---
title: "ICYMI: Selecting images for a family history"
description: "ICYMI: Selecting images for a family history"
---

[Vita Brevis ](https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org)

# [ICYMI: Selecting images for a family history](https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org/2021/09/icymi-selecting-images-family-history)

 Written by [Penny Stratton](https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org/author/pstratton) | Sep 29, 2021 1:36:46 PM

[**Editor's note**: *This post originally appeared in* Vita Brevis *on 5 April 2019*.]

<https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/Ella-1-4.jpg> My late mother-in-law, with her father, in 1927.

How do you choose photos for a family history? Someone recently asked me that excellent question. She happened to have dozens, if not hundreds, of photos and didn’t know how to start. I had never really come up with guidelines for selecting photos, but as I answered the question, I realized that I *do* have some rough rules of thumb:

1. **Digitize everything. **For publication, you will need to have all your images in digital format; why not scan all you have? That will give you an easy way to view them in one format – and will put you along a path to creating a digital archive of your photo collection. Make sure to scan at a minimum of 300 dpi/ppi. Here’s a good [guide](https://thephotorestorationcenter.com/beginners-guide-to-scanning-old-photographs-for-preservation-and-restoration/).[[1]](https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org/2021/09/icymi-selecting-images-family-history?hs_amp=true#_ftn1)
2. **Create electronic folders for each ancestor or family group. **If you have already started writing a family history and have a file structure for your writing, create a parallel file structure for your images and sort them accordingly. Creating a separate art log can also help you organize your images and thoughts.
3. **Illustrate as many people as you can. **Try to have an illustration for most if not all key people in your ancestry. If your family history goes back a dozen or more generations, of course, that will be difficult. In that case, see item 10 in this list.
4. **Aim for balance throughout the book. **Undoubtedly you will have many photos of one person and few of others. You needn’t include *every *photo of each person. Your goal is some kind of balance: say, two to four photos per chapter. But don’t be slavish about these guidelines. One person’s life might warrant more photos than another’s. Your log will help you keep track.
5. **Select photos from throughout a person’s life. **Given the choice, for any significant person in your family history, you might opt to select a photo from babyhood or childhood, one from young adulthood (perhaps a wedding photo), and one from later in life.
6. **Select photos showing family groups. **Photos of family groups have the advantage of showing many people at once – and also to show your relatives interacting with each other, particularly if the photos are candid or informal.
7. **Include informal photos. **As implied in step 6, informal photos are more likely than studio portraits to bring your ancestor to life. They also show everyday clothing and everyday settings.
8. **Include images of homes. **Not all your photos need to show people; don’t forget family homes or other places of significance. Bonus points if you have a photo of people in front of a home or business. I particularly love the photo (*above*) of my young mother-in-law with her father in front of her father’s real estate office, because it brings them – and also the place and the era – to life.
9. **Assess the overall image quality. **Once you’ve done your preliminary selection, you might still have dozens of photos in front of you. Then I’d choose the best-quality image – with “quality” relating to the physical quality of the image, such as its sharpness, contrast, or composition, or to its character: that is, whether it shows personality.
10. **Supplement with photos or images from other sources as necessary. **Sometimes you just have no photos of a person. In that case, look for something to illustrate his or her life: a photo of the church or school he or she attended; an image or map of a town where he or she lived; the person’s signature on a document; a birth, marriage, death, or other record – or a detail from a census. Here’s a [list](https://www.americanancestors.org/uploadedfiles/content/education/learning_resources/select%20online%20image%20resources.pdf) of some potential online sources.

** **What if you have only one image of, say, your great-grandmother, and it’s a poor one, blurry or damaged in some way? Use it anyway! Even a poor-quality image gives us a sense of what the person looked like—and that’s more important than worrying about a tear or a blemish. And don’t overdo it on photo editing. Re-watching Ken Burns’ *The Civil War *series recently, I noticed that many of the images have spots and other blemishes. Somehow, those flaws give them character and lend a sense that, like their subjects, these photos have been through a lot.

Have you been through this process recently? What hints would you pass along?

### Note

[[1]](https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org/2021/09/icymi-selecting-images-family-history?hs_amp=true#_ftnref1) The subject has also been covered [here](https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org/2017/08/arranging-family-papers-3/) at *Vita Brevis*.

[View full post](https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org/2021/09/icymi-selecting-images-family-history)

```json
{
  "@context" : "http://schema.org",
  "@type" : "BlogPosting",
  "author" : {
    "@type" : "Person",
    "name" : "Penny Stratton"
  },
  "dateModified" : "2023-12-13T21:26:44.805Z",
  "datePublished" : "2021-09-29T13:36:46Z",
  "headline" : "ICYMI: Selecting images for a family history",
  "image" : {
    "@type" : "ImageObject",
    "height" : 200,
    "url" : "https://4306738.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/4306738/Imported_Blog_Media/Ella-1-300x200-4.jpg",
    "width" : 300
  },
  "mainEntityOfPage" : "https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org/2021/09/icymi-selecting-images-family-history",
  "publisher" : {
    "@type" : "Organization",
    "logo" : {
      "@type" : "ImageObject",
      "height" : 60,
      "url" : "/hs/hsstatic/content_shared_assets/static-1.4092/img/default-amp-logo.png",
      "width" : 60
    },
    "name" : "Vita Brevis"
  }
}
```