Many times when we work with a photo estate project, it involves going through large bins and boxes of items. We often find old family documents, memorabilia and family history notes. A newer online program, Collectionaire, may be a solution for you.
You may recall some of our stories where we have been able to help people record and preserve their family histories. Eric preserved over 400 years of his ancestor’s journey from Bohemia to America, settling in the Midwest and becoming productive members of their communities. Gen learned of her great-great grandparents’ Polish birthplaces and farmer background in small villages.
Like our clients, your old family photos can be the start of a genealogy journey. Those photos can help fill in the stories of your ancestors you may be missing. Getting all of this digitized is a job onto itself.
Then, once that is done, storing, sharing and enjoying the digital files can be challenging too. If you love family history and genealogy, you might like using Collectionaire.
About Collectionaire
Collectionaire is a simple but smart cloud app for building the ultimate collection of a family’s history and best memories, including digital photo albums, home movies, digitized scrapbooks, slide shows, audio recordings, journals, etc. It is not a photo storage site, but instead, a “hub” that complements cloud sites like SmugMug, Flickr, Google Photos, Forever®, YouTube, etc. by bringing all your media into one easy-to-navigate site via your family tree.
Side note: We do teach that all of your photos should be in one digital home. Our clients most often have their digital photos in Forever® and then we link those albums to their Collectionaire account.
You can see Gen’s Collectionaire tree above. Each of the brown circles contain a number. The number indicates how many links each person has. Gen (in the gray box) has 39 links from a variety of sites.
Here’s a portion of her media collection page.
With this screenshot, you are only seeing 7 of the 39 links we have in place for Gen. As she saw her family tree and pages being created, she stated, “This is what I always hoped for but could never imagine coming together.”
With Collectionaire, the setup does take time and patience. If you are a beginner, we do offer the service of setting up your Collectionaire account for you.
Why I Like It
- The family tree structure really tells the story of your family lineage. Each person in the tree has a media collection page where you can set up chapters, entries and links. Once you get the hang of creating the tree and then connecting links, it’s pretty easy to use.
- You can import your GEDCOM file which will automatically create your family tree. This is a fantastic feature and will speed up the setup of your Collectionaire account considerably.
- There’s also a “family history” collection that can be added to any person on the tree (with an “FH” flag) to document the multi-generational family history of a surname.
- Sharing is easy, with permissions to allow family members to view, comment on, and even edit one’s collection.
- There’s a great “search” feature that allows you to quickly find anyone on your tree or even search for any “keywords” added to photo and video descriptions. Typing “Yellowstone” would find that 1988 trip to that national park.
Things to Keep in Mind:
- If one of the cloud sites you use is discontinued, you would need to upload your photos to a different cloud site. And if a link to that site becomes broken, you may have to recreate the link, though this “linking” concept is core to the design of most all cloud sites and not subject to change. You should always have the original photos and other material backed up in your home. The cloud is there for backup and sharing with friends and family via the web.
- Creating the tree and uploading photos does take some time and practice. There are many tutorials to help you figure it out, and you can always hire someone to build your Collectionaire family tree.
- You can share your Collectionaire account with others. They will need to create their own free account to view your family tree.
As with any software, you need to use the account often enough to:
- Keep familiar with the tips and tricks
- Be updated with new software developments and upgrades
- Continue adding new links to your family tree
- Double check old links now and then
Pricing
The pricing on a Collectionaire account starts at $36 per year. I think this is quite reasonable to preserve your family history in this format.
And. . . we’ve got a discount code for you! Use PXFAMILY and
receive 50% off your first year at www.collectionaire.com
With online software platforms like this, I always remind our clients to have a backup in their home of all of their photos, videos and documents. Collectionaire gives you the ability to download all of your links and you should take the opportunity to do this routinely after adding new links to your account.
Here’s a video to see how Collectionaire works!