I’m celebrating 30 years in my photo coaching business this month by:
1 helping you learn how to protect your memories from disaster and
2 helping families impacted by the recent fires in Los Angeles and Altadena.
Sign up for a disaster preparedness session and your registration fee of $49 will be used to help families in the fire zones restore damaged photos, especially those that have suffered smoke and water damage.
I call it “investing in your peace of mind.”
Once you prepare, you don’t have to worry about what’s safe and what isn’t.
Visit my Events page for my interactive class, Friends don’t let friends lose photos.
I can conduct them in person and online.
My evacuation experience
The recent fires in Altadena and Pacific Palisades made me think back to 1993 when Eaton Canyon caught fire. The flames swept up the hillsides from east to west, forcing families like mine along the canyon and the mountain slopes in Altadena and Pasadena to evacuate.
I did what most people do in an emergency: make sure people are safe, grab pets, and get my boxes of photos to the car and take photos off the walls.
The fire happened about two years before I started my photo coaching business.
My mission is to help families safeguard their photos, videos, and other memories so they can pass their legacy on to future generations.
I’ve always enjoyed looking through family photos and I would have been crushed if I had lost some, especially my favorites.
Let’s prepare before disaster strikes
It’s not hard. You just need a system where you keep your photos like these that I’ve taken for insurance purposes.
Read on to see how I keep these photos in the same digital home with my most meaningful memories.
3 types of disasters
The fires sweeping through Altadena, just northeast of downtown Los Angeles, and the Pacific Palisades were once-in-a-lifetime disasters. Hopefully, a fire of this magnitude won’t be experienced ever again.
Disasters, though, can be personal and still devastate you.
Home
Broken pipes, smoke damage, or other problems can result in loss. And if the items lost are valuable and they’re not replaceable then that’s disastrous.
Technological
Our electronic devices are wonderful, but they’re subject to disasters. Desktops and laptops can crash, thumb drives can get misplaced and external hard drives can break. They’re great for backing up memories but our electronic devices aren’t permanent storage solutions.
Natural
Natural disasters get a lot of attention because they affect towns, cities, and regions. Just glance at the news during hurricane season, floods, or a time like fire season in California and you know how these disrupt lives.
It’s important to store all of your photos, videos, and other documentation in the same secure place.
It’s difficult to do because we’re faced with media files that aren’t compatible with each other, like a mix of printed photos, digital cameras, and smartphones.
Our photo eras
Technology has made leaps during the past few decades that I’ve been in business. Yet, preserving your memories and protecting them from disasters is tough because we have different types of media we’re trying to protect.
We’ve gone from the era of:
printed photos to the digital camera era.
Remember waiting in line during Black Friday sales to get the latest and best digital camera on sale?
Now, we’re in the smartphone era but we still have plenty of memories that are printed or stored on media like CDs and DVDs that are obsolete.
What’s the best way to protect diverse types of media?
I use the cloud-based storage system FOREVER®, to store all of my old and new media in one safe, secure digital home.
Why FOREVER®
FOREVER® is cloud storage that’s guaranteed safe and secure and is designed to last a lifetime, plus 100 years and beyond.
I can share more about how the guarantee works, but briefly the fund ensures that files are backed up and migrated to newer technologies as the current media becomes obsolete.
You own your account so it’s not going to disappear, and you won’t get locked out like you can on social media or on other storage services where you pay a low month-to-month fee to rent.
The system is versatile and lets you easily:
1 Digitize older media files from DVDs to slide shows, audio tapes, printed photos and more.
2 Store your files in digital albums that you create.
3 Print photo books and photos for gifts from your digital files
4 Research your family history using professional genealogists with FOREVER®
Using FOREVER® for Disaster Preparedness
You’re not just taking photos and videos of your home for sentimental purposes but also for insurance purposes like I did above.
Talking about insurance is about as exciting a topic as a dried-up pond in a drought, but you’ll need it when disaster strikes.
In Altadena, I know families who lost their homes in the fire and had never taken photos of their structure.
For the disaster preparedness class, you’ll take photos of your home from different angles outside and inside.
Take photos of all rooms including closets and bathrooms. For potential insurance claims the photos and videos will document the condition of the rooms and the contents.
This is important because you may have to prove what the condition of your home was like before the disaster struck. Your insurance claim is meant to return your home to pre-disaster conditions and comply with current codes.
Easily store the images and video clips in your FOREVER® account.
Can I help you prepare and safeguard your family’s memories?
You may never have a disaster threaten or ruin your memories. But you don’t know when one might happen and that’s why we prepare.
Create a disaster preparedness system once and enjoy peace of mind for years.
Contact me and let me know if I can help you create a plan that meets your needs.
Follow Safeguard Your Memories on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.