More fun with photos

 As you know, I love old photos. And I have found the photo tools on MyHeritage.com to be a lot of fun.

1. Firstly, I have been able to convert black and white photos into color photos, which make the people look much more real. The downside is that inanimate things like clothing may be rendered in the wrong color. For example, a green uniform may be rendered as red instead, or a red car may appear as black in the colorized version of the photo. And black and white photos that are too dark or light or where the contrast is bad, do not colorize well. But for most normal photos the results are excellent. (If anyone knows of a free tool for fixing dust specks on old 35 mm colored slides, please let me know,)

This site can also restore color to faded or discolored colored photos, In the bunch of old family photos that I received recently, there were some that were so badly discolored that I could not make any sense of them. I thought "I wonder if MyHeritage can improve them? If not I will have only wasted 5 minutes." Wow! It is hard to believe they are the same photos. They were instantly transformed from "useless" to "very usable". Maybe give it try with some of your "problem" photos.

2. Secondly, I have used their DeepStory function to create animated photos of people telling their own story. This is a different way to share family history. To do this, choose a good frontal photo of the person's face. Colorize it if you prefer. Then write the person's life story. Add it to the project and then proceed. It will take a few minutes for the computer to animate the face and synchronize it with the computer voice telling the story. (You can choose the computer voice you want to use.) I found that I occasionally had to tweak the spelling to render people's names and place names accurately. For example, the name "Levers" is pronounced "Leevers", so I needed to spell it that way for the computer.

3. Most recently, the  AI Time Machine can generate photos of yourself in a variety of historical roles. This has no practical application that I could think of, but after hearing positive reports repeatedly for the past few weeks, I decided to give it a try. My preferred role was seeing myself as an astronaut. I doubt that NASA or SpaceX would ever find me a suitable candidate, but here I am  

Best wishes for a joyful Christmas and blessings throughout the new year.
Christ is the reason for the season.

Bill

DISCLAIMER: I receive no sponsorship or other special benefits from MyHeritage.com I am just a very satisfied user of some of their services.. 

Unexpected family photos

I received a message via Ancestry Messaging.

Back in 1967, I had spent a few days with Wilfred and Jessie Anderson in England. They were wonderful to me. Jessie was a first cousin and long-time "pen pal" of my mother. After Jessie's death, Wilfred remarried and moved to Scotland. Years passed, Wilf died and his step-daughter, Sarah, found that she had inherited Jessie's old family photos. along with those of her mother. She did not want to put them in the trash, so she went looking for someone who might want them. She found Jessie in my tree at Ancestry.com and so she contacted me.

I let her know that if the people in the photos are identified I would love to have them, and I would be happy to pay the postage, She sent me a photo of a table top covered with the photos. My plan is to scan them, upload them to FamilySearch, create an Album there, and share the link to the Album with all the relatives possible. .

Sarah sent them at her own expense. And to make sure the photos were not lost n the mail, she scanned them and sent me a link to her Dropbox folder. This allowed me to download the photos and start work on them before they physically arrived. I was able to colorize or restore the color of many of them using my MyHeritage account, before emailing them to my extended family..

I received a message from a cousin in England, thanking me for sending the photos Some of the emails bounced because the attachment was too large, so I plan to create 3 smaller attachments for those specific people and try again. 

I appreciate technology. When I started my pursuit of family history in the 1960s, paper and the postal service were the state of the art  (And they may be slow but they still work.)