Do you have boxes of grade school, high school, vacation or other paper ‘treasures’ taking up room in your closets? Do you want to reduce the amount of paper? Hate to part with them,yet tired of keeping them around? My tech tip for this week may be a good solution for you.
I’ve made a video that both shows a project I did while telling you how I did it. In our article today, I’ll go into a few more details. Here’s how I did it:
- Take pictures or scan your pictures or documents. I chose to use my camera.
- Import your pictures into your favorite picture-saving software (Windows Live Photo Gallery, Picasa, Flickr, etc.)
- Then import your pictures into your favorite movie software (Windows Live Movie Maker or Picasa will work). You could also choose to import your pictures into PowerPoint 2010 and make a slide show from there.
- Download & install Jing, a free screencapture software. There’s plenty of documentation at TechSmith regarding how to use Jing, so I won’t go into it here.
- Start your movie or presentation and start Jing. You have 5” to speak about your slides – that’s the Jing time limit. I recommend paying $15 for Jing Pro. Your video can be easily uploaded to YouTube and put in a format ready for sharing either via a link, on Facebook or other social services.
- Be sure to back up both your photos and your video to the clouds.
- Now you’re ready to share your video with friends and family. If you use cloud storage, DropBox, SkyDrive and many other cloud storage choices make it easy to share with people.
A Limitation of Jing
In order to use Jing, you must either start it up by clicking on the yellow ‘sun’ object, or start it from the system tray. It’s not possible to start up the movie you’ve made in full-screen mode and then start Jing. This is because when the movie is running, Jing isn’t available. The work-around for it I found was to make my movie large on my screen, then I started up Jing and ‘drew’ the rectangle above the start button for my movie. I could then start the movie and it would go through the transitions – just not in full screen mode. If anyone knows how to get around that, I’d love to hear it! (If you’re not familiar with Jing, let me explain the ‘draw the rectangle’ phrase I used above. When Jing is started, your computer screen will go dark and you’ll see a yellow outline on your screen. Then you select the part of your screen you want to highlight and show, this is the ‘rectangle’. Anything inside the rectangle means you can’t use your mouse to click inside while Jing is recording.)
The one way I did get it to work full-screen was in PowerPoint. I was able to ‘draw’ my rectangle in such a way that I was able to start my presentation and then I could start Jing.
Go Digital and Ditch the Paper
It does take some time to sift through thing and decide what’s worth keeping but once it’s done, you’ll have more space and you’ll have a better and long lasting way to archive your memories – both for you and your family. What are some things you do to save your memories?