MEMORY KEEPING 101: ACCESS IMAGES WITH YOUR PHONE INSTEAD OF HAVING THEM ON YOUR PHONE
Having Images on Your Phone
Let’s face it! Smartphones have spoiled us! Some people do their whole life with their phone. They don’t have a desktop and their laptop might have dust on it, but their phone goes with them everywhere and they use it for everything.
Of course, you want to be able to share images with your phone, but you don’t have to have them on the phone to do that. In fact, having your photos on your phone creates all kinds of problems. What if the phone is stolen, you lose it, you run over it with your car or whatever other disaster might happen. Are the photos on your phone backed up? All of them? Or just some of them? Do you know how to access them?
Losing your phone, however that happens is awful. I know, because I left my phone on top of my car one time and drove away. I only thought of it when it sailed off my car onto the highway and was run over by multiple vehicles – it wasn’t pretty.
You know what else is awful? When I hear someone say, “I can’t take any photos because my phone it full. Phones come with free storage, like a drug dealer gives away free drugs. The point is to get you hooked and once you are, they’ve got you. Breaking away can seem overwhelming, but once you have the ease and security of FOREVER, you’ll discover it’s worth it.
Sure, there are lots of solutions available. You can rent storage or more storage, according to your situation, and upload to the cloud. You can go through and delete a bunch of photos. You could download the images to your computer or move them to some service like Google Photos. Yeah, but chances are you really don’t want to do any of those. You’d just like some sort of magic to happen.
Accessing Photos With Your Phone
So, what you’d like to have happen is for the photos on your phone to be somewhere safe, magically. Well, I can kind of do that for you. It will still suck if your phone gets lost, stolen or destroyed, but with everything else you’ll have going on, you’ll know your photos are safe, that monthly storage charge will disappear and you won’t get that darned notification your phone is full every time you turn around.
When you buy storage from FOREVER, you pay for it once and you get a free app to access the images on your phone. You can buy more when you need it, but paying for it will not be something you have to do the rest of your life. You’re not getting dinged every month for some little (or large) payment for your rented cloud space. In fact, your photos are guaranteed safe for your lifetime plus 100 years, so whoever comes after you won’t have to pay that annoying little fee either.
With the app, you can back-up whatever images you have on your phone and then you can set it to synch with FOREVER every time you take a photo. If your phone says you can’t take anymore photos, just laugh and hit the delete button. How good does freedom feel?
More Than Backing-Up & Synching
The FOREVER App does a whole lot more for you than back-up and synch with the photos you take. You get all the power of the FOREVER Library, Albums and Tagging Features, as well. Most of the things you can do on the FOREVER website, you can also do in the app. If you want to find out about the Library, then see THIS post. If you want to find out about the Albums, see THIS post. If you want to find out about Tagging, come back next week.
If you’ve ever scrolled and scrolled and scrolled to share a photo, then you’ll love the tools FOREVER has to organize, show and share your images. With a few clicks, instead of random scrolling, you can find that beach pic from years ago. And whether your sharing with some across the coffee table or across the world, it’s easier than you can imagine.
So, if your phone is holding your photos ransom, charging rental fees which will never go away (even if your photos do), then lets talk about FOREVER.
MEMORY KEEPING 101: 5% OFF EVERYTHING & FREE STORAGE
What the Club is not!
People are wary of getting signed up for stuff and I don’t blame them. Too often we are promised the world and all we get is a monthly charge for something and we can’t get rid of it.
One minute a friend is telling you about some miracle cosmetic and the next you discover you’ve joined their “team.” Or you sign up for some sort of discount, only to discover you suddenly have both a membership fee and a quota. I hate that.
FOREVER is different. It is always free to sign up and there is never an obligation to buy anything. FOREVER does not want you to join my team. Being a FOREVER Ambassador is a serious career path, not a discount program. Various discounts are available all the time without being anything except one of my FOREVER customers.
What the Club is!
However, if you are a frequent flyer with FOREVER or you’ve got a big purchase you want to make, then the Club could be something you are interested in. It is really a budgeting tool. You choose the amount of investment you want to make on a monthly basis, for as long as you want to make it and then you get out of the Club – easily by the way. You don’t have any hoops to jump through to end the membership. Just go online, access your account and stop the club, whenever.
When you use the Club to budget your Memory Keeping expenses, then FOREVER will reward you two ways. First, they’ll give you a 5% discount on virtually everything and you’ll get a gift of storage anytime you stay in the Club for 3 consecutive months.
Ways to Save
There are a number of ways to go about using the Club.
Dribblers like me
I myself am a dribbler. I invest $25/month each month, primarily so I can get that extra 5% off whatever I buy. You know how you can go into a store with a great coupon, but you can only use it on full price merchandise or there are so many other restrictions the coupon is not worth the paper it’s printed on. Or the company’s ongoing promotions without the coupon are a better value than the coupon. That’s not happening in FOREVER.
With FOREVER, I can spend my $25 whenever I want toandonly a very few items are excepted from the 5% discount. I also get to stack it up with whatever other deals and discounts are going on – including welcome coupons and referral coupons. That makes it a true bonus, not a come on.
And you know what else, on top of saving 5% on virtually everything, I like that 1/2 GB added to my storage every quarter. It might not be much, but it’s something and if I get it every three months like clockwork, it does add up.
Strategic Savers
Other people are more strategic in their investment plan. When they want something specific, they set a budget for their expense and save up for it. Let’s say someone wants to get a FOREVER BOX and pack it full of scrapbook pages. I’d sit down with them and estimate how much they’d need to spend for their box credit and overage to digitize all their pages.
Just for this discussion, let’s assume they have 500 page sides to digitize at the retail price of about $2 each and they want to invest $100 a month until they’ve saved up enough. Well, first we’d plan on them waiting until there was a 40% off deal going on, because that’s the biggest discount that’s ever offered for digitization. That takes the $1000 price tag down to $600 and their 5% discount would take it down to $570. $570 divided by $100 Club payments equals 6 months and that means they’d save up for that amount of time. During this period, they’d get 2GB of storage every 3 months, so after 6 months they’d have 4 GB.
Want to know something else? We’d make sure they bought their box on Club Weekend when Club Members can get free shipping, which would save them another $30 or so. So, this customer using monthly deals and the Club would get approximately $1078 worth of FOREVER for $600. That is value!
The Club Installment Plan
Some folks like instant gratification and don’t want to wait a six months to buy what they want. Let’s say someone has the same $100.00 a month, but they want to go ahead and buy 250 GBs of storage right now, on the installment plan.
Well, first they’d join the Club and invest their first $100. Forever storage rarely (if ever) has anything more than a 25% discount, which is available virtually all the time. So, they wouldn’t need to wait on a sale. The retail price is $2499 and with the 25% discount, it would be $1875. Then the Club discount would take it down another 5% to $1782 and they would choose the 24 month installment plan (about $75/mo). They’d set their monthly Club investment to go towards the future payments of their installment plan and each month, FOREVER would charge $100 to their credit card.
Since each month they’d pay in $25 more than they needed for a month’s installment, after 18 months they’d have enough to pay off the other 6 months. They would have earned 2 GB of storage every quarter for a total of 12. So, for $1800 they spent, they would have gotten $2600 worth of value.
These are just a few basic ways of using the Club. People who want to make really large investments, such as permanent streaming or Terabyte Storage packages, sometimes get very fancy in their maneuvering.
Review the Basics
So, your monthly investment can be as low $25 and the largest is $250, but nothing is stopping you from stacking up as many Club Memberships as you want. If you only have one purchase to make and all you want to do is get 5% off, you’ll want to get in and then get out as soon as your purchase is made. However, I do recommend staying in the Club for 3 months at a time so you can earn the free storage and take advantage of deals like free shipping. If you decide to stop investing, your dollars never expire, so you can never lose them, but your discount is only good during the months when you are actively paying into the Club.
If that’s no clearer than mud, I’ll be happy to answer whatever other questions you may have. Just give me a call at 972-971-5263.
Last month I walked you through a couple of easy, peasy AutoPrint projects step-by-step. AutoPrint is what you want to use to create very quick projects. The layouts are very simple and while you can make some edits, the primary goal is done.
Design & Print is the next level of (shall we say) fussiness. You want more in the way of decoration and more opportunities to add your own touches, but you also want the heavy of lifting of design to have been done by someone else.
Available Projects
While AutoPrint and Design & Print offer many of the same projects for you to choose from, there are some differences. I have compared the AutoPrint Offerings with the Design & Print Options.
Photo Books (In AutoPrint you have all these choices with each photo boo. In Design & Print, options for size, binding and style depend on design chosen, but all of these can be found in various designs.)
Sizes 8X8 -12X12
Softbound & Hardbound
Standard & Layflat
Photo Gifts (Varies)
Coaster Sets (Both)
Tabletop Panels (Both)
Notebooks (AP Only)
Magnets (Both)
Ornaments (D&P Only)
Puzzles(D&P Only)
Blankets (D&P Only)
Drinkware (Varies)
Water Bottles (Both)
Photo Mugs (Both)
Frosted Glasses (D&P Only)
Wall Decor (D&P Only)
Canvas Prints
Metal Panels
Cards (D&P ONly)
Calendars (D&P Only)
Photo Prints (AP Only)
Glossy & Lustre
Sizes 4X6 – 11X14
Selecting Your Photos and Your Design
When you have a project you want to do in Design & Print, I suggest you first go to your albums and set up one for the project. Then add all the photos you want to include in your project into the album. It’s also a good idea to get them into the order you want them to be in the project. This will not only get you prepared for making the project, but it could help you decide which design to use.
Then it’s time to choose the design for your project. According to your point of view, this part is either your favorite thing about the project or your biggest headache.
If you like shopping online, this part is fun. You can go in and browse around, checking available options for size, style, material and etc.. You can put together your whole project and then decide you want to change the design or the layout. You’ll love it.
I’ll admit it makes me a little crazy. In prepping for this post, I went in to find a coaster set project to walk you through and hit a brick wall. Artisan is my favorite way to design in FOREVER because I like to start with a blank page, but many people find a blank page daunting. They want a design template. FOREVER offers three design options because different people like different things.
Let’s Make a Blanket
Since I’m definitely not in the mood for coasters, let’s make a blanket. I’ll use the photos I have tagged as Floral for the images on the blanket. On FOREVER I would hover over the “Create & Print” Tab and a selection box comes up offering AutoPrint, Design & Print and Digital Scrapbooking & Deign. Under Design & Print, Photo Gifts are in the center and Blankets are at the bottom of that list. Click “Blankets.”
There are many, many design to choose from, but for this project I wanted to include as many floral photos as possible, so I used the “# Of Photos” filter to find the blanket designs which included the most images. I got two choices. (Ignore the pricing. The image I included shows the deals available on the day I wrote this post, not the day you are reading it)
When I clicked on the Photo Grid Blanket, here’s the screen I got. It advises me of all the options I have. There are two sizes, two orientations and two materials available to me and there is a big PERSONALIZE button. Let’s do that.
So, I went in and added a photo for each space and chose a Bible verse as my text. If I clicked on “Layouts,” the designer offered four options, but this was the one with the most spaces, so I chose it. I could still select my size, orientation and material. Then I could add it to my cart and order it!
There are no hard and fast rules for creating albums in your FOREVER storage. You determine how you want them set up. You can set them up based on the subject matter, the time frame or the people. You can have as many or as few albums as you want and you can nest albums under the top level album for as deep as you’d like.
Some people keep photos strictly by date – with each year being an album, with nested albums for each month inside that and then an album for each day/event within the month. Others focus more on families, having one album for their immediate family, one for their own extended family and another for their spouse’s family. Perhaps the nested albums inside that would be by years or it could be broken down by people.
My choice is to have one album for travel and another for day-to-day activities. In the travel album, I have an album for each vacation. In my day-to-day album, the nested albums actually correspond to the various traditional scrapbooks I have created on a annual basis, but according to the scrapbook, it could be one year or multiple years. Then I have an album for all my completed FOREVER Projects and another for my Memory Keeping business.
I’m sorry this post is so long, but I wanted to include all the pertinent information in the same place and there’s a lot of it.
The Top Bars
Looking at my album page above, you can see that it’s easy to access any place on the FOREVER site with the click of a button. Click “FOREVER” and you will be on the FOREVER Home Page. You can shop FOREVER by clicking Digitize, Preserve & Share, Create & Print, Products or Deals. “Blog” will take you to the FOREVER Blog, which has an encyclopedic reference library of posts dealing with everything from new products to how-to’s. You can go to your shopping cart and also take a look at your account.
In the row below that, you have access to your Library, your Tags and your Profile. There’s also a link to your “Friends & Family.” Friends & Family are the folks you have chosen to share your photos with. We’ll talk about that more later.
Finally, you get to items specific to Albums. You can add a New Album, Search the Albums you have or take a look at Visited Albums. We’ll take a deeper look at Visited Albums later, also.
In the middle of the bar below these options is a Search Bar which allows you to use keywords, names and such to find specific images in your storage.
+ New Album
Hit the blue “+New Album” button and this “Create a New Album” dialog box will pop up. “Album Name” is the title you want for your album. You must create this name and it will show up below the photo you choose as a cover image for your file. For instance, below the photo with the ornate iron gate, I named my album “A Travel Journal.”
There are three Privacy Settings available and you must select one for each album. This will indicate who can see these albums in your storage. The privacy setting you chose for the top level album will apply to all the nested albums.
“Private” means for your eyes only. The only people who will be able to see these files is you, someone you have allowed to sign in with your credentials or anyone you have designated as a manager for your account, if you have chosen for your manager to have that sort of access. You can create a link and share the file, but it will not automatically be available to anyone else unless you decide to.
“Friends and Family” are people you want to have access to the images in your storage. They are completely under your control. You can invite them when you want to and take them out of Friends and Family at your discretion. However, if you would like for them to collaborate on an album with you, you must share the file with them, using the “Share” button. Then they can add photos to a file, but they still cannot modify the photos. They would need to be a manager for that.
“Public” means your files are accessible to anyone on the internet. This is not what most people want, but it could be what you want. You could set up a portfolio of projects you wanted the public to have access to or training films for your customers or even, like one of our users, a historical album of his service in WWII. The WWII Vet did not have any family who was interested in his photos, but he thought they had historical significance, so he wanted them to be available to anyone who was interested.
“Album Description” gives an overview of what’s in the album. You don’t have to put anything here, but if you are giving access to other people or you are setting up an archive which will be used for generations to come, then the more you include the better.
“Album Date” can be a single date or a date range. You do not need to fill this in at all, but as with the description, this information could be invaluable to future generations.
So, remember when I said you could share your albums with others and allow them to collaborate in those albums. There are a wide variety of uses for this feature, from a network of family albums to a team, club, business or other organization which uses a central FOREVER account. If you are a FOREVER customer with this type of access to other accounts, then this is where you would go to visit those albums which you had looked at before.
Individual AlbumOptions
If you have already added files to an album, then it will select an image for the preview. It can be changed to whatever you want. If the album is new and there are no photos in the album, then the preview will be a blue box, but as soon as you add photos, one will be automatically selected. The green box at the bottom of the box tells you the level of privacy chosen for that album, how many images are in that album and how many albums are nested below it.
Each individual album on your Album page has a small blue box in the corner. If you click on that, a drop down box gives you several choices of things you can do with that album.
The first is “AutoPrint.” A few weeks ago I published a post about AutoPrint, which creates easy, quick projects almost like magic. If you select AutoPrint here, FOREVER will start building a project with the items in this album.
“Upload” allows you to upload images from your device directly to this albums.
“Add files” will take you to the Library so you can add images already on FOREVER to this particular album. It does not duplicate the photo, filling up your storage. All your photos live in the Library and are merely displayed in the various albums you create.
“Move” takes a photo out of an album and moves it to another one. As with Add Files, the images live in the Library. You’re just asking FOREVER to let you view this image in a a specific place.
“Delete” deletes the image. FOREVER will remind you the image is being moved to the delete bin and will be deleted in 60 days.
More Individual Album Options
If instead of clicking on the arrow as we did above, you click on the preview, you are given a peek at all the nested albums in the album and given many options, some you had on the outside of the album, but others as well.
You’ll find Upload, AutoPrint, Add Files, Move and Delete, which do the same thing as I described above, but you’ll find other options as well.
Click the “Share” button and this dialog button comes up. You can use it to share the entire album with someone with a share link. If you’d like for the person you share it with to be a collaborator, this is where you designate them.
The “Add Nested” button will add a new nested album to the album you are in. You will need to name it, but the Privacy Setting will automatically be the same as the album you are working in. You can add the other information as desired, but as I always say, the more info the better.
The “Slideshow” button will create a slideshow of all the images in the album, but will bein the slideshow, but it does not include the images in the nested albums within that album.
If you want to change the cover photo, click it and change it, but the image has to be in this album, not one of the nested album. You can also edit anything about the album with the “Edit ” button below the green box identifying the Privacy Setting.
If you click the circle on the left side of any of the nested items, you can then use any of the buttons I described above to perform that action in the nested items you’ve chosen. If you click anywhere else on the nested album, you will enter that nested album.
The only thing I have in my Top Level Albums are nested albums and the one image which is used as the cover photo. However, if you have multiple images in your album, you have more choices. Above this view are all the buttons I have previously described.
Notice on the right side, above the photos , it says “Order By.” When you click it, it allows you to choose the order based on the Date Taken or the Date Uploaded and you can select “Oldest First” or “Newest First.” That’s all the same as it is in the Library, but in your albums, you can also custom order the files according to your own preferences.
If you click on “Edit Custom Order,” you get a page like this that theoretically allows you to select the photos you want to move, then drag and drop them where you want. I say theoretically, because I’ve never been able to do that. I just click on a picture and try to drag it. I eventually get it to work, but I hope you have more luck. I am probably not holding my tongue right!
Whenever you are inside an album, you can chose favorites, by clicking the heart on the right side of a photo. If you use the circles on the left side, you are taken to a screen which will allow you to choose multiple images for a variety of operations shown below.
When you are in this screen you have access to many of the operations we have covered both a few weeks ago in the Library post and in this one, as well as some we haven’t seen before:
Add to Album will allow you to go get images from other albums you’d like to include in this album.
Move to Album takes the selected images out of this album and puts them in another.
Add Tags allows you to put shared tags on multiple images which you have selected.
Share is your tool for sharing a selection of photos with someone via a link.
Download is for adding photos from the album to your device.
Edit Info is a great place to change the name, description and/or date for selected image.
The Bulk Organizer is marvelous for quick curating of a number of photos at once. It will give you access to add the photos to another album, add tags, edit the names of a series of images, give a series of photos a description or change the dates of the photos. It is important to remember that what you do in bulk organizing overwrites whatever else you had input about the images, however, if you leave a section blank, it makes no changes. So, you could, for example, add tags and change dates, but leave everything else intact.
Slideshow lets you select images to include in a slideshow.
One of the more important buttons is Remove and this is the only place you’re going to find it. If you do not want to delete an image and it is already residing in other albums, then this button just takes it out of this nested album
Finally, Set as Album Cover allows you to choose an image to use as the cover of the album.
A Few Closing Thoughts
Though I have described the items in this post and the previous post on the Library from the standpoint of someone using FOREVER on a computer or laptop, most of these features are available on the app, just not in the exact format shown here. That means you can curate your albums on the go – waiting in the line to pick up your kids, sitting in a doctors waiting room, stuck in line at the grocery store or hanging at the pool.
Whether you are in the Library or in an Album, if you double click on an individual image you will be taken to a page on which you can provide info for that image. There is a lot of options there, so I will be covering those tools in a later post.
Finally, always remember I am here and happy to discuss your projects and challenges with you. If we need to ZOOM about something or sit down at your computer together (for local clients), let’s do it. Having access to your own Ambassador is part of what makes FOREVER so unique.
I’m here for you and so is the wonderful customer care staff at FOREVER. There is a comprehensive Help Center you can reach by scrolling to the bottom of any of the pages on the FOREVER site. Or you can just call or email. FOREVER’s Blog is a wealth of knowledge. Videos sprinkled throughout your Library, Albums and Tags will walk you though many processes. Or, like I said, I’m here, so just call me at 972-971-5263.
There is one question I ask a lot and this is it! It applies to many steps in the Memory Keeping process, but in our digital world, wondering what formats can be saved on FOREVER is a pretty important one.
If you are a general consumer with photos, video and audio on your devices and computer, then FOREVER is going to save pretty much anything you want it to. Here’s a list of all the things FOREVER will save.
As you can see, this is a pretty comprehensive list. In fact, I don’t even know what some of those formats do. However, there are things FOREVER can’t save (yet), so let’s talk about those.
Raw Files
Many pro and hobbyist photographers take photos in Raw. This is a a generalized category which creates huge files for the purpose of file manipulation. When we were in the real estate photography business, our photographers would take their shots in raw on the HDR setting. This meant the files were huge and that basically they were in parts. Our guys would take multiple shots in a variety of exposures for each image, which would then be processed to create one data rich file for editing. The purpose was to manipulate light, so that we could take a picture of a room with the curtains open and get everything in the room and everything outside with perfect lighting. Various photographers use a variety of other methods to do the same thing, but this is the method we used and a lot of other photographers do, too.
The difficulty with this is that different cameras take different types of raw photos. Our Canon camera took .cr2 and the DGI drone took .dng. Your Nikon takes something else and other cameras will take another format. And this is why FOREVER has not yet embraced RAW in it’s suite of supported files, yet.
While FOREVER will not save all these raw files, most of the time the raw state is just a temporary destination for files which will become jpg’s. That’s what we did. General consumers don’t want to handle or store the huge, unedited files. We always converted our raw files to jpg’s as we processed the files for delivery. While FOREVER doesn’t store raw files, yet, it does realize that for some photographers, this capability is a high priority.
I have spoken with Dr. Nathan Bowers, the VP in charge of R&D and supporting these files is on the short list of development with FOREVER, but there are technical challenges associated with it. Nathan would have been happy to explain these details to me, but I wouldn’t have understood. If you would, then perhaps you should call him, but for the time being, suffice to say, FOREVER can’t store Raw files, but we’re working on it.
HEIC
Those who use and are familiar with Apple know they sort of like to be unique. If you have an Apple phone, then this is the format your photos are taken in. Not to worry! While FOREVER will not store your photos in HEIC, it will automatically convert them to .jpg as you upload them. For 99% of the population, that’s fine. They actually don’t care what extension is attached to their files, they just want to save them. There are some proponents of HEIC who want to keep their files in that format and unfortunately, at this time, FOREVER cannot save these files. I say “at this time,” because an ongoing desire at FOREVER is to never say no to any format. At this time it is not possible to store .heic on FOREVER, but that won’t be the answer forever.
Various Documents
Let me start this part of the conversation here. You can save PDF files on FOREVER. The document files on your computer are much like the raw files from a camera, because the type of file created depends on a variety of factors. That’s why PDF was created in the first place.
PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It was designed to make your files portable, whatever format they were created in. Converting most files to PDF is easy. You just change the extension to .pdf and viola, you have a PDF which can be stored on FOREVER.
So, will FOREVER store your documents? Absolutely! Just save them as jpg’s and upload.
APPS
When one of my friends bought FOREVER storage, the first thing they wanted to do was save everything on their Quickbooks. Well, for one thing, Quickbooks is already saved and backed up. Perhaps not to the extent of FOREVER, but certainly safer than the photos on your phone or the VHS tapes sitting on a shelf.
After a little discussion, I discovered that what she really needed was not the whole app, but the reconciliation she created each month. Easy peasy! The reconciliation was a PDF doc. Now she saves those to FOREVER and is perfectly happy.
The point is that while you cannot save a whole app, probably what you want to save is some document which is already in a format FOREVER can save.
Specialized Formats
The items I have covered so far in this post are the most common questions I hear, however the longer I do this, the more formats I discover. Did you know quilters have a specific format for saving their quilt patterns and genealogist have their own format? The list goes on.
If you have a specialty format that you’d like to save on FOREVER, please let them know. The development team prioritizes projects based on need and demand. I know quilters and genealogists have their own formats, because I’ve been on ZOOM calls where Dr. Bowers has mentioned these formats as items on his development list.
In the meantime, many of these formats can be converted to something like jpg or pdf, which can be saved. Or you can take a picture of the file and save the picture. It may not be the complete digital file, but it’s better than nothing, until it can be saved on FOREVER.
Summing Up
While FOREVER cannot save every type of file in the world, the list of things they can save is very comprehensive and most files can be saved with a simple conversion to PDF. FOREVER was designed for the specific purpose of memory keeping and it does that very well for the vast majority of formats in which people have captured their memories. If you have something in particular you need to save that isn’t on the list above, let’s talk. You might be closer than you realize to keeping your memories on FOREVER.
MEMORY KEEPING 101: A LITTLE INCENTIVE TO GET STARTED
The $20 Welcome Coupon from FOREVER
I want you to discover FOREVER! I know I rave about it all the time, but I’m not sure you know how easy it is to get started. I probably also fail to tell you FOREVER has $20 waiting for you to sweeten the pot. Here’s how it works!
It Starts With My Link
FOREVER has assigned me a unique and specific link. They want you to sign up with an Ambassador you know. Someone who you feel comfortable with. They do not want to be an anonymous website like so many of web-based companies out there which assign you a number and talk to you through bots. They have a wonderful Customer Service staff and a great help page, but they want you to have a real live Ambassador of your very own.
That link takes you to FOREVER. According to the device you use, you may immediately be asked to provide your email and create a password. It’s OK, it’s free. If it just takes you to the Home Page, click on Log In in the upper right hand corner and then under the green Log In button, there’s a link “Need an Account? Sign Up Free”. Click that and you will go here.
Fill it in and hit the Sign Up button. That’s it! Welcome to the wonderful world of FOREVER, but don’t stop there, because you need to claim your $20.
FOREVER Will Send You an Email
When your sign up is through, go to your email. If you don’t see an email from FOREVER then check all those spam folders. Confirm your email address and then FOREVER will send you your Welcome Coupon.
Twenty dollars is waiting for you. When you open the Welcome Coupon email I suggest you either print it out and/or save it someplace where you can find it again.
Near the bottom of that email is a code. That’s your $20. You’re going to want that when you make your first order. Many clients are ready to buy when they join. They cut and paste their code into their order and they are done. But I also have clients who aren’t ready to buy from the get go. That’s why I want you to print it out or save it somewhere you’ll be able to find it later.
In Fact, FOREVER Will Send You a Lot of Emails
So, one of the reasons FOREVER wants you to verify your email address is because like everyone else, they want to send you all their stuff – and that’s why you have an Ambassador. FOREVER stuff is great if you are about to start a bunch of projects, because the emails will keep you informed of all the great promotions which are going on. If you’re just sticking your toe in the water and aren’t interested in the stuff, when you get your first promo email, go to the bottom and click either “update your preferences” or “unsubscribe from this list.” Then you can tell them thanks, but no thanks – but wait until after you get your $20 coupon!!! I don’t want you to miss that.
Use That Coupon!!
First of all, you have 60 days to use that coupon. On Day 61, it will no longer be valid. So please find a way to use it within 60 days of signing up. The coupon will work with most things on FOREVER, with a few exceptions – gift cards, events, FOREVER Club memberships etc., but for merchandise, it’s all good.
Stack your deals!! Many, many, many companies are quick to send you a coupon, but then trying to use it is almost impossible, because you can’t use it with any other offers. That’s not so with FOREVER, except in very, very rare cases, which will be clearly marked. You can stack your $20 welcome coupon with all the deals on the Deals page, as well as with The FOREVER Club discount, which I would be happy to explain to you.
Get the best price! At the first of every month, FOREVER informs its Ambassadors about all the deals for the month. When you know what you want to buy, just give me a shout before you hit the buy button. I can let you know if you can get a better price by waiting a day or a week.
And that’s it! Twenty dollars towards your Memory Keeping project. You can also get $20 for referrals, but we’ll talk about that and The FOREVER Club another day!
If you are one of my FOREVER clients, then just log into the FOREVER website or get on the app. Both avenues will allow you to do AutoPrint projects.
If you haven’t become a customer yet, it’s free and easy to sign up. You’ll also get a $20 Welcome coupon just for confirming your email address, so don’t forget that part. You do not need to have storage to create these AutoPrint projects. From the main page, hover over “Create & Print” and select “Autobooks from the left side.
For current customers, on FOREVER’s website >go to the Library > select your photos, >select Print in the upper right hand corner. Then follow your nose. I selected 4 photos, chose Coaster Set and in milliseconds I had a set of four gorgeous coasters. All I needed to do was hit the “Add to Cart” button. It’s that easy!
Breaking It Down a Little More
If that’s moving a little too fast for you, let’s take it a little slower. With AutoPrint, you have a wide variety of quick gifts to create:
AutoBooks
Sizes 8X8 -12X12
Softbound & Hardbound
Standard & Layflat
Photo Gifts
Coaster Sets
Tabletop Panels
Notebooks
Magnets
Drinkware
Water Bottles
Photo Mugs
Photo Prints
Glossy & Lustre
Sizes 4X6 – 11X14
Your first job is to select the images you want to use. While these selections can be chosen on the fly from your FOREVER Library or in a folder on your device, if you have storage, it’s easy to make an online album and collect the photos you want there. Start with the photo you want for the front and then add the rest in the order you want them to show up. A little preparation makes the actual ordering go even faster.
When you are on the website, hover over Create & Print and select “AUTOPRINT” from the drop down menu. Then select one of the four categories above. For this exercise, we’re going to make a standard 8X8 softbound AutoBook.
I selected AutoBooks and on the next page, I chose Standard. The screen moved up so I could choose an 8X8 Softbound. And here’s the Get Started Page.
When I clicked “Get Started” it gave me this screen. From here I can go to my Library, my Albums, my Tags or as you can see there is an “UPLOAD” button in the upper right hand corner.
For this project, I chose tags and selected the “Floral” Folder. This folder has 161 photos in it, but I can have up to 892 images in my 99 page book. (Artisan 6 users can have up to 199 pages!!) I used the “Select All” button to get all 161 photos and then hit the “ADD SELECTED” Button.
Before one second could pass, my book was created. I could literally hit the “Add to Cart” button and print out my album.
But wait, at this point, I have options. I can add “Photo Pages” or “Text Pages.” Or I can “Edit Pages.”
Let’s do some Editing! I added a title to the front of the book and the spine. I changed the layouts on some pages which had textboxes, because I just wanted photos. There are text boxes at the top and bottom of each page, but I left them blank, so they won’t print. I chose a pattern for all the pages and then a solid color for the cover.
It’s taken me longer to explain what I did than it did to do it.
Were I actually to print this photobook there is some cleaning up to do. I decided to do this particular tag folder very spontaneously and there are some duplicates. I might reorder the photos, too, but I wanted to show you just how easy it can be.
There are some changes in the works for AutoPrint, to streamline it further into Create & Print world, but FOREVER is devoted to offering the quick, easy and clean looking option, so while the navigation might change a little, the look and the ease of AutoPrint is not going anywhere.
I have to tell you, the retail price of the album was $27.15. My FOREVER Club Membership knocked it down 5% and a promo on that day knocked it down another 40%. I could have printed the photobook for $15.48 (plus tax and shipping). Who said Memory Keeping is expensive? And if you’ve been using another online vendor, because you thought they were cheaper, maybe this will give you pause.
In later posts, I’ll cover Design & Print and the Artisan 6 program, but next week we’re going to talk about how to $20 on your first order.
Last week, on Facebook and other social media channels, I made a big announcement. My husband and I sold our real estate photography business. This had been so, on paper, for about a month, but last week we drew open the curtain for everyone to see. Though I am working hard to offload all my Spot On Images duties on the new owner, we’re not quite there, yet – but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel is not the headlamp of an oncoming train.
Spot On Images was the brainchild of my husband. I was only along for the ride. I remember when Bill pitched the idea. I was not exactly enthusiastic and it hurt his feelings, but we’d been married for almost a quarter of a century by then and I knew the routine. He has great money-making ideas, but his visionary capabilities fail to embrace the drudgery and hysteria of supporting said enterprises. Though he realized it would take more than a camera and a website to make the dream a reality, he really had no clue what would be necessary.
There was a division of labor. He did the photography and managed the money. I did everything else. Everything else was not the fun part. I’ll leave it at that. A couple of years ago I hit a brick wall. Like the rest of the world I was sick and tired of masks, Zoom meetings, vaccines and social distancing. The world was beginning to open back up and I wasn’t looking forward to going back to the grind. I introduced the idea of my memory keeping side gig and Jane Sadek – Memory Keeper was born.
A Juggling Act
Perhaps starting a new business when I already had plenty to do in the one we had might not have been the smartest thing I ever did. My new business had all the growing pains of any new venture and initially I actually had more success than I could handle. That was not good for my marriage, but it didn’t hurt Spot On Images one bit. We’d created a snowball and it was barreling down the mountainside.
At that point, other people might have quit, but Memory Keeping is not just business venture for me. It is my passion. So, while I severely dialed back my Memory Keeping activities, I did just enough to keep the embers warm.
Then we arrived at a crossroad. Spot On Images had outgrown the two-man job we’d created for ourselves. Oh, we’d already hired editors and more photographers, but the company was on a trajectory that needed a five year growth plan, more personnel and more headaches. This wasn’t what we’d signed up for, so we decided to sell.
On the Other Side
As this post is being published this Thursday morning, I will be loading the trunk of our car with luggage. We’re going on a trip. Just a five day jaunt to the Detroit area for a family event, but a world of difference from a couple of years ago. That time I stayed up over night before we left, to nurse the editors through our rush jobs, so I could deliver photos by 4:30 AM and catch our flight. During that trip I missed the opportunity to enjoy one of the top picks on my itinerary, because we ran into a hiccup on an important job.
As far as I know, there’s never been a Memory Keeping emergency, which is one of the best things about my new career. A hallmark of any business related to real estate is drama. In photography we were once removed from the insanity I endured as an agent, but because we cared about our clientele, their drama our emergencies. If someone has a Memory Keeping emergency, then I’m not their Memory Keeper. I am out of the emergency business.
While I will need to support the new SOI owner during the weeks to come, my primary focus will be Memory Keeping. I have so many exciting plans. I’m in the middle of a huge sorting job for one client and will be picking up my next scrapbooking project when I get home. I’m going to offload the SOI archive out of my FOREVER account and fill it up with my personal photos and then set up my demo account to share with potential clients. There’s so much training available with FOREVER that I could spend the next year on that, but I will have to restrain myself or I won’t have time for working on my projects or getting the word out that there’s hope for your Memory Messes.
In the future, look for online training, office hours for customer support, a Memory Keeping coaching program and that’s just the beginning of the list of things I want to offer to those of you who want to tackle your Memory Mess. I am so excited, but to make this work, I’m going to need your support. Whenever you hear a friend or family member bemoan their own Memory Messes, I hope you’ll send them to me. I can fix that!!
MEMORY KEEPING 101: FOREVER FOUNDER SHARES HIS WHY
What’s FOREVER?
FOREVER is not yet one of those companies everybody knows about, yet I think a day will come when it will be the go-to place for all things digital-memory-keeping. Until then it’s one of my missions in life to be sure people don’t lose their memories from lack of knowing about FOREVER.
You can’t be around me very long without finding out I care about your photos and have all the tools you need to preserve them for generations to come. That’s especially true if you read this blog.
Why FOREVER?
The founder of FOREVER recently took the time to share the reasons why he has devoted the rest of his life to this company. In this short (4:40 minutes) video he tells what led him to discover the need for the company and why he feels it is such an important tool for anyone and everyone to use.
No one could be more eloquent on this subject, so today, instead of writing a few more hundreds of words, I’m sharing this video. Please take the time to watch it. I think you’ll agree with me, the time has come for FOREVER.
Glen Meakem, Founder & CEO of FOREVER shares his why
So, what do you think? Are you ready to make FOREVER your memories’ home?
Saving Your Memories, Not Selling a BusinessOpportunity
I remember sometime back in the late 70’s, a friend came by to share a business opportunity. It seems as if the first hour of his presentation was spent describing fantastic vacations, palatial second homes and very expensive cars we were going to have very, very soon. I guess we were supposed to overlook the fact his shoes were worn out and his car was ready for the wrecking yard. Eventually we got him to admit he was there to sign us up for a multi-level marketing company that is now a well known pyramid scheme. We said no thanks and then spent an hour trying to get him out of our house. His parting words, “I’m sorry you didn’t have the vision to understand what I was offering.” We ran into him a few months later and he sheepishly let us know he was pursuing other opportunities.
I’m sure all of us, at some point or another, have been approached by someone who wanted us to join their MLM team. I want you to know there are some great teams out there to join – Tupperware, Melaleuca, Mary Kay, Pampered Chef and so many more. While there have been some bad players in the past, this type of company provides great products, usually at a lower price and they have also been a real boon to women. When the glass ceiling was firmly in place, there were lots and lots of women who were outpacing their male counterparts through network marketing.
Back in the day, most network marketing happened out of the trunk of people’s car. They’d buy up lots of merchandise, so they’d have something to sell you and the more they bought, the more impressive their title would be. There were also lots of parties. You’d go to a friend’s house and their friend would demonstrate a product line. You’d order something so your friend could earn her free product and then a few weeks later it would be delivered, usually with a little pressure for you to have a party, too.
Then along came the world-wide web and network marketing was transformed. Network marketers didn’t have to buy up a bunch of merchandise they might or might not be able to sell. They could drop ship their products to their clients, just like Amazon and E-Bay and Walmart. While many companies still use the party format for marketing their products, there are many more that don’t and it’s not a tool I use.
Today, the biggest difference in retail marketing and network marketing is the way a company chooses to spend it’s marketing dollar. If you’re Walmart or Macy’s or Louis Vuitton, then you’re going to buy up radio and TV spots, have slick ads in print and put brick and mortar storefronts at the local mall. Companies like Mary Kay and Arbonne instead invest in their representatives to spread the word. That’s the way FOREVER and Creative Memories do it.
In spite of this transformation, there are still people who want to know if FOREVER or Creative Memories are MLM’s. So, let me tell you how my business works and then I will tell you how these companies work.
Service is my Primary Product
I am a Memory Keeper. I am offering my service and experience as a life long scrapbooker and part owner of a real estate photography company. I love helping others preserve their memories and along the way I have learned quite a bit about media, how to preserve it and how to share it. I will be happy to make scrapbooks for you and help you organize your photos. You pay me directly for those services. I will be using Creative Memory products in your album. I will also use my new Cricut, stickers from Hobby Lobby and paper from JoAnn’s if I can’t find what I need in the CM line. If we do a digital projects, I will most likely use FOREVER programs like Artisan and Historian as I work on the job, because they are my tools.
If your project is digital and you want to do it yourself, then I will recommend FOREVER products like digitization and permanent storage, to you. If you need these products, then I’m recommending to you the very thing I use for my own projects, because they are, without a doubt, the very best available. Yes, I will make some commission on those purchases, but this is my business and to continue doing what I love to do for others, I need to be able to support my habit, but if you’d rather use another company, go right ahead.
While I want to help you save your memories, I won’t be trying to recruit you to my team. There are CM advisors and FOREVER ambassadors who choose to build their businesses by building a team, but that’s not what I want to do. It takes a lot of time coaching and mentoring to be a good team leader, and your own success is determined by your leadership skills.
My business is based on my scrapbooking and organizational skills, not my recruiting skills. In addition, a team leader should also be modeling the business for your downline and very, very few people have creating scrapbooks and organizing photos for other people as their primary goal. If team building were my goal, I would not split my effort between two companies, but would pour my energies into one company or the other – in my case Creative Memories – but because many people with a memory mess need digital solutions, I offer both.
Now, if you’re going to be spending a significant amount of money (as in thousands) with either company, then I may show you how to get deeper discounts, but it’s because I want to save you money, not because I want to add you to my team. I will actually make less money with you as my team member, than I will if you are a customer, but because my ultimate goal is to preserve your memories and help you share them with others, if I can save you a little money along the way, then that’s what I am going to do.
Every once in a great while a unicorn does come along. You could join one of my companies as a representative to get the discount, fall in love with what they offer and build a very successful business of your own. That’s great! I would support your efforts, as would everyone in the company you chose. That’s why we call it network marketing. We network with our clients and our fellow representatives. The more you do for others, the more successful you become. However, I have photos to organize, scrapbooks to create and people to help save and share their memories. I don’t have time to go unicorn hunting.
Creative Memories
Creative Memories is a part of my life. Along with a lot of other people in the 90’s, I learned those adhesive photo albums I’d been using were actually destroying the very thing I was trying to save. I was soon hooked on a lot more than acid-free, photo-safe albums. I loved stickers and die cuts and paper. (Oh, did I ever love the paper!) I still love scrapbooking and after all these years I know there are no products out there better for what I love.
There have been two Creative Memories and I have been a customer and a representative of both. The first Creative Memories was an MLM. Your success depended on having parties – only they called them home classes, workshops and crops, but you also had to recruit. To keep your consultant designation, you had to purchase a certain amount of inventory you hoped to unload at your events and you had to recruit. Confession, I was dismal at both. I filled up my house with product and I never recruited a soul. That was happening to a lot of people, so for that reason and some others, Creative Memories went bankrupt.
The new CM is completely different. There are no buying quotas to meet and while I can build my own team should I desire to, they are only my team and no one else is benefitting off of them. There are various streams of income I can make based primarily on my sales and the sales of my direct team members, but that’s it. That’s all there is. It is not an MLM.
FOREVER
Forever is a little different and the teams do have various levels, but they are quite limited. The business plan is based first on my own sales to my own customers. They do not pay a membership fee, nor do they have to buy a certain amount within a certain time period. I never have to recruit anyone to promote within the company. I can reach the top commission level on my own.
Should building a team be what someone wants, that’s great and they will receive a tiny portion of sales for their own team members up to 5 levels down, but that’s it. There’s not some big dog at the top of the pyramid making his living off all the people who have ever been joined the company. There is no pyramid, only a short trapezium.
I say a trapezium, because while there are nine levels of compensation with Forever and thousands of ambassadors, a manager only qualifies for a tiny percentage of the sales within their own five level team. In fact, the Senior Executive Ambassador from whom I get most of my training and who I turn to when there’s a problem doesn’t get a penny of my sales. She just loves Forever and wants to help everyone be successful. That’s the culture.
So, if you avoid want to avoid having parties and being recruited, you’re safe with me. If you have a problem with the pyramid-like compensation plans of some of the MLM companies, you’re safe with me. I want you to be my customer, not my team member. I want to help you, not recruit you and I assure you, you can spend a whole lot of money with me and never buy a product from CM or FOREVER. If you have memories that need saving let’s talk. If not, check on my Weekend Report tomorrow and my Travel There post next week!
jane sadek 