Organizing and Preserving Your Family Memories with Angela Andrieux of MyLio Photos - Episode 111
Feeling buried under a mountain of memories? 📦 From dusty boxes of old prints and albums to countless digital photos scattered across phones, computers, and hard drives, the task of organizing a lifetime of pictures can feel overwhelming. But what if you could finally bring order to that chaos and create a secure, lasting legacy for your family?
In this episode of the Caregiver Relief Podcast, host Diane Carbo is joined by Angela Andrieux , a professional photographer and product evangelist for Mylio Photos. Angela shares simple, powerful strategies to help you go from overwhelmed to overjoyed. Learn how to tackle decades of photos, safeguard them from disaster, and use them to create beautiful, connecting moments with your loved ones.
What You'll Discover in This Episode 🎧
- Getting Started (Even When Overwhelmed!): Learn the first steps to take when facing 50+ years of photos, whether they're in boxes, albums, or on old devices.
- The 3-2-1 Backup Method: Discover the industry-standard method for backing up your memories to protect them from tech failures, fires, floods, or any disaster.
- A Virtual Family Reunion: Find out how to use your photo collection to bring multiple generations together, share stories, and capture precious details before they're lost.
- Connecting Through Memories: Learn how photos can be a powerful tool for caregivers to connect with loved ones experiencing dementia, sparking joy and bridging memory gaps.
- Introducing Mylio Photos: Get an inside look at this privacy-first app that helps you organize, protect, and access your entire photo library without relying solely on the cloud.
Your Roadmap to an Organized Photo Library
Step 1: Taming the Overwhelm
The biggest hurdle is often just starting. Angela suggests two paths: the "Do-It-Yourself" (DIY) route or hiring a professional photo manager.
- If you're going DIY:
- Take Inventory: Gather all your physical prints, slides, home movies, and memorabilia in one place to see what you have.
- Digitize Your Prints: You can start simply by using your phone and an app like PhotoMyne. For larger jobs, a sheet-fed scanner like the Epson FastPhoto 680 can scan the front and back of photos quickly, preserving any handwritten notes. Angela even suggests chipping in with other family members to share the cost of a scanner!
Step 2: Bringing It All Together with Mylio Photos
Once your photos are digitized, Mylio Photos acts as your central hub. It brings together your scanned images and all your digital photos from phones, hard drives, Google Photos, and iCloud into one organized library that you control on your own devices.
Features like the Calendar View and Map View automatically organize your photos by date and location, making it incredibly easy to find what you're looking for.
Step 3: Creating Meaningful Connections ❤️
This project is more than just organizing files; it's about preserving stories. Angela shares a beautiful story about visiting her 98-year-old grandmother, connecting her laptop to the TV, and spending hours going through old pictures together. They identified relatives, fixed dates, and captured stories that would have otherwise been lost. You can do this in person or organize a "virtual family reunion" over Zoom to crowdsource information and bond with family members near and far.
Step 4: Protecting Your Legacy with the 3-2-1 Method 🛡️
To ensure your memories are safe from any disaster, Angela explains the 3-2-1 Backup Method:
Have 3 copies of your data, on at least 2 different types of media, with 1 of them offsite.
This could mean having your photos on your computer, an external hard drive at home, and a cloud service. Mylio Photos helps facilitate this, and Angela also recommends a service called Backblaze for affordable, unlimited offsite backup of your entire computer.
The Perfect Tool for Caregivers 🧠
For caregivers of loved ones with dementia, photos are a powerful gateway to the past. Angela explains that looking at old photos can "light them up in a way that other things aren't even gonna touch".
With Mylio Photos, you can load an iPad in "guest mode" and let a loved one safely swipe through pictures without any risk of deleting or changing things. You can also create simple web galleries to share with family members who aren't tech-savvy—all they have to do is click a link.
Ready to Start?
The best day to start is today! As Angela advises, just "pull out a single photo album... Take something small and then be able to check that off your list". This journey is a marathon, not a sprint, but every small step is a victory.
Learn more and connect:
- Mylio Photos Website: Mylio.com
- Mylio Community Forum: community.mylio.com (Free to join!)
- Angela's Photography: angelaandrieux.com
- Follow Mylio Photos on Social Media:
And to our incredible family caregivers, remember Diane's closing words: "You are the most important part of the family caregiving equation. Without you, it all falls apart. So please learn to be gentle with yourself. Practice self-care every day because you are worth it".
Caring for a loved one can be overwhelming — but you're not alone. If you have questions, big or small, our expert team is here to help.
👉 Click here to Ask the Expert
Our Resource section can help you find the information and tools that you need. We have courses, videos, checklists, guidebooks, cheat sheets, how-to guides and more.
You can get started by clicking on the link below. We know that taking care of a loved one is hard work, but with our help you can get the support that you need.
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Diane Carbo
