:

• Create an account on the platform that most appeals to you.
• Figure out which keywords and key phrases represent your service then search on those terms to see what people are saying.
• Join the conversations
• See if you have time to update the content frequently and regularly.
• Find out if people follow or friend you
• Make an offer to your network and see if there is a response
• Look at your results after one month and adjust your activities and keywords
• Give it another month and look at the results again.
• After 3 months, if you are not getting results and the time it takes to maintain your social network is burdensome, drop it and try again next year.

Bullying

Although I cannot remember a single case of cyber-bullying in the early 1990s, there were many examples of people being rude on forums. Capitals were used to yell at newbies who asked uneducated questions, and many threads devolved into streams of impatient rants.

Many people hoped the community would self-regulate. Many people killed the forums they moderated. Venting and using the internet opportunistically aren’t new, but increasingly, it may be a crime.

Social media and anonymity allow bullying to reach new heights. A person can create an anonymous or fake account on a social media network and use it to hound a target. That target, being a person, suffers and the consequences have occasionally been dire.

According to i-Safe

• 42% of kids have been bullied while online.
• 35% of kids have been threatened online.
• 21% of kids have received mean or threatening e-mail or other messages.
• 58% of kids admit someone has said mean or hurtful things to them online.
• 53% of kids admit having said something mean or hurtful to another person online.
• 58% have not told their parents or an adult about something mean or hurtful that happened to them online.

A 2008 University of Toronto study found that half of students having been cyberbullied. 5% were scared by what they experienced; over 50% did nothing about it. 35% of students admitted bullying another student within the previous 3 months. Instant messaging makes it easy and is the preferred method.

Be Web Aware gives a good overview of who bullies, why and how. One thing of note is that according to this study, 3/4 of cyber bullies never bully anyone by other means. Other studies suggest this may be wrong and that 2/3 of cyber-bullies have engaged in some kind of face-to-face bullying. Either way, online technologies obviously provide an opportunity to ramp up the level of bullying in society. And there are concerns that it will spread into the adult mainstream. ( Des Butler, Sally Kift & Marilyn Campbell Cyber Bullying In Schools and the Law)

6 Forms of cyber-bullying

1. Insults: Posting or spreading lies about a person to harm them or their reputation.
2. Targeting: Singling someone out to make fun of them and inveigling others to join in.
3. Identity theft: Pretending to be someone else so as to steal from them or create an impression that they have done or said things they didn’t.
4. Uploading: Sharing files, often images, that show or place a person in an embarrassing situation without their permission.
5. Excluding: Inveigling others to ostracize someone
6. Harassment: Repeatedly sending someone nasty, insulting, or frightening messages.

Increasingly the police are involved. The Department of Health & Human Services in the USA runs a website devoted to bullying. The Ontario government legislated against cyber-bullying in 2007 with changes to the province’s Safe Schools Act which now makes bullying illegal.

Cyber bullies can be brought to justice under a number of laws including identity-theft, harassment, libel, defamation, or creating an unsafe environment. Against this is the problem of showing the perpetrator intended to be malicious and is responsible.

At a higher level of discussion cyber-bullying pits two sections of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms against each other. Section 2 guarantees freedom of expression. Section 7 guarantees “the right to life, liberty and security of the person.”

Copyright

Copyright laws have been with us since print publishing became ubiquitous and while they may have been revisited at times to cope with magazines and broadcast, they were unprepared to handle the Internet.

The concern here is not the validity of the content, but who owns it and whether or not they have a right to publish it as (if it were) their own.

When a student writes an essay, there is an expectation that they went to a variety of sources, found pertinent information, thought about it, and attempted their own summary which they put to paper.

Many webpages appear to be written by people who take this approach. There’s nothing wrong with summarizing the work of others if credit is given where credit is due and if  something original is added to the content. Otherwise, why not simply point people to the original online document?

Why not? Because the internet encourages people to build huge repositories of mediocre and copied content to build traffic to websites that are paid for by advertising. With little accountability offered, texts and graphics are simply lifted from one website and copied to another, to be republished as new content.

Search engines attempt to clear out some of the resulting clutter, but a quick search on almost any topic will lead you to a dozen sites that claim to provide information on the topic but which simply repeat each other. How can you tell which site is responsible for creating the content or whether it is verifiable, trustworthy, or rot?

Again, if people won’t self-regulate, the law steps in. Most people think of copyright as a set of laws that protect the ownership of content. Creating content is costly and the originators want to be paid. The result, seen first in the music industry, is a demand that governments upgrade the law to protect artists and their support teams.

Copyright actually protects us all by ensuring the provenance of information. To decide if information is trustworthy or not, we look at its source. Do we trust the person who provides the information? Have they shown us how they derived their conclusions? Do we believe they are experts in their field whether that field is astrophysics or astrology?

Plagiarized information loses credibility because we no longer have a connection between the conclusions and the sources.

Copyright law in Canada is extremely complicated and if you are publishing content to the web you should ensure your right to it.

Of great importance, you must ensure that you have copyright to publish the content online. Most agreements, especially older ones, to not take internet publication into account and in those cases, the courts have tended to assume the content creator did not intend their work would be made available online.

The problem is that once a file is online, it may be copied and transferred all around the globe, including countries where copyright protections are light. In the process, the person who spent hard hours creating the content loses control of it. Further, it is easy for someone to gently massage the file to turn it into something new.

Content creators should ensure they have protection of their works online as well as offline. Publishers should ensure they have the right to publish in a variety of  venues.

The Canadian laws on copyright were last amended in 2005 but are facing a major overhaul (the proposed Copyright Modernization Act ) designed to toughen the provisions. Some people feel the new law, if enacted, goes too far. It would in essence, make it illegal to copy a favourite song from a CD that you own to a memory stick, if the CD has a digital lock. But the new laws are also intended to align with international treaties we signed in accord with World Intellectual Property Organization.

Essentially, the law will allow Canadians to make copies of content only for short-term use and only as long as the content is not protected by license, digital locks, or an on-demand agreement. You can’t use the content to create a library or use it commercially except in the limited circumstances of Fair Use: using the content for educational or satirical purposes. Note here though that students are required to destroy educational materials covered by copyright that they were given in online classes, within 30 days of the course ending.

For a complete run-down of the provisions in plain English, visit the CBC Copyright changes: how they’ll affect users of digital content. Also view these government documents:

• Backgrounder on the Copyright Modernization Act
• Q&A about the Act

Privacy

Privacy

Privacy as a fundamental human right is recognized in

• the UN Declaration of Human Rights
• the International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The Office of the Privacy Commission in Canada says,

“Privacy is often viewed as a fundamental human right and, arguably, the right from which many other essential freedoms flow: individual autonomy and decision making, freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of thought.”

Personally Identifiable Information

Personally identifiable information (PII) is information that is available about you online. It includes information that you have provided to a variety of websites in return for services, information provided to social media sites, posts, tweets, and information collected by tracking cookies and similar devices.

Most websites track visitors to determine how many visitors they get and which pages visitors find most interesting. Tracking cookies routinely include information the browser provides to the web server, such as what brand of browser is in use.

If you have ever looked at the reports from Google Analytics, which is a common tracking tool for websites, you will note that Analytics also records your location, time of visit, how long you were on the site, and what you looked at. Most tracking codes also note where you were before and after the visit and may follow you throughout your session.

The data that is acquired, according to most companies, is then stripped of your PII. It is anonymized and combined with other records to form visitor profiles. These are used to improve the website so that it offers more of what visitors want. Strangely, given that your data is not anonymous, the companies use the profile to streamline the ads pushed to the websites you visit.

Study after study shows that if you purchase the information marketing agencies collect on people through online tracking, there is a good chance you can trace it back to the individuals on whom it was based. Further security flaws and hacking show again and again how easy it is to collect detailed profiles and attribute them to specific people.

Adding in GPS co-ordinates and the fact that many smartphone apps only work if they know where the phone is located, and one quickly sees that the idea of anonymity on the web is artificial.

The law however, requires you to make an effort to protect any information you collect from people who visit your website. The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario (IPC) promotes the idea of privacy by design, a concept that envisions websites and online applications that are developed and implemented with privacy issues built-in.

In this the IPC sometimes finds itself at odds with Federal issues such as the expanding surveillance laws that would allow authorities to access information that has usually been guarded, simply because it is online. (see under the Spies tab)

When you collect information from visitors to your website, you need to think about how that information will and could be used, who will access it, and how it will be stored and deleted.

For some reason, people are often careless with e-communications. For example, they leave their email client open while they go for lunch even though anyone sitting at their desk can now view the messages. People send personal information, passwords and credit card numbers via unsecure email and online forms.

• For a list of recommendations and best practices tpo protect the privacy of your customers and staff, visit the IPC website.
• For an overview of privacy issues globally visit the Global Internet Liberty Campaign

Spies

Government Surveillance Technologies

The Internet provides us with opportunities for learning, socializing and purchasing smarter. Much of the richness of the Web comes from Web 2.0 technologies which allow collaborative activity online, but there is a price. Most of the cool applications require a degree of tracking to make them possible.

• GPS works by sharing having your mobile phone call in
• Foursquare needs to know where you are
• Serving relevant ads to consumers requires profiles and the ability to associate you with one
• Downloading games and whitepapers requires a legitimate email address.

What marketing companies potentially know about you is disturbing but they are subject to legal action and restrictions on advertising.

What the government knows about you is potentially dangerous.

Canadian Legislation

Canada has 3 pieces of legislation in the offing that are designed to give the police broader access to your online activity.  The average Canadian spends 44 hours a week online and 17 hours a week on their mobile, so giving the police permission to read your email or watch where you travel on the Web is akin to being under physical surveillance and a phone tap. However, under this legislation, they won’t need a warrant.

The Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act would

• require telecommunications and Internet service providers to be capable of decrypting, decoding, and preserving all online and telephone communications. While it does NOT give the police to read your email, there would be little point in having this capability if it wasn’t the intention that they might. This presumably includes emails you deleted,  culled from backup servers at your ISP.
• make it permissible for police to get basic contact and IP information for any ISP’s customer on demand. The concern is that the information can be linked to profiles like the ones used by marketing agencies and to discover who is behind anonymous communications. The purpose is to make it possible to investigate dangerous crimes like child pornography but there is nothing in the legislation to limit it to that use.
• make it possible for police, without a warrant, to make a “preservation demand” requiring an ISP to save meta data on any customer including who they contacted, what kind of messages were exchanged and how long they connected.
• make it possible for police to install a number recorder for 2-12 months to track all phone calls made from the targeted address without a warrant.
• extend the current police right to add a tracking device to anything you own, so that they can unilaterally activate your mobile phone to track its location

There is no requirement that the police or ISP inform the customer that they are under surveillance.

According to Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian,

• Bill C-50 would make it easier for the police to obtain judicial approval of multiple intercept and tracking warrants and production orders, to access and track e-communications.
• Bill C-51 would give the police new powers to obtain court orders for remote live tracking, as well as suspicion-based orders requiring telecommunication service providers and other companies to preserve and turn over data of interest to the police.
• Bill C-52 would require telecommunication service providers to build and maintain intercept capability into their networks for use by law enforcement, and gives the police warrantless power to access subscriber information.

Available at a Conference Near You

If you are feeling complacent that you have nothing to hide, a few snippets from an article in The Guardian might give you pause:

• In April 2011 Egyptian activists discovered that in 2010 Gamma made headlines offered their FinFisher spy technology to Hosni Mubarak’s regime. FinFisher loads a virus onto targeted computers so that Skype can be monitored surreptitiously.
• An FTC employee who was concerned about government surveillance of citizens was fired from his job after making recordings of part of an ISS World conference.
• Italian company Hacking Team offers software to governments that can load discretely onto a target computer, turn on its microphone and webcam and send recordings back to the spies along with emails, passwords, GPS location, and other data. They claim that their software can work nation wide and track 100,000 devices simultaneously. They also claim to have already sold their software to 30 countries worldwide.
• The German police use software similar to Hacking Team. Under German law, its use is illegal and they were outed by Berlin-based hackers at the Chaos Computer Club (CCC).
• In the U.K. authorities need a warrant from the Home Secretary for this type of surveillance and must show that national security is at issue. In 2010 1682 such warrants were issued. We live in dangerous times
• The US government read personal emails to and from Jacob Appelbaum, formerly of Wikileaks, during the ongoing investigation into Wikileaks.
• In 2011 Appelbaum was ejected from ISS World on the request of a surveillance company.
• Citizens in Tunisia claim that a simple post to Facebook could lead to a visit from death squads.
• Since 2000, in the U.K, there have been over
• 20,000 interception warrants (requests to tap phones and secretly read emails)
• 30,000 authorisations for directed surveillance (following a person in public)
• 2.7million requests for communications data
• Indian Country Today Media Network reports that the Canadian government has been

Read these articles

• TheGuardian on surveillance technologies
• TheGuardian on British surveillance

 

 

Set Goals

Before you begin any campaign, you need to consider your goals:

• brand awareness
• sales and acquisition
• develop new markets
• which media are most popular with your audience
• how will you track traffic and effectiveness

Online media are easily tracked and as mentioned above, most Americans are online and 90% of them are visiting Google. Further, they are online at Google because they are looking for information or services.

It makes sense for you to put your ads in front of people who are actively looking for products and services in your arena.

Consumer Buying Cycle

Of course, you want your ads placed at the moment the visitor is most susceptible to your offer.

The consumer buying cycle is a concept based on extensive research. It breaks out how people move from a vague interest in something through a series of steps, to purchase.The 4 broadly defined steps are

1. Awareness:
2. Consideration
3. Trial
4. Repurchase as a loyal customer

Awareness

The most effective media for making people aware of your company are the traditional options of TV, print, radio and outdoor (signs, billboards, etc.)

To these we can now add online video, image ads, and Google ads and most importantly Google search advertising  and Google search. Online advertising allows you to “touch” potential customers at any stage of their buying cycle.

In many cases, the first time people encounter your company will be as part of a search result. This is why so many companies expend so much money getting their company website to show up in the top 10 results of a Google search.To make it most effective, you also need to include a description that entices people to visit your website and back the enticement with a website that delivers.

Direct mail and in-store demonstrations help to personalize the experience. But television is the biggest driver of online search. People hear a message and go online to find out more.

Consideration and Testing

Despite the growth in ecommerce, many people will visit a store before they purchase a product or service so they can see and test it more concretely.

Other media may help to reinforce purchase and in some cases, if the price and pitch are right, some people will buy online without visiting a store.

Repurchase and Loyalty

Traditionally you might follow up with a customer by sending a direct mail flyer or by phoning. But today, an alternative is email or subscription to websites including to YouTube.

Click to Buy

Google provides advertisers with many options and the ability to target audiences and track results. You can place ads

• in product search
• on Gmail
• on webpages of Google search partners include websites that incorporate a Google search engine into their design
• on webpages where Display publishers place ads on specific pages of publisher’s websites

Google Search Network

Google Adwords deliver ads based on keyword searches. When a person types in a search terms, they get organic results based on a complicated algorithm on the left side of the page. On the right are paid search ads purchased at auction and ranked by quality. The quality score is determined by how frequently the ad is clicked which means that the ad must appeal to the person searching, if it is to get good placement on the page.

While most people realize that the ads on the right are paid for and are more inclined to choose a result from the organic listing, running an ad places your company in front of the viewer. If your company is visible on the right and left, the person is more likely to click through. If the organic results are poor, for example displaying a list of directories instead of companies, the person may turn the paid ads to find a website that directly meets their needs.

You should run some tests on where and when to run the ad because if your ad is displayed frequently but rarely clicked, you will lose status and sales. For example, if you have a TV commercial running, it is likely people will turn to their computer to find out more about your company. Likewise there may be times when you don’t want to display your ad because the people who see it aren’t interested.

You also need to select the keywords with care. For example, the word “car” is so generic that your ad would run on pages with results from Toyota to toys. Be specific and choose keywords your users would use uniquely to find your company.

Essentials

The steps behind the placement of ads is:

1. Users search on the words
2. Google ranks the value of keyword and puts them up for auction
3. The advertiser selects keywords and bids on them. The selected keywords should be used throughout your campaign and the page the ad links to should be highly relevant.
4. Google ranks the ads
5. The best ads appear at the top
6. The advertiser pays only if the ad is clicked.

Google Placement Targeting

Google placement targeting lets you choose where your ad is displayed from a database of partners. It’s even possible to choose specific pages within a website or you can choose to be displayed on any website within one of over 60 categorie.

Besides choosing which webpages serve your ad, you can choose where on the page to place the ad. Buttons, squares, skyscrapers and other options are available, to be displayed inline, in the margins or mastheads.

With Display Ads,  text, static images, video, or rich media ads are available.

Finally, you have the option of paying by click (PPC) to gain sales or impression (PPM) to increase branding

YouTube

YouTube receive 2 billion hits every day and 24 hours of new video every minute. For many people, it is their search engine of choice because it gives in-depth impressions of the topic they are searching on.

The advertising options are similar to display ads because you target your audience from one of the categories.

There are 10 formats from masthead, in video, streamed, standard banners and expanding ads are all available.

Location Based Advertising

Many companies would be wasting money to advertise outside their immediate community so Google offers two important options.

You can confine any ad so that it displays only within a chosen  geographic area  or you can use Google Maps, placing a marker over your location on the map and adding information about your service, location, accessibility, hours, and parking, along with photos, menus, and more.

1 in 5 searches is location oriented.

Mobile

For every PC purchased in 2008, 3.3 smartphones were sold, so mobile is a growing in importance, especially in some markets. A growing percentage of mobile phones are smartphones with the ability to browse the internet, receive text messages, read virtual reality codes, link to websites, etc.

Most mobile searches are location based which means that the person performing the search is probably looking for you or someone in your field. These are customers or potential customers ready to buy.

Optimization

There are 5 key steps to optimizing your website

1. Optimizing the account settings

• Set clear advertising goals that have common themes and products
• Check all the elements of the account to ensure they are aligned: from the advertising goals, through the ad campaigns, to the website and sales. Set out specific, separate campaigns, possibly organized around sections of the website, featuring one product, aimed at one target audience to meet their needs.
• Find relevant, targeted keywords. They should reflect the themes and be related to each other. This will improve the campaign which in turn makes it more effective overall leading to a better quality score. Avoid duplicating keywords across campaigns.
• Create clear and compelling ads with a call to action. Keep them specific to one product or service and make sure the webpage they link to drives the sale.
• Track the conversions and revisit the settings

2. Optimize the campaign settings

•  Organize your advertising budget to create a series of ads that focus on specific products and goals. For example, a promotion in one city is the basis of one ad group; a branding campaign across a region is the basis of another.
• Set budgets for the day, based on your goals for each separate campaign plus an overall budget for your account. For example, you might spend more on a top-selling product, and limit the budget on a product being introduced.
• Set a bidding strategy. Small accounts can take advantage of Google’s built in budget optimizer. Increasing what you are will to pay as Cost Per Click, increases the number of impressions and makes you more competitive. You can also allow Google to automatically manage your bids through Preferred Cost Bidding where you set the maximum bid. Setting times for when your ad appears also improves your ROI especially if the last step of your sales pitch encourages customers to fill in a form or speak with a representative.

3. Optimize the keywords

• Filter out words perform poorly: high cost with low return
• Lowering bids or switching them to other ads might give you better returns
• Identify best performers and make sure you give them adequate budget.
• Look for variations on the good performers by adding qualifiers or trying synonyms
• Review the match setting.
• Broad matches match will match your keyword with synonyms. This gives you maximum exposure but may have less relevancy.
• Add in quotes = the word must be matched but other words can be included in the search
• Put your keyword in square brackets, it must be matched exactly.
• Add a + before any specific keyword and it must be included in the search. If you have a keyword phrase, try removing the quotes and adding a + to each word to get a broader, less precise reach.
• Adding negative keywords can prevent your ad being shown places where you don’t want it to be.
• The keyword tool will give you ideas for new words. As you add effective words, it will give you alternatives.
• The traffic estimator gives you an idea of how many clicks you can expect at the bids you set.
• The keyword analysis report shows you the quality ranking for each word in play

4. Optimize ad text

• Experiment to find the ad text that conveys the message effectively
• Be descriptive
• Add deals and promotions
• Match your keywords
• Try different formats. Even changing the capitalization can have an effect.
• Use Keyword Insertion. This is indicates a keyword my placing it in brace brackets {keyword: Local Handyman}

Relevance

Create Relevant Ads

At the beginning of November 2011 the US FTC (Fair Trade Commission) made a demand for greater transparency in online advertising. The problem is not so much the ads as how they are served to people.

Marketing experts claim that the tactics they use are designed to provide webpage visitors with advertising that is relevant to them, rather than sluicing the everyone with generic ads. A simple tracking code pushed from the website to your computer makes it possible to watch how people use the internet and gain an understanding of their interests. Once a profile is generated, it is possible to target the visitor with ads for products in the categories they recently searched.

For example, after searching on vintage Ford convertibles, the visitor goes to a news website and is fed an ad for a car agency specializing in classic cars.

According to some marketing agencies, people online want this kind of intrusion. Even less adamant experts believe that people prefer relevant ads to irrelevant ones. The issue is the tracking code. More and more surveys are being discussed that come from impartial sources and they are clear: most people are uncomfortable with the idea that they are being followed as they move around the web.

At the moment online advertising is self-regulated, largely in response to public outcry. If advertisers cannot find a happy mean between tracking and protecting privacy, the government is likely to step in eventually.

Google Ads

Google ads are served up based on search keywords. It is only minimally invasive, but if you look at the entire range of services that Google provides, they include analytics and tracking. It is possible to tie your Google ads and your analytics together to create advertising campaigns that take advantage of some of the behavioral marketing techniques that concern individuals.

You should be aware both of the options and the repercussions of using online advertising.

• 84% of 25 to 34 year olds have clicked out of a website because of an “irrelevant or intrusive ad.”

Resources

Identify

Do an inventory to find out where your photos are

Your photos may be stored

• in the camera
• on a memory card
• on flash drives
• on CDs or DVDs
• on hard drives
• on online galleries

Every one of these devices is likely to fail or go the way of the 5-1/4″ floppy, so the first thing you want to do is find out who has them now and how they are stored.

If the photos are on older devices, you might want to start by ensuring they are still readable. If the only photo of Uncle Fred is on the floppy disk he sent you back in 1995, you may need to find someone who can download it for you.

You may also find that many of the photos you gather in are repeats, but be very careful. Two photos on different devices with the same name, such as ron-holding-a-fish.jpg are probably the same, but check the file size and date.

• A file moved to another device may be slightly smaller if some of the associated metadata was stripped out.
• The dates may reflect when the file was transferred, not when it was taken.

There are software programs that can compare the contents of 2 devices to see if the files are the same. Some of these apps are free. It can save you lots of time.

The worst case scenario is based on the fact that many digital cameras give meaningless names to files. IMG00014-20100821-0045 is timestamped, but 2 photos called DSC08897.jpg could be different photos, so check them.

If your photo collection is truly out of hand, create a folder and copy everything to it, deleting all the duplicates. You have the originals should something go horribly wrong. Remember where all the originals are, because when you are done, you are going to make a backup of the new folder and delete all the photos from their original sources including destroying CDs and wiping memory sticks.

At then end of this stage, you want one collection of all your photos to work with.

Organize

Organize your photos into named folders like 2011_beach party. You aren’t actually looking at them at this stage, simply sorting them into groups based on a theme that makes sense to you. For example, most people will sort their photos into events or by date. My mother is sorting hers into years for events and people.

Start with big categories

• ancestors
• my family
• husband’s family
• family
• before kids
• kids
• world cruise
• retirement

 

Decide

Which photos are important?

My father went on vacation every year to lakeside resorts, many of which were in Eastern Canada or Northeastern USA. Going through his albums after he died it was striking how one spruce tree leaning over a cold lake looks like any other spruce tree leaning over a lake. The labels were useful mnemonics of trips we took, but those photos weren’t.

Pictures of unique events, people, iconic buildings, and the like are great ways to remember the past. Vague, fuzzy photos of a stranger’s cat will probably leave you straining for context down the road.

Some people find it really hard to delete stuff from their computers. Sorting the photos first is helpful because it allows you to compare apples to apples. Click through the photos in the folder a couple of times to get a sense of what you have, what the topic was and the story you want to tell with the photos.

• Delete any photo that is blurry. You can’t fix them.
• If you have a number of photos that are nearly identical, choose the largest one or the one with the best balance (it just looks nicer than the others), and delete the others.
• Glancing through the remaining files, are there any parts of the story that are only represented in poor quality photos? For example, the only photo of Uncle Fred might be really dark. Keep it for now, digital photos generally contain more information than the human eye can see and it might be possible to improve the photo later.

The goal at this stage is to get rid of rubbish and duplicates.

Any artist will tell you that a small focused portfolio has more impact and holds more interest than a flood of examples of varying quality.

Your next goal is to reduce the selection down to 10 or 15 photos. If you can’t bear to delete any of the remaining photos consider three options:

• If the folder contains more than one story, sort the remaining photos into sub-groups. For example, if these are photos of your 30-day trip to Europe, sort them into different countries, or days, or types of activities
• Keep them for now. One day, in a couple of years, you’ll go through them again and pick out the keepers.
• Be ruthless and delete half of them. Remember, your goal is to create a complete and inclusive story and stories are strongest when they are succinct.

Here are some tips. Choose photos

• with the highest resolution.
• that are clear and recognizable
• that reflect recognizable discrete events or people
• tag photos that aren’t great but are the only ones that show something important because it may be possible to salvage them.

Tag

Next, go through the folders and name the photos in a way that will have meaning 10 years from now: i.e. ron-falls-in-lake.jpg not lotsa-laughs.jpg.

You can also tag your photos. Many photo editing programs let you add extra information to the file. Some of it, like the timestamp, can be pulled from the camera itself.

Information that is useful includes

• time and date
• participants
• location
• keywords that you could later search on

Copy

Hard drives fail and CDs and DVDs can fade, so make copies of the photos and consider making a sub-selection and having them printed out professionally using archival quality inks and papers. AND migrate as technologies change: another reason for keeping the collection small and under control.