Marsha Ingrao – Always Write

 My 600th post! 

Arcadia Publishing has specific requirements for the photos in your Images book.  You receive a written guideline and an editor that answers questions promptly.  Your success is practically guaranteed – once your get the photos!

Images of America books are not family history books, so even if you grew up in a community, you must gather pictures.  Multiple family’s pictures in the book are essential to telling the story.

In the case of a small community, probably the library will not have enough images to fill your book.   You might have a small museum or historical society that stores pictures.  Even though our museum is not open, one woman has pictures in her home.  Here are the ways I started from 0 and gathered the 200+ pictures I needed for publication in 6 months.

1. Our local Kiwanis magazine put in a free ad for me. – 1 direct call and one referral from her
2. I walked the streets of Woodlake and talked to business owners, City Hall and Woodlake Police. – 2 donors
3. Talking to friends in the grocery store  – 1 prospect
4. Following referrals from friends – 30 donors
5. Cold calls to businesses – 1 potential donor who googled me to make sure I didn’t have a criminal record or wasn’t a sex offender before he called me too late for publication.
6. Following referrals from referrals – 3 donors

Organizing was important, and took quite a bit of time as I processed the photos.  These are my steps.

1. As I started scanning photos, I put the PDFs into files in my document folder labeled by donor’s names.
2. Next I created a “Woodlake PDF” and put in all of the donor folders.
3. Each photograph sent to Arcadia was a TIFF file, so I processed all most files, and put them into a separate file with the donor’s name inside a large folder that said, “Woodlake TIFF.”
4. I didn’t write about every picture.  In order to write, I used an unpublished blog account, because importing each picture to a Word file made Word crash.  It is hard to write about a picture when you can’t look at it as you write, so the blog was perfect.
5. However, that created another step.  TIFF files are huge, so I resized each photo I used (or thought I might use) in the book and saved it as a JPEG, and created another Donor file and put it inside – you guessed it – the “Woodlake JPEG” file. Then I could upload those files easily to my blog, and the ones I didn’t use in the book I could post to FB or in my  blog.
6. Then I made files for the chapter titles and copied only the TIFFS into those files, numbering them for the book.
7. Finally I copied the entire folder, “Arcadia,” onto an external hard drive.  I started to copy all of it to the cloud, but it was very time consuming.
8. After I submitted the manuscript and pictures, I began copying the JPEG files only to Picasa.  I’m still not finished, and I hope it is worth the effort!  I have them organized by subject rather than chapter, and I have one folder for all the images used in the book along with the caption, so that if I do another book, I will use different pictures, or be sure to credit the book as well as the donor.

That’s it.  That’s how I gathered and organized hundreds of pictures in six months.