In reality, FOREVER doesn’t say much about Historian these days, because they have plans to incorporate much of what Historian offers into your storage – things like facial recognition, for instance. Only there’s no date offered for when the storage upgrade will happen, so I think Historian is a great program now and FOREVER allows you a 30 Day Trial to find out if it is for you.
Historian is a desktop program. It’s a place to sort through your photos BEFORE you take them to your permanent storage account, so you won’t have duplicates and outtakes filling up your GBs. It automatically bundles things into the year they were taken and has a timeline at the bottom, so you can easily focus on the year you want to organize.
I mentioned facial recognition and it’s a wonder, but then again so is the star rating system. As you go through your images you can give them 1-5 stars so you can quickly see which are the best.
If you’ve got a great picture with poor quality, then you’ll love the Auto-fix feature. A photo can go from mediocre to spectacular with one click. You’ve also got a lot of other editing tools at your fingertips for cropping, fixing red eyes and so forth and so on, but the Auto-fix feature is marvelous.
When I’m working on a custom album, facial recognition and the album planner are my friends. Tagging people in photos is a huge time suck, but so important. You’ll need to spend a little time training it to know your people, but once it knows, it knows What a boon.
The album planner is particularly important for me, because I’m not sorting through the photos to save in my storage. I’m sorting through them to fill the pages of a scrapbook or photobook. It’s easy to move them from the cabinet I’m working in to the album planner and from there, just a click or two to put them in a print project or order copies.
I like it for scanning, too. When I scan from my printer, I sometimes have a hard time finding it on my computer. Using Historian to initiate the process means the items scanned will be in Historian and much easier to find. I love it.
Some people, who have more time than money, might run all their photos through Historian (or at least a lot of them) during the 30 Day Trial. If you love it at the end of the trial, it’s only $129.99 and yes, it’s eligible for Club Dollars and Club Discount. (After a recent price change, it is no longer included on monthly deals.)
It will be at least a year and maybe more before the upgrade to storage is done and even then, many of the improvements will be add-ons to basic storage. According to how you use your account, Historian might be a better deal than a Facial Recognition add-on to your storage, but if you’ve got work to do with photos on your computer, it will be worth every penny to get it done now and not wait to see the upgrade. YOu can check it out, here: https://www.forever.com/ambassador/jane-sadek/historian .
For most people who are interested in FOREVER’s permanent online storage, the biggest obstacle to getting it done is their Media Mess, but there is another group. Their obstacle is that the images on their computer are already organized in folders and perhaps tagged.
There was a time when I would explain to these people that safe is better than at risk, even if it requires a little extra work. And besides, if you’ve got it organized on your computer, part of the work is already done. They’d just need to bring it over in smaller batches.
I was one of those people who had already organized their photos on their computer before I found FOREVER, so I was speaking from experience, but that didn’t really make it much better. Moving a photo cache of decades and keeping the already instituted organization to it was daunting.
Then Came Valet!
My first purpose for owning FOREVER storage was our real estate photography company. We’d killed one external drive and lost about 12 months of photos. I needed safe. Besides, I was up to date on my scrapbooks, so even if I lost my personal photos, I hate a physical backup.
Then we sold the company. I needed to get the archive to the new owner with all the organization and tagging intact. Thankfully, as if they’d done it just for me, that’s when FOREVER introduced Valet. It was designed primarily for professional photo organizers, but an amateur version was offered at a reduced price.
My first Valet operation was to download the archive from FOREVER to a disk, so I couldn’t use the free demo, which only allows uploads, not downloads. I had to invest in the software, right off.
We’re talking years and years of real estate photography, but it was done so fast I was amazed and I knew was never going to migrate files from one place to another without Valet. Once the new owner verified he had our stash, I saved some of the archive for the sake of nostalgia and started deleting the rest. I couldn’t wait to upload my my personal photos.
Valet was brand new to FOREVER, so I admit I was a little apprehensive about migrating from my computer to FOREVER. From FOREVER to a disk was one thing, this was something else. Other Ambassadors were raving about it, but I couldn’t help but be skeptical. To boot, even though the photos on my computer were organized, I had some ideas about how to reorganize them, which would take better advantage of FOREVER’s features.
The day came for the migration and just as it had been with the real estate photos, Valet finished the job in record time – even though I’d moved the cache over in several batches rather than just letting Valet do it’s thing. I’m sure if I had moved all of it right as it had been, things would have been fine, but I do love the new organization.
So Is Valet Something You Need?
If the photos on your computer are organized and you want to move them into FOREVER, then Valet is the best way to do it. Spend some time getting it just like you want it – maybe adding photos from your phone or other devices. Then when you get everything just so, get the free 30 Day Trial version of Valet. I’m guessing you’ll be through in a couple of hours, but you’ll have 29 more days to play with it. As I said, you can only upload with the demo, but for most people, that’s all they really want and you probably won’t need Valet again after the job is done – standard or pro version.
Or Maybe You Will!
Perhaps you are the family historian and while all of your photos are organized, you are also collecting items from others. If this is you, according to the the size of your family and the state of their files, you may, you may be able to use the standard version to help. As long as you are uploading to your own FOREVER account, you can log in on any computer and do so. The pro version is for downloading to and from other FOREVER accounts.
The Future of Valet
So, Valet just came out in May, but improvements are already in the works. While the current version is focused on images stored on devices, they are working on making it work with other cloud formats, so that if you have at risk images on Google Photos, Dropbox, i-cloud and other places, bringing them home to FOREVER will be a one step process. I love Valet just the way it is, but I’m really excited about that improvement. Believe me, I will keep you abreast of any developments I learn of. In the meantime, you can try Valet with this link: https://www.forever.com/ambassador/jane-sadek/valet .
MEMORY KEEPING 101: ARTISAN & PIXELS 2 PAGES – A DYNAMIC DUO
A 30 Day Free Trial in Digital Scrapbooking Heaven
Two things in FOREVER go together like a horse and carriage – that’s Artisan and Pixels 2 Pages (P2P). If you are perfectly satisfied with the templates FOREVER offers for photobooks, photo gifts, greeting cards and calendars, then you need not read any further. Artisan and Pixels 2 Pages are for digital scrapbooking aficionados and they can try out both during a 30 Day Trial. Keep reading to find out why NOW is the perfect time to take advantage of your free trials.
Artisan is a very powerful design hardware. With it you can create a wide variety of digital print projects – everything from greeting cards to photobooks, but I even use it for social media memes. You can design virtually anything with Artisan and FOREVER offers a wide variety of digital art to use with it.
Pixels 2 Pages is an online community for Artisan users. The primary focus is digital scrapbooking, but the skills taught are applicable to whatever you want to create in Artisan. However, developing your skills is just one of the benefits of membership. The real drawing card is the fun. P2P Artisan specialist are called Pixies and they sprinkle a little magic into every corner of the community.
Let’s consider the icing on the cake! Since we’re talking FREE today, let’s talk about all the stuff included when you purchase Artisan and join Pixels 2 Pages.
Artisan is a one time purchase of $129.99. That’s it. You will own the world’s most powerful, most comprehensive tool for digital creation. Not only does it include the powerful Perfectly Clear Auto-Fix, but what you will also get is a lot of other built-in resources – page templates called blueprints, shapes, fonts, frames and strokes, to name a few. Then there’s digital art – so much free digital art that I created photobooks and other items for over year without even checking out what FOREVER offered for purchase. And, generous FOREVER keeps offering free digital art. So every once and I while I just do a search and see what new free stuff I can find.
With your Artisan purchase, you also get a peek into P2P. You’ll have access to the Pixie created How-To Manual, public posts in the P2P community and partial access to P2P events throughout the year. If that peek perks your interest, which it most likely will, then you’ll want to join and there are two ways to do that – monthly and annually. The monthly price is $19.99 or you can save a little with the $189.99 annual membership.
For many, the P2P community, sharing ideas and offering encouragement is reason enough to belong, but there’s more, like the Facebook page group, monthly newsletter, monthly blueprint downloads, weekly guides, videos and project ideas and such. You also have access to the library where they’ve archived years of training, so at your fingertips you have answers to more questions than you’ll ever think to ask. There’s a free quarterly crop and while anyone can attend parts of it, only P2P members have the inside track.
Oh yes – and every year there is a huge Virtual Party for P2P members that’s spread out over weeks and culminates in a weekend binge of creation. There is a fee for this event, but guess what, it only costs half of the value you will receive in digital goodies. The fun starts with weekly classes in March, to give you a head start on what will be introduced at the weekend crop. Then for an entire weekend in April, you crop with the Pixies. Everything is recorded, so if you have to miss a class or can’t attend the crop, it will all be there for you to enjoy anyway. For many people that weekend is their favorite thing of the year.
Do It Now!
I am sharing this with you today, because now is a special time to take advantage of this Dynamic Duo. If you sign up for your free trials in January, you can enjoy full access to the “Let’s TACO About It” quarterly crop (January 12-13) and for only $19.99 you can participate in FOREVER Virtual (January 20), which will offer lots of FOREVER training and the “Party After Dark” P2P Crop.
After these special events and a month’s access to these wonderful resources, I’m betting you will be hooked. Why don’t you check these out: Artisan, Pixels 2 Pages, Forever Virtual or just call me at 972-971-5263 and let’s TACO about it!
There may be no free lunch, but there is a free FOREVER account. If you’ve chosen Memory Keeping as your New Year Resolution or if you’re just curious, there is no cost and no obligation when you try out FOREVER.
When you click the link, it will take you to FOREVER and walk you through the sign up process. Then FOREVER will send you an email to verify your address. You’ll want to do that, because the reward is a $20 Off Welcome Coupon and you have 60 days to spend it. If you decide against FOREVER, no harm, no foul, but you’ll have 60 days to try it out and if you find something you love, just apply the coupon code.
So, I Have the Account, What Now?
Now, that you’ve signed up, start checking things out.
If you’re the kind who likes to start with a little how-to, then right on the first page under the big picture, you’ll see this. Click “Get Answers” and you’ll enter a world of how-to intro videos. That should keep you busy for awhile!
Or if you learn by doing, look for the avatar icon in the upper left hand corner. Hover over it and choose “Library”. FOREVER gives you 2GBs of storage for free, which is 375-1250 images depending on their size. You can upload some images and get started with your curating!
Whether you start with the videos or just start, you can’t blow up FOREVER, so try everything. The Library is where your images will live, but you can set up albums according to how your brain works. FOREVER does not create duplicates, so you’re not using up GBs. The albums can be nested for ease of handling. There’s also great tagging tools that let you cross reference the ways you find images. Don’t forget to name the photos and write a description.
Check Out the FOREVER Guarantee
You may not be impressed, yet. I loved FOREVER from first sight and couldn’t wait to put all my memories there, but you might be telling yourself you haven’t seen anything you can’t get with other cloud providers. Well, there is the fact that you own FOREVER storage rather than rent it. That’s a big deal, but the really big deal is the FOREVER Guarantee. You don’t just get FOREVER for your lifetime, but access to the images is guaranteed by FOREVER for 100 years after you are gone, without anyone having to pay another penny.
After you’ve looked at what FOREVER does for you and for your images, go check out the terms you agreed to with whoever has your digital images now. Basically those other agreements say that when you load your images, you give us all rights to those images to whatever provider you’ve chosen. They can compress them, delete them, transfer them, mine them for ads, etc. etc. etc.
One Stop Shop
And speaking of those other providers, how many of them would you need to do all the things for you that FOREVER can? We don’t just store your images, we’re a platform for sharing them. We can digitize your hard copy media. You can make photo books and photo gifts. We have video streaming and family history research. There’s a world of amazing software available for managing your images and using them everywhere. There’s even an online community you can join who know everything there is to know about Memory Keeping. There’s a blog. There’s pages and groups on social media. Whatever Memory Keeping tools, devices and support you need, you can find them with FOREVER. No need to juggle multiple photo-related accounts and apps.
Test Drive Our App
Your FOREVER account is free and so is the app. It is available for both Apple and Android phones. Go to the App Store on your phone to install the app and then see what it does. Imagine being able to have access to your images on your phone without having to worry about losing your phone, damaging your phone, having your phone stolen or having it die. That’s what the app does. It does more than store your images – it protects them. You can set the app to auto-synch with your phone and every picture and video you take can go right to FOREVER.
Drive-Thru Create & Print
Though FOREVER is great for storage and sharing, it’s also good for photobooks and gifts. Click the Create & Print tab, choose a product and try out our interface. There are lots of great products to personalize with your photos – from greeting cards and calendars, to photobooks and coffee cups. Though our products might look like some you’ve seen on other sites, I assure you that when you hold them in your hand, you’ll understand why FOREVER is a better choice.
It’s OK to create a few things, just for the fun of it. It doesn’t cost you a thing until you actually order it. You can try things out and change them a zillion times. You can even share your creation and show off your ideas without spending a cent. Sometimes the process of creation itself is enough, but it is tempting to buy and share your creations.
Will It Be a Yes or a No?
I hope you’ll take FOREVER up on it’s free account. Check out all the pages, load up some photos, look at the deals, take advantage of the free trials and see how FOREVER fits into your life. If you need a guided tour, we can jump on Zoom and I’ll show you around.
Once you’ve gotten your account, find something to spend your $20 on. Coaster sets and magnets are a fun inexpensive way to check out our print products. Or you can invest that $20 towards storage or digitization. Or you’re welcome to delete your account and walk away.
I’m Jane Sadek, your Memory Keeper. I’m Saving Legacies and Sharing Smiles. Let’s talk, 972-971-5263.
You’ve heard the BIG FIVE a million times – fitness, finances, reducing stress, weight management and a better diet. How many times have you made them yourself? All of these are great resolutions, but the truth is, you’re going to have limited success, because life happens. These aren’t just New Year Resolutions, these are commitments we need to make and remake throughout the year. We should be setting small daily/weekly/monthly goals and you’ll have more success if you have an accountability partner.
Try Something New
Instead of the same old thing with a dose of guilt and a gallon of reluctance, why not try something new this year. This year why don’t you tackle your Memory Mess? We’ve all got them. Think of all the places you have photos! Crates, boxes, drawers, your phone, your computer, thumb drives, discs and probably 3-5 places on the cloud. And what about videos – VHS, beta, Hi8, Mini DV, DVD’s and U-matic? Negatives? Slides? How about audio? Historical documents, newspaper clippings and awards?
How great would it be to turn that headache into a blessing you, your friends and your family can enjoy for generations to come? Let me assure you it would be pretty darned cool! You’d get to get rid of of a burden and the value of the gift you pay forward into the future would be immeasurable.
You Won’t Be Alone
If you choose one of the BIG FIVE, you’ll start the year with a lot of support. People will be impressed by your motivation. The gym will be crowded. Social media will be full of great memes and recipes. You’ll have friends choosing the same resolutions. You can even buy a coach for for most of these. January will be a lot of fun!
But face it, the support for the BIG FIVE won’t last. Well, maybe the coaching bills will, but everybody else will go back to their lives. By February they’ll be tired of hearing about saving money, nutrition, work out routines, affirmations and salutations. You’ll be working out alone, pinching pennies by yourself, eating too many salads and you’ll be stressed out! So just don’t!
The truth is, if you choose to tackle your memory mess instead, you may start out alone, but you don’t have to stay that way, because I’ve got you. My advice is free and I’ve been memory keeping since I was nine. It’s my thing and it’s going to stay that way. So, if you tell me you’re ready to tackle your memory mess, I’m going to come alongside and help, but you’ll find a growing crowd of supporters.
As you begin to make headway in the project however, something interesting will happen. When the dieters, the exercisers and the savers are turning off everyone around them with their preoccupation, you’ll be gathering up a cheering squad. As you rediscover your memories, you’ll also be saving the memories of those around you. When you’re reminded of a funny situation or a special occasion, you’ll be inspired to reach out to friends and family and remind them. Perhaps you’ll text them a copy of the photo or you’ll give them a call, so you can laugh or cry a bit with them.
No Effort is Wasted
How many times has one of these happened to you? You start a new workout routine which is derailed by an injury, a new schedule at work, your trainer quits, the gym closes etc. etc. etc. You start on a new savings plan, but your car breaks down, the water heater floods, you have a health crisis etc. etc. etc. You’ve embraced yoga, meditation or affirmations and suddenly your life goes to hell in a handbasket. You start a new diet for weight loss or healthiness and your schedule goes haywire, making you feel lucky if you get to eat at all, much less have time to shop and cook healthy.
That’s why the BIG FIVE need to be more than a New Year Resolutions. These plans and commitments have to be adjusted, rearranged and recommitted to over and over again. When you fall off the wagon, that wagon is gone. You have to build another one from the ground up.
Let’s say that you decide to start tackling your Memory Mess instead. You go around the house gathering up all the images and memorabilia you can find, but before you can do anything about it, here comes a crisis. That’s OK, take care of the crisis and all those things you gathered up will be waiting for you. You will have made progress and you can pick up where you left off – not five pounds heavier with no muscle tone, not deeper in debt and totally stressed out.
And I’ll Be There!
Once you tell me you’re committed to Memory Keeping, I’ll stay with you. My social media accounts are full of Memory Keeping, to encourage you, to gently remind you of why you do this, how to do this and I’ll keep you abreast of all the sales. You can call me anytime, but I’ll also reach out to you from time to time. I’m going to be most interested in what’s up in your life and how things are going, but I’m also going to ask about your Memory Keeping. Not to create guilt or shame you, but to keep you going, to help you over humps and to share the Memory Keeping road with you. If you say, “I’m just overwhelmed and can’t think about Memory Keeping right now,” then I’ll first find out if there’s any way I can help and then I’ll go away – for awhile…but I’ll be back, to see how you are and to get you back on track.
I’d love to help you launch a Memory Keeping resolution in 2024. Let’s sit down and talk about what you have and where you’d like it to be. Let’s talk about your audience and your budget. Let’s talk about setting up a plan that is doable and a schedule that is flexible. And if the truth is you just want it done and don’t want to do it yourself – well I can help with that, too. Let’s talk – my number is 972-971-5263.
MEMORY KEEPING 101: NEVER TOO EARLY, ONLY TOO LATE
Christmas 2010
So, I went and grabbed the oldest Christmas picture I had on my computer. One picture and so many stories. You see me and two pets. Let me tell you the memories I see in this photo.
Let’s start with the purple wall!
This house was the first one we bought after we moved back to Texas from our sojourn in California. Bill had detoured through a year in Iraq, interpreting for the Army and I had come back to Dallas to be near my aging parents back in 2006. He was back from Iraq in 2007. We were both in school until about 2008 and we had lived in a rent house, because we didn’t know what we wanted to do when we grew up. We were both in our 50’s. I guess we were having a mid-life crisis.
At the end of 2008 we bought a house in Far North Dallas. The house had great Mid-Century Modern Bones, but it needed love. My mother thought we had lost our minds and perhaps all our money, if this was the best we could do. By 2010, she decided we were OK, because we’d totally renovated it with the help of a decorator who thought a purple wall was a good thing.
If you had a few hours, I could tell you some stories about the decorator – how Bill wanted help, but he didn’t want the usual services and fees of the standard decorator. Looking at wallpaper we found Christine and while she was very affordable, we also got an education in the mess people can make of their lives.
Why don’t I have on any make-up?
This was the Christmas of the infamous rolls! One of Mom’s friends kept half of East Dallas supplied with bread and desserts, but in particular my parents, because they lived down the street. Eddie Jo was always finding a reason to pop down to their house with a pie or a cake. When Eddie Jo offered to make something for our Christmas, Mom suggested yeast rolls. I know why, Eddie Jo’s were delicious. I’m sure my mom was imagining the final product, not the batch of dough Eddie Jo had me come by and pick up on Christmas Eve.
I woke up very early and set about trying to follow Eddie Jo’s instructions, which had sounded quite easy when she gave them to me. HA! I ended up with a kitchen covered in flour and I seemed to be covered in sticky dough from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet, but I had no balls of dough rising under a dish towel. I had the whole rest of the meal to complete (Thank goodness it was catered in from Market Street, but it did need to be heated.)
At the end of my last nerve, I woke up Bill and shared my dilemma. He powered through the dough balls while I got everything else ready. I’d already done everything ahead that I could on the previous day, such as set the table, but there was a lot of last minute items on my list.
About 15 minutes before the family arrived, I ran in, took a shower, washed my hair and put on something festive. There was no time for makeup. In this picture I was trying to pretend everything was OK.
As the rest of the meal finished up, I took the rolls out of my office where they’d been rising and put them in the oven to bake while I dished everything up and put it on the table. At the last moment, I opened the door to the oven and there sat the unbaked rolls. My Aunt Edie had “helped” me, by turning off the oven when I took out the turkey.
Who was I supposed to be mad at? Eddie Jo for her aggressive food offerings. My mom for suggesting something as insane as yeast rolls. Aunt Edie for turning off the oven. Well, one thing was for sure, I wasn’t going to be mad at Aunt Edie, because she was in the process of dying of cancer. I wouldn’t have another Christmas with her.
My Jewelry
One of my rings is, of course, my wedding set. Every time I see it, I think of the New Years Eve Party Bill threw the evening he proposed to me. I had no idea he was going to and certainly had not contributed to his selection process.
The other ring is my UTD ring. I was so proud to have graduated Magna Cum Laude with school honors, but there’s a reason that 50 some-odd-year-old woman wanted to have a school ring. I only had my high school ring for a few days. It disappeared. I always say the house ate it, but Mom was convinced the girls down the street stole it. They’d come by when I was washing the dishes and my ring had been sitting on the top of the TV, where I’d put it to keep it from getting in the dishwater. I’m sticking with the house ate it.
The necklace is an enameled replica of a Fabergé egg. My sister-in-law had picked it up for me during her travels. I chose it to go with the red sweater vest, which was a hand-me-down from Aunt Edie. Throughout her life, the hand-me-downs from Aunt Edie were always my favorite clothes. She’s gone now, but her jewelry, accessories and clothes still populate my wardrobe and are worn with pride and joy.
There’s More!
I still haven’t told you about my short-lived career as an Avon lady, which provided me with the red earrings I was wearing and the poinsettia throw on the back of the sofa. I haven’t told you a single story about my beloved Shih Tzu, Precious, or Princess the Pound Cat.
I am a Memory Keeper. Sure, that means I help people resolve their Media Messes and turn them into Memories to be shared with their family and friends for generations to come. It also means that I treasure and share my own memories – and not just my photographs. A true Memory Keeper captures all the memories wherever they are found – in a purple wall and a poinsettia throw.
Once a networking friend said I probably cared more about her memories than she did herself. I can’t say whether or not that was true, but I can tell you how important my own memories are to me. That’s why I am doing everything I can to capture every single one – to set them in stone and provide the stories behind everything you see in my media. Who knows, maybe I actually care more about your memories than you do, but someday, somewhere, someone is going to look at some random photo that you have and wish you’d kept all the memories in them. Let me help you do that. Call me today at 972-971-5263.
MEMORY KEEPING 101: ADD MEMORIES TO EVERY DAY OF 2024
Calendar, Planner, Notebookor Journal
So, how do you keep your life organized? A large monthly calendar on the wall? Or is it a chunky planner you carry everywhere you go? Or are you the more free flowing type who keeps a notebook with all your pertinent information and to do lists? Or perhaps you’re the reflective type that settles down at the end of the day to write down what was important.
Just about every store you’ll walk in for the next month or so will have zillions of calendars, planners and blank books on fixtures throughout the store – especially in those impulse buying areas. They want you to think “Oh yeah, I need a ___________________________(fill in the blank: calendar, a planner, a journal)!
Ooooh those exciting travel places! Look at those cat and puppy faces! That one has motivational sayings! What’s your hot button? How about, instead of that canned theme and stock pictures, you design a calendar or planner that instead focuses on your travels, your pets, your goals, your friends and your family?
Well, with FOREVER Create & Print you can use photos of your own memories, motivational sayings and Bible verses you choose, or even download images from the internet of things you want to do – it’s up to you. Just click on Create & Print on the FOREVER website and start designing your calendar, planner or notebook with their great templates. Or use Artisan 6 to add even more more exciting choices, like a personal event list.
The Wall Calendar
No matter what other calendars and planning tools you have in your life, most of us have a wall calendar hanging somewhere – on the refrigerator, next to our desk wherever we need to be reminded of what the year looks like. Every insurance agent, real estate agent and most financial advisors are quick to offer you a free calendar, but do you really want to look at their advertising all year long?
There are many great designs for wall calendars in Design & Print. You can have one large glorious image on each month or multiple images with a variety of themes. While the basic calendar design is great, with Artisan 6 you can change up the format, putting the month and days where you want them, the way you want them, in the font you want them.
Oh, and if you do choose Artisan 6 to design your calendar, then you have even more options when you design from a blank page. Perhaps the best part is that there’s a customizable event list which will offer both sets of holidays like Christian and Jewish or American and Canadian, OR you can create your own personal event list with birthdays, anniversaries and milestones! (Oh, and with Artisan you also have the choice of making desk calendars!)
The Planner
I’m a planner girl. Confession, I also have a wall calendar and desk calendar, because I am a little obsessive, but I love my planner best. FOREVER Planners became available in the summer, so mine starts in August. That’s one of the beauties of of creating your own calendar, you can start it whenever makes sense for you, whether it’s tied to an event or just when you decide you want a new planner or calendar.
One of my favorite features of the FOREVER planners is the three templates available. I’m a month/week girl, but you may identify most with a weekly or daily view of your life. Along with three different page styles, you can choose between hardbound and spiral-bound. I’m using spiral bound right now and I love it.
Notebooks/Journals/Blank Books
FOREVER calls them notebooks, but you might call them journals or blank books. Whatever you call them, there are a million ways to use them and the choices we offer make it easy to create your own perfect place to jot notes, ideas, memories, dates, goals – anything.
First, you choose what you want on the cover. Will it be a motivational statement, your Bible verse for the year, photos of your goals, photos of the ones you love or photos of the places you love.
Then you can have hardbound or spiral bound – whichever best fits your taste and usage. How people resist having a few of each is beyond me!
Best of all, you get to choose exactly which style of pages best suit your needs. (See why it’s hard to resist having a stack of them?) Do you think best on lined pages? Are you using the notebook to journal your way through your year? Do you think in images? Then you’ll definitely enjoy the bullet pages. If your method depends on your mood, then perhaps the graph/lined combo will attract your attention.
Create Your Planning Tool Today
While we’re talking about planning tools, I wanted to let you know you can use our Table Top Panels to make great dry erase boards. That’s not the same thing, but it’s in the planning family.
Whatever planning tool you’d prefer, give it a go with FOREVER – and while you’re at it, I will remind you, they also make great holiday gifts. Design & Print your calendar today.
The internet is a funny thing. We depend on it heavily and yet it has very limited capabilities – in part, because it depends mostly on numbers. Were you to ask it who offers the best media digitization available, you could get a lot of different answers, but chances are, you wouldn’t know what those results meant, because what is best? Is it the company that’s been around the longest? Is it the one with the most reviews? Is it the one with the highest rating?
One of the oldest companies offering media digitization is by far the best known, but they don’t make any of the best lists. Some rating companies point to bad reviews. Others talk about it being expensive. I hate it when people ask me if we’re like XXXXXXXXXXXX, the company they know from the ubiquitous advertising campaigns. Yes, we’re both in the same business, but what we offer is light years ahead of this company, which was once on the leading edge of this industry.
One of our competitors is making great strides, in part because they’ve convinced the rating companies that they do everything – only they don’t. Two words – Scrapbook Pages. They don’t. And their photo restoration is handled by AI, not photo restoration artists. I don’t know about you, but those things matter to me. I think they’ve done a great job of marketing, but I know they actually can’t compare to us.
In fact, when you really start to dig into it, the more you learn the crazier it gets. Bright new start-ups, mobile digitization services, the guy in a garage with an ancient scanner. In fact, the internet hides more than it reveals. If they have a shiny new website with good SEO, chances are the internet is going to love them, regardless of what they do or do not offer.
So What Does FOREVER Offer and Why Should I Use Them?
Well, for one thing, we just moved into the newest, largest, most state-of-the-art media digitization facility in the world. We’re very excited about the “newest” thing, because we literally just built it and moved in, but it’s not the most important thing on the list.
That we built it is rather relevant, because we’ve been digitizing for a while now and we’ve been in some of those older facilities like our friendly competitors. These days we’re not making do with a remodeled strip center retrofitted to meet our needs. We built our facility from the ground up with only one thing in mind – media digitization. From weatherproofed docks which allows Fed Ex to unload their trucks inside to the clean room for processing media, no stone was left unturned which would allow us to do our job better.
Largest is quite significant, because one of the reasons for our size is the number of pieces of equipment we have for digitization. That’s why when we say we digitize everything, unlike our competition who try to say the same thing, we actually do. We’ve invested in a lot of equipment, just so we can digitized anything. We’ve actually developed our own equipment for handling materials that other companies don’t touch (like scrapbook pages, newspapers, 3D items etc.)
Most state-of-the-art is a little of both of these. Our warehouse is innovative, but our clean room is amazing. Our people are pretty remarkable, too. Our hiring process is not about finding warm bodies to shove photos through a machine. We hire and train media specialist with a focus on customer satisfaction. Our mind set is not faster processing, it’s more accurate, better quality processing. And yes, we hire real live artists to handle our photo restoration projects.
Our white glove service isn’t restricted to the clean room. The entire circle of service, from the moment a box comes to our facility until the moment we load the media we’re returning to the customer for delivery (yes, we return your media back to you after it is digitized) we understand what we’re handling. Throughout the entire process, from the moment you order your box, we’re going to keep you updated with exactly where your media is in our process. It’s not media to us – it’s memories.
Beyond Our New Buildingand Our Boxes
The fact that we deal in memories, rather than media is what really matters. Media Digitization is the beginning of what we do. We also offer the best online solutions for storing and sharing your memories. Those other guys will allow you to download from their site, offer you equipment to store your images or try and rent storage to you.
You can download from our online box center and you can buy equipment like thumb drives and DVD’s if you want to, but that’s not what we want you to do. We know you need a permanent place to store your memories, one that is safe and will be there for generations to come, without having to pay monthly/annual fees. That’s why we have online storage you own rather than rent, protected by an ironclad guarantee you can read for yourself.
We also offer a free app for synching your phone’s photo storage with FOREVER; a computer-based program for sorting, editing and sharing photos that also has facial recognition, scanning and album planning; file migration software developed for professional photo organizers and cherished by memory keepers everywhere; the world’s most advanced and comprehensive software for designing digital scrapbooks, photo gifts and more, as well as a huge selection of digital art; private video streaming; frequent free training events for our customers, as well as an extensive library of free training videos; family research professionals for discovering your genealogy; a very active online community of digital scrapbookers with virtual crops, free giveaways and more training than you can imagine; and that’s still not all we do.
We offer an extensive line of projects you can create and print, on your own. No need to go to the local office supply store, the big box store, the pharmacy’s photo department or one of those online places that offer photobooks and gifts, but has made you sign an agreement saying they can delete, compress or mine your photos. We have Autobooks and Photobooks in a wide variety of sizes, styles and bindings. Our Photo Gifts include tabletop panels, ornaments, coasters, magnets, puzzles, blankets, drinkware and wall décor. Our stationary choices include greeting cards, notebooks, planners and calendars. And if that’s not enough, get Artisan and design anything you want. Oh, and if you want prints, from standard sized photos, to page prints to posters, yes we do that, too.
A Stream-lined One-Stop Shop for All Your Digital Memory-Keeping Needs
There’s just not anything else like FOREVER. There might not be a keyword or phrase you can plug into your search engine that will say we are the best, but after reading through this blog post, I hope you realize FOREVER is the best for you. Call or text me and let’s talk about it!
Memory Keeping 101: Always Save Money with FOREVER Deals
There’s Always a Deal at FOREVER
It’s November, so FOREVER has Black Friday deals happening all month long, but FOREVER has deals every month. Here’s how to find out what they are!
If you’re a FOREVER customer then chances are you’ve noticed the daily emails you get from them. (You can shut them off if you want. Just go to preferences in your account.) Someone in the marketing department has run their algorithms and decided which deal will entice the most people to make a trip over to their website. That’s the first place a deal might get your attention, but if you’re like me I get so much stuff in my inbox that sometimes I don’t see these love notes until a week or two later. Besides, this is just a teaser and doesn’t cover the whole spectrum of what’s being offered at a discount.
If you follow my business pages on social media, then perhaps you’ll see my daily posts about current deals. Or then again, maybe you won’t, because social media has algorithms and while they seem as if they read your mind, they also keep you from seeing a lot of things you really might be interested in. If you’re really looking for a certain item to go on sale, then don’t count on social media to deliver the post to you.
The best way to see what’s on sale at FOREVER every day is FOREVER’s Deal Page. To begin with, FOREVER has a Deal of the Day every day. Their target is digital scrapbookers who are always hungry for new digital art. Some Pixies I know (Pixies are members of the Pixels 2 Pages Online Community of Digital Scrapbookers) start their morning ordering the Deal of the Day every day. You may not be a Digital Scrapbooker, but it doesn’t hurt to keep an eye on the daily deal, because sometimes it’s free. I love free, even when it’s not really something I want!
But that’s only the beginning of what’s offered. The day I wrote this blog there were 27 deals on the page, from a free coupon for new CLUB Memberships to 50% off Print Orders to Gift Ideas, Events and even FOREVER logo-wear. From the deals page, you can click directly to what you want to buy.
If you bypass the Deals page and just go to the merchandise you’re interested in, you don’t have to worry that you’ll miss a deal, because each item will be marked with both the retail price and the current deal. Just be sure that when you order you check to see that the deal has made it to your cart. It usually will, but it is the internet and things happen or don’t happen at the whim of a byte.
And Then There’s Me
Let’s face the facts! It really doesn’t matter how many places the deals are posted, most of us are too busy to go track deals down and because of that, there’s a chance you will miss the one you really want. And that’s why you have me!
While it’s not your job to keep up with what’s on sale at FOREVER, it is mine. I keep a list of what my clients want and when I know it’s going to be on sale, I let them know. How do I know what’s going to be on sale? Well, I’m an Ambassador, so on the first day of each month I get a spreadsheet that lays out everything that will be on sale for the month. The first thing I do with it is match it up with the deals up with my clients’ wish lists and let them know the window for getting that deal.
Even though I am an Ambassador, I am not privy to the specific deals of each month until they are announced, but I do know the rhythm of our business. I know there will be special offerings for Black Friday in both November and May. I know we have Christmas in June every year. I know the seasons when greeting cards are most affordable and when there will be a deal on calendars. So when you and I sit down and map out your Memory Keeping priorities and agenda, then I can help you base your schedule on when the best deals will be coming around.
Let’s Do Lunchor Coffee or Drinks or…
So, when you look at your Media Mess, remember you do not have to tackle it alone. I am happy to be your ally in the war against lost memories. Even if you don’t have time right now to tackle the job, let’s get together and talk about it. Learn your options, set your budget and let me help you get it done. I not only have access to the monthly deals as soon as they come out, I also know which tools will help you with your projects and how to use the CLUB to get the best deals.
Whether you’d like to chat memories over margaritas or you only have time for a quick Zoom, the first step in any project is to get started! Give me a call or at 972-971-5263 and let’s get started.
Memory Keeping 101: Togetherness for Digitization Value
Welcome to Group Box Digitization
Group Box Digitization is a great way to try out FOREVER’s Digitization Process, with less expense and risk than ordering your own FOREVER Box. Though our Digitization Process is quite easy and safe, some people are intimidated. Joining FOREVER, verifying an email address, choosing a type of box, choosing a size of box and then ordering a box. It sounds like a lot to some people and for the budget-minded or skeptical, it might seem like too much of an expense or risk. Then there’s packing the box and sending it back to FOREVER. We do it every day, but if you never have, you might feel some hesitation.
See there are all those urban legends about digitization companies, most of which may have actually happened, but have nothing in the world to do with FOREVER. We don’t do any of the awful things to your media the other guys do. Turn-around time is quick, everything gets the white glove treatment, nothing is lost, nothing is destroyed by equipment etc. etc. etc., but if all you’ve heard are horror stories from customers of other media digitization companies, sending your treasures off to strangers is scary.
With a Group Box, you don’t pay a penny until your media arrives at FOREVER. I order the box and I pay for most of the shipping. A Group Box is actually a big box with four small individual boxes inside. Your individual box is smaller than a standard FOREVER box, so you don’t feel the pressure to load up the box to get your money’s worth. Send one thing and see what happens. Or load it up and enjoy the reduced shipping fees. It’s up to you.
All you have to do with a Group Box is get signed up for FOREVER and give me your stuff. When I receive the big box, I’ll pack your media and send it back. When the Group Box containing your media arrives at FOREVER, they’ll let you know. Only then will you be invoiced for the digitization and return shipping. Then sooner than you can imagine, you’ll receive notification that your digitized media is online. You can download it or even better, you can invest in FOREVER storage and have those memories ready to share for generations to come – even generations you’ll never know.
Try It! You’ll Like It!
My first Group Box was delivered to my house just the other day. I want to return it to FOREVER before Thanksgiving, so your digitization order will earn an entry in my Crazy Turkey Day Drawing for a $50 Gift Certificate and you can share your digitized memories around the Christmas tree!
For some clients, Group Boxes become a way of life. As soon as I send off their media in one Group Box, they start gathering what they want to send in the next one. For others, sampling Digitization with a Group Box was all the encouragement they needed to order their own Box and ship into high Memory Keeping gear. Maybe, the Group box is just big enough to hold the two or three items you wanted to get done and that’s all you’ll ever need.
Whatever your situation, the Group Box might be just the thing you need next for your Memory Keeping projects. Give me a call at 972-971-5263 and let’s get sgtarted!
jane sadek 