MEMORY KEEPING: BOGO DEAL- BUY STORAGE GET 5% OFF FACIAL RECOGNITION
The Focus is Storage, but the Deal is Facial Recognition
Storage and Facial Recognition are NEVER on sale – NEVER! So, when FOREVER says, “Buy Storage and get 5% off Facial Recognition,” then it’s time to pay attention. First, because Facial Recognition is never on sale and because at FOREVER, 5% off is really 10% off and you also get 5% off the Storage with the CLUB.
But (You Might Say) I Already Have Free/Cheap Storage with Facial Recognition and AutoTagging!
Unless you already have FOREVER storage, then you do not actually own any storage, because we’re the only ones selling permanent online storage. Anything else you may have is either storage you have been given a free temporary license to use or you are renting the license. That’s what I blogged about last week. To learn more, see this post.
You don’t want to risk the loss of your precious memories. You want them available to your family when you are gone, so you want permanent online Storage that you own and if you’ve got that, then you also want Facial Recognition.
So, How Does 5% Off Become 10% Off?
I’m glad you asked. FOREVER has a savings plan called the CLUB. It offers 5% off pretty much everything you can buy, including Storage and Facial Recognition. So, if you are a member of the CLUB, you get 5% off Storage and Facial Recognition any day you want to, as well as anything else you want to buy. This month, in addition to the 5% off Storage and Facial Recognition, you’d get another 5% off Facial Recognition for a total of 10%.
With the CLUB you invest in Memory Keeping at a set amount and every penny of that money is yours to spend as you want, but now it will buy you 5% more. You can either do this one month to take advantage of this deal or like many of my clients you can invest every month, so you get 5% off all the time and once a quarter you get free storage, based on the amount you invest.
If You’ve Never Bought FOREVER Storage
If you are new to FOREVER, then you can either buy storage outright or you can buy it on a 24 month payment plan. Let me show you some sample purchases!
Regular Outright Purchase of 10 GB Storage + 1 YR Facial Recognition = $309.98 (a good value!)
Example 1: Same Purchase in July with this deal and CLUB $288.88. Then stop CLUB or continue, your choice. (You saved over $20!) Without CLUB you only save $12.99.
But let’s say you’d like get started with your memory keeping with a $30/month investment. I’d recommend Example 2: Invest in CLUB for $30 a month for 24 months, buy Storage on 24 MO Purchase Plan and 24 months of Facial Recognition(2 annual purchases). Your first month you’d spend about $100, but only $30 a month after that and you’d have so much more. Instead of 10 GB of storage, you’d have 14 GB, because of the quarterly storage gifts. You’d also have a second year of Facial Recognition AND and about $325 of your own investments to make purchases at 5% off. This is just one example of the way to do it. What you actually would invest and how you use it is up to you.
If You Already Own FOREVER Storage
If you already have FOREVER storage and have almost filled it up, then this deal should be a no brainer. Buy what you need and take advantage of the Facial Recognition deal, at $117 using the CLUB. And remember, the more storage you buy at a time, the cheaper it is per GB!
Let’s say you’re a CLUB member and you don’t REALLY need any storage, but you really, really want the Facial Recognition deal. I can offer you a 2GB Storage package that will qualify you for the FR Deal. The CLUB price would be $47.94 for the 2GB and $117 for the year of FR for a total of $165. Subtract the CLUB dollars you have in your account and you might have enough there to cover it.
Let’s Talk About You!
These are just examples I pulled out of the air. You might need more storage. Perhaps you’d like to purchase permanent Facial Recognition rather than buying the annual subscription. Maybe you’d like to budget more than $30 a month for Memory Keeping. Whatever you’re specific needs are, I’m happy to run the numbers for you.
Talk about a gift that keeps on giving! What if a gift you give this Christmas could tell generations you’ll never meet how much you care. That’s what the gift of FOREVER can do.
A Permanent Digital Home
Perhaps the perfect gift for your someone is FOREVER’s permanent online storage they own rather than rent. Phones, tablets and other devices are lost, corrupted and destroyed every minute of every day and yet, they contain some of our most valuable possessions – our memories. With FOREVER Storage, those memories can be automatically delivered to safe, permanent storage and you never have to worry about losing them again. Because you own rather than rent FOREVER storage, you’re not signing up for someone to make monthly or annual payments into perpetuity. You buy it, they have it – FOREVER. Not only do they have it, but their kids have it and their grandkids have it and their great grandkids have it and – well you get the picture.
What’s more, those images are not going to be mined for advertising, compressed, sold or shared, because your giftee will own it. They’re in control of who has access and that access is guaranteed by the FOREVER Guarantee Fund. And FOREVER storage is more affordable this month than it ever will be again, because January 1, 2024 the price goes up!
FOREVER Digitization Boxes
Somebody in your family is the Family Historian. Everyone knows who they are. They were the ones who agreed to store all of the photos/slides/videos left behind by your mother/father/grandmother/grandfather/aunt/uncle. That means in some closet, under some bed or on some shelf all of your family’s history is sitting around and no one has access to those images. Give that historian a gift that all the family will enjoy. Get them a digitization box and begin the journey of turning a mess into shareable memories. Just for fun, FOREVER has a special Holiday Edition Box that will look great under the tree.
Genealogy Genius
Perhaps the Family Historian, with the Media Mess, is also the Keeper of the Family Tree. Perhaps someone else is constantly researching the Family Connections. Perhaps family members belong to the DAR, DRT and/ or ODC. If someone is researching genealogy, then it is inevitable for them to hit a brick wall. Did you know FOREVER has a team of Professional Genealogists with connections all over the world to help amateur sleuths climb over those brick walls? There are a number of plans from 1 hour consultations to months long research projects. Brick walls melt before these seasoned pros and your favorite genealogist will love you for gifting them some help.
Click & Play
Who’s the videographer in your family? They’ve got their phone out all the time and they’re taking videos rather than photos. So then, what happens next? They might put it on social media, but with all the hacking going on, they’re account might or might not be there next week. The videos can disappear into their phone or perhaps be loaded on another device, but then you have to download it to play it. There are sites like YouTube or Vimeo, but the bottom line is that they own the videos, not you. So, your videographer will love FOREVER’s Personal Video Streaming. Buy it once, own it forever. Share videos without the recipient having to download to watch.
A Community of Crafters
Crafters love other crafters. Crafters will pack up all their stuff and travel many miles to hang out with other crafters. What if they could just sign in, instead? Pixels 2 Pages is an online community of digital crafters who use Artisan 6 software as their vehicle of creativity. Gift your favorite crafter Artisan 6 and a month long trial membership in Pixels 2 Pages or if they’re already using Artisan 6, how about a membership in P2P? Or perhaps they’d like to be part of an online crop. FOREVER has one in January and another in April. Whatever you choose, your crafter will love you.
These are just a few of the gifting ideas with FOREVER and there’s always a gift certificate, which allows them to decide how to invest in their memory keeping. FOREVER is the gift which truly keeps on giving. They can’t eat it all or out grow it. They can’t lose it. It won’t ever be out of style. What’s even better is that long after you or your giftee are around, your thoughtful gift will still be enjoyed by family and friends for years to come.
Just call me at 972-971-5263 and let’s talk about who you’d like to gift with FOREVER and decide on the perfect gift or if you already know what to get, just follow this link https://www.forever.com/ambassador/jane-sadek and order it now. And just in case you come up short Christmas morning, remember FOREVER will be there for your order!
In my career as a FOREVER Ambassador, there was one thing I really hated and it was the way their prices were moving targets. The decision to invest in Memory Keeping is an important one and when someone decides to do it, they shouldn’t have to hurry up or wait to make their basic purchases, but the way FOREVER handled some of their pricing made me crazy.
Nobody loves a bargain better than me, so I love FOREVER print deals. I’ve always got a project on my mind and yes, I save them for the 50% off deals and Club Weekends free shipping. That just makes sense. However, some deals just didn’t.
To me, the pricing for much of the FOREVER services were counterproductive to my efforts. When I first started with FOREVER (almost 3 years ago!) the pricing for storage would fluctuate wildly. I get it – they were trying to match what the competition was doing and the competition, those fishes, flies and boxes, use slashed prices to lure in customers, but we had things the competitors didn’t, so why were we slashing those prices?
Obviously, I wasn’t alone. I was a mere newbie, what did I know? But behind the scenes the Executive Ambassadors were saying the same thing I was.
Few people buy permanent online storage or private video streaming on a whim. Most people don’t even realize it exists. They think you have to pay for storage month by month for the rest of their lives. They think their personal videos have to be posted to some social media giant to be shared. FOREVER isn’t a household name, yet.
So, Ambassadors go around letting people know they have a choice, but figuring out what that means usually takes some getting used to and some serious consideration about budget. When the price changed for those unique services week by week and day by day, trying to offer your customers the best value for their dollar was a game of chance.
It Got Better
I am not privy to everything that went on behind the scenes, but at the first of this year, they made a change to the pricing on storage. They set a price that was the price, but they weren’t quite to where I wanted to be, because the price was consistently marked down the same percentage. It wasn’t what I wanted, but at least I wouldn’t be faced with telling anyone the 50% off storage was last week and now they had to pay full price.
In recent months, they tried something with a few of our other premiere products which, like our storage and video streaming, you can’t get anywhere else. When Valet, the file migration software beloved of the professional photo organizers, was introduced, they didn’t kick it off with bargains. They said here’s this unique software and you can try it free for a month, but then this is the price. Nobody waited for a deal, because there wasn’t going to be one. They just purchased it with glee.
That went so well, FOREVER made a change with our other unique software programs, Artisan and Historian. Instead of juggling the price with deals from month to month, they announced the price was the price and that was it. Guess what, sales continued at the same rate they had before. People weren’t buying because of the deals. They were buying because they understood the value and uniqueness of what we offer.
It’s Going to Get Even Better
So, come January, the same thing is going to happen with storage and streaming. The price is going to be the price. The “deals” which have been going on all year are going away, because when something is permanently 25% off, that isn’t much of a deal. I’ve got to tell you there will be a slight (very slight) rise in the price of storage and streaming from the net price you’d pay today, but it will be the price and I am so happy.
So, if you have storage you need to buy or have been considering streaming, the price you can get it for, through the end of December, is the cheapest you are ever going to see it. Come January 1, 2024, the new prices will be announced and that’s going to be the price. The only deal you can get is the 5% off you get with The Club or the $20 off with Welcome and Referral Coupons. That’s it! My job will be easier and I believe our clients will be less confused.
While We’re on the Subject of Deals, Let’s Talk About Our Print Deals
While I think FOREVER has been a little frustrating with some of their deals, I have always been very impressed with their print deals. Just like you, I used to think my only options for photo printing were the fish and the fly. While I was always a traditional scrapbooking fan and didn’t delve into the world of digital photo books (or digitization with the box for that matter), I did go their for Holiday Cards and photo printing. I’d be all excited about a deal and then when I’d made all of my selections, I’d be aghast at the final price. It would seem awfully high.
Well, let me tell you about those slashed prices at the fish, the fly and the box. Their bargains are offered on a particular portion of the sale and then they get you on everything else. If you were buying Christmas cards, for instance, you’d get the reduced price on the basics, but if you did anything beyond that, like a different finish or shape, fees would be added which were not marked down. If you were creating a photobook, the standard number of pages would be discounted, but every page after that had a hefty per page price. And those other digitization people? Who cares if they were going to give you 60% off on the initial items, because they’d always charge you full price on the rest of them.
When FOREVER has a deal, the deal applies to the whole product. If your digitization box is 40% off, then your extra items are going to be 40% off. If your photo book is 50% off, then the extra pages, matte finishes and anything else added to that book will be 50% off. And of course, the same applies with your holiday cards. Now that’s what I call a deal.
I know Memory Keeping is a big investment, however, the returns on your investment are immeasurable. How can you put a price on creating and sharing a heritage which will reach generations you will never even know? I don’t think you can, but with FOREVER and their new pricing policies, you won’t be playing a game of roulette. The price will be the price for the basics and you’ll enjoy true savings on the rest. Call me today at 972-971-5263 to talk about your memory mess.
A picture is worth a 1000 words, at least that’s the old saying, but if you don’t know anything about the people, the place or the occasion then that picture probably isn’t worth two cents. I’ve spent time over the last few months talking about the FOREVER Library, Albums and Tags. These are great tools, but with FOREVER, each image has a lightbox (you might call it a work page) and you can use it to make sure your images are always worth more than a couple of cents.
The Top Bar
Let’s start with the bar above the image, but skip the first few, because you’re not going to need those until you finish with the rest of the choices.
When you’re in the process of adding value to your images, you may first need to Rotate. Back in the days before digital, you could take the photo any way you wanted and then any rotation needed was done in your hand. Using smart phones, photos get shot in all sorts of angles, so to see them properly in your in your lightbox, just hit Rotate. The photo will fall to the right. To get it the way you want, you might have to use rotate several times.
Edit is next and it’s a biggie. Remember when you had film developed. You were stuck with whatever you took, but that’s not the case anymore. You have a built in editor in your lightbox and it does a lot.
Above the photo are plus and minus buttons which allow you to make the image larger and smaller in the light box. It doesn’t actually enlarge or reduce the real size of the image. However, the first button on the bottom is your Transform button and with that you can change the size of the photo.
When you press Transform the screen changes again. Now at the top are buttons which allow you to flip the photo horizontally or vertically. There are also buttons to rotate the photos to the left or the right.
Right below the photo is the Rotation selector. Instead of flipping the whole image, this bar will allow you to tilt the photo to the right or the left, so that everything can be square, even if you help the camera atilt.
At the bottom, you get to choose the size and shape of your image. Many of choices are pre-determined to help you out. You can choose square, 4:3 or 16:9. 4:3 is a sort of standard photo ratio and 16:9 is commonly known as widescreen.
The 4:3 aspect ratio describes a width of four units and a height of three units. These can be inches, lines, or pixels, depending on the object with that aspect ratio. When you divide the values, that is the width by the height, you get 1.33 (4 divided by 3 is 1.33)
But FOREVER is not through helping you. Most of you know Instagram likes squares, but if you do Facebook and have ever been frustrated trying to create a Profile Pictures, Ad, Post or Cover, here’s your solution!
If you’ve fiddled around with all the ratios and decide it was best to begin with, just choose Original. Whatever you choose, click the arrow on the bottom left to return to the lightbox and when you get there, be sure to save in the upper right hand corner.
Back in the lightbox, if you select Filter, then you’ve got a world of filters to choose from. I don’t use them much, but many people do. If you click the list icon, you’ll be able to access filters sorted by the types listed.
After Filters in the lightbox, you can choose Adjust. This is getting pretty fancy and most of us don’t get this deep, but I wanted you to know it was there. If the filters can’t fix what you think is wrong with the photo, then you have all these tools. When you click on each of them a scale will come up from -100% to +100%. Play around with them, see what they will do. You can’t mess the image up, because once you use the arrow on the left to go back to lightbox, you can say UNDO!
Next after Adjust in the lightbox is Text. Whether you want to put an X on a treasure map or just make a caption to go on your Christmas Card, here’s how to do it. When you click the Text button, you’ll see a text box. It will say, “Double Click to Edit”. You have a choice of size, font and alignment. Say what you want, change the font, change the color, change the size, change the alignment and move it where you want it. When you get back to the lightbox, you can undo or save. If you save, it create a copy. You always have your original, unless you choose to delete it.
Want stickers instead? Yes FOREVER’s got that, too. Right after the Text button is the Sticker button.
And after Sticker button is the Brush button. You can change the pixel size of the brushstroke and the color.
Do you see how I blurred out the background and put the focus on Bill and me. That would be the Focus button. There is both radial and mirrored blurring and you have a scale to select how much blurring you want.
Frames, your final editing choice lets you add a fun frame to your image. There’s this Film Frame, an Art Deco Frame, Polychrome, Wooden and more.
Back at the top in the lightbox, there’s Slideshow, which will start a slideshow and more through the album or library. When you’re done, you may decide to Delete the photo or Order Prints, but you’re more likely to want to share it.
When you click the share button this is what you get. It’s easy to share, but be careful! Know who you are sharing with, because giving them access will allow them to view, upload and download files from this album. They can’t delete anything, but if you start finding odd photos in your library, this could be the reason. All you have to do is delete them and turn off that share link.
There’s a lot more you can do in your lightbox, but I think this is enough for today. We’ll come back to the Info, Tagging and Albums sections later.
When it comes to file storage, you’ve got a lot of choices, but if those files are memories, in the form of images or audio, then you need FOREVER, because that’s where your photos will be safe now and for generations to come.
Safe, because you own it. Safe, because it’s technologically secure. Safe, because it’s guaranteed for your life plus 100 years. Safe because it’s triple backed up in a variety of geographical locations. Safe, because it’s not mined for advertising. Safe, because it won’t be deleted, compressed or transferred.
Most people have their memories spread out over three types of media. They have some things in hard copy – photos, videos, slides, movies, audio etc. The most recent memories are on their phone. And squeezed in between these two are all the places you may have digital photos other than your phone – your pc, your laptop, hard drives, thumb drives, floppy discs, CD’s, DVD’s, even camera cards.
FOREVER – a Place for Everything!
FOREVER is ready for all your memories.We have the very best digitization – bar none- in the industry (and in a few weeks will have the largest, most extensive facility) for all that hard copy media. Then every FOREVER storage account comes with it’s own free app, which will upload all your photos from your phone and continue to synch them as you take them should you desire.
All the rest can be uploaded from your devices, but in the past that could have been an obstacle for potential users. If your images were spread all over your digital life with no type of organization, then a move to FOREVER storage would protect your mess, but it would still be a mess. If your images were neatly organized in one or two places, then a move to FOREVER storage would have, once again, protected your images, but unless you took the time to carefully move them, folder by folder, you’d just have a safe mess. In either case, interested parties might hesitate to make the jump.
VALET Solves Both Problems
VALET is an app for high speed uploading and downloading, but it does more than that.
If your images are spread all over the place in a wide variety of media with no rhyme or reason, then you’ll love VALET. It will sort your images into dated albums by year and by month, as you upload them into FOREVER, and it will do it so quickly you’ll be amazed. When it’s done, all your memories will be safe and organized.
If your photos are neatly organized on your device(s), then you’ll love VALET even more. It will upload your photos into nested albums, based on the organization you have on your device and it will do it so fast you’ll barely believe it. When it’s done, all your photos will be safe and organized.
Here’s the best part! You can try out VALET for free for 30 days, even though you could probably move all your pictures in a matter of minutes or hours. Because it is a trial, it does not have the download feature available, but when moving to FOREVER, it’s all about the upload.
However, if you’re someone who moves a lot of images around or you’ve got so many photos, so many places you can’t get them all uploaded in 30 days, then VALET is only $60 a year. It was developed for use by photo professionals and professional organizers, so there is a pro level of the app which costs more, but for most of us, the standard VALET will do everything we’ll ever need it to do.
If you’re like some folks who just couldn’t face the trials and tribulations of moving your photos into FOREVER then I have to tell you, that excuse no longer holds water. If you’re still unsure about it, call me. I can either walk you through it in a ZOOM meeting or if necessary, come to your house, sit at your and do it for you!
With your FOREVER Permanent Storage you have three ways to organize your media. I have told you about two in recent weeks, the Library and Albums. By way of review, your Library is where all the photos in your account reside. Whether you upload them to the Library or an Album, the actual photo will be stored in the Library and your Albums are merely a way of accessing them. For that reason, you can add a photo to as many albums as you like without taking up more storage.
Your Library has a variety of tools you can use to sort, filter and order the images. You can also use the search bar to find images by tags, file name or description. Some people find this to be all they really need and they never get around to using the Albums or Tagging. Most of us love having other tools for curating.
I find Albums to be my favorite curating tool. I choose the categories I want for my top level Albums and then nest related albums beneath them. I can continue to nest other albums under those secondary albums for as deep as I need. It is important to note the images are not “in” the albums, they only show up there. (I will confess that initially I thought I was supposed to “move” images into albums and then I could delete them out of the library. Thankfully, the images remain in the Delete Bin for 30 days and I was able to rescue them, but then I had to repopulate my Albums.)
So Why Tag?
Until I found FOREVER, I was never happy with the way any program, app or service wanted me to organize my photos. Some people identify with organizing by year or with pre-designated categories. I didn’t. If creating your own album names is threatening to you, I will be happy to help you set up something, but for me, the ability to set up my own system was pure heaven.
If you want to know more about how I set up my account, see my post about Albums. It works for me, but I was even happier when I discovered the cross-referencing power of tagging. I’m not always interested in looking at a photo in the context it was taken. Instead I want to find a photo for a certain purpose.
One of the best examples of why you might need tagging involves other people. Let’s say there’s a birthday or anniversary coming up and your family/friends want to gather up great photos of the honoree. Without tagging, you’d have to recall what years or events or places you were with that person to find the images of them. If you’ve tagged your photos with the name of the people in your photos, then all you have to do is go to the Tags section of your storage and find the file for that person. Then enjoy choosing from all the images you have of that person. FOREVER even allows you to show them in a variety of orders to assist in your search for just the right photos. You can also click the hearts as you find those you like.
Multi-Level Tags
But that’s only one reason why you might want to use tags. You can use them for lots of things besides identifying people. The most important photos in my account are my travel photos, so I created a tag called “Travel.” That way, if I’m just in the mood to see a variety of travel photos, I can go to my tags and choose travel. I created a tag for “Cruises” and also for each country, state and/or city I have visited. If I want to see all the photos from my trips to Egypt – boom. I have a “Museums” tag, but also other tags for favorite museums so I can go directly to those.
When it comes to people, I have a tag for “Family” and for “Jane and Friends”, as well as for family members and close friends of which I have lots of photos. I have a Tag for “Bill and Jane” in case I just want photos which have both of us in them.
See, I can have as many tags as I want, so I don’t have to be stingy. If I think I might need to find something using a certain tag, I create it – but that’s me. Some people would be overwhelmed by all those tags. Well then, you do it your way!
So How Do You Do It?
There are many ways to go about tagging. I will go through those I use most often, but there is no wrong or right way to do it.
From the Library
If you want to do some high level tagging, like “Travel” or “Family” then the easiest way is to go to the Library and instead of “All Files”, select to see “Not Tagged”. From that view, start clicking the circle on all the photos you want to include in a tag. (You can do up to 500 at a time.)
As you click you’ll be taken to an area where you have a choice of actions including “Add Tags”. Once you have chosen all you want to include, clicking “Add Tags” will take you here.
Then you just start typing in the tags you want. You can either add new tags or as you type, FOREVER will match what you have typed with available tags. Hit the “Add Tags” button and you are done.
From Albums
If you want to tag from an Album, you have to go deep enough to be in a file with photos in it. You cannot tag the Albums. Then you do exactly what you did in the Library. Start clicking and you will be in an area where you had the same choices you did above and you will do exactly the same thing.
From Individual Images
Whether you are in the Library or the Albums, you can always choose to click on an individual image (not the selection circle) and you will end up on a page like this. On the right side in the middle is the tag section. Click on the “Add Tags” button.
This box opens up and you can start typing, just as you did in the “Add Tags” box from the Library and the Albums section.
Go Give It a Try
If you already have a storage account, go online and give this handy tool a try. If not, it’s free to join FOREVER and you get your own 2GB trial account. Upload some photos and try tagging. I promise you can’t hurt FOREVER!
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.
jane sadek 