The Anim-Boadus family: Documenting photographic history with Lens & OneDrive

Family photos are very important to Kwaku and Susan Anim-Boadus. Moments are fleeting; photos allow those moments to stay frozen in time, to be shared with family and friends later. But when their household was burglarized, the delicate, irreplaceable nature of their snapshots was brought into focus.

“[This is my personal] photo album where I have photos from when I was a child, when I was as young as, I think six months. [Until] now, […] those [are only] in hardcopy. But you know that […] over time, this could potentially decay, or you could lose this. You could lose this in a flood or [a fire].” Kwaku recalls how, after the family’s home was broken into, they raced to ensure that the burglars hadn’t taken a hard drive that did have several family photos and other important documents on it.

Thankfully, the drive was missed by the thieves. “There was a lot of relief for us because we had almost everything—all the memories that we had—saved.” But what if the hard drive had disappeared with the family’s other lost belongings? “That was a wakeup call for us to start backing up almost everything that was available on this hard drive into the cloud.”

Kwaku and Susan already considered themselves a Microsoft family—they use OneNote to plan and track long-term goals and future meetings and leverage To Do for shared shopping and chores lists. “We'[d] [been] using a number of the tools,” Kwaku notes, so making the transition to using OneDrive was a no-brainer.

He’s done it so many times by now that Kwaku has his photo digitizing and archiving process down to science with an easy-to-follow step-by-step—which also includes sharing these newly digitized memories with friends and family far and wide.

It all starts with a smartphone app.

“In order to scan [a] picture, I go straight to […] Microsoft Lens,” Kwaku explains. “And once [I] open it, it goes straight to […] the number of options that you can select.” These options are called modes, and Lens has four: Photo, Document, Whiteboard, and Business Card.

“Because I’m scanning the photo, I […] select Photo.”

Next, Kwaku frames the photo he’ll scan using the app’s frame lines. He’ll also decide if he should turn the flash on.

Then, Kwaku edits the digital scan of the photo that he’s taken with Lens. He can ensure that it’s cropped and oriented correctly before saving.

“The default title is the date and the time you are taking this particular picture,” he notes—which is not typically ideal for organizing! Kwaku likes to add the names of the picture’s subjects. “I can actually indicate that that’s part of the title” before saving in any number of different places.

“But the option [I select] is […] on OneDrive because that’s where I want it. And once you click Save, that’s it. […] The beautiful thing is that once this is on [OneDrive], if I have OneDrive open on my PC […] I can have the pictures available here on my PC, on my tablet, or any other piece [of Internet-connected technology] anywhere in the world.”

A lot of the joy of preserving his family’s photos is sharing the results with others.

“The next thing I want to do is share this particular photo with my family on our family page. I go to Share and then send it directly to our family page.” Not only can his family members see the picture, but they can also comment on it too—sometimes folks ask where a picture came from or to hear a story about it or to share a story of their own. “It helps us [see] the moment and […] we [form] a conversation out of this. And the beautiful thing is that this picture can be shared multiple times.”

Once a family photo or other piece of paper memorabilia is digitized and placed safely in OneDrive, “we’re able to preserve those for the next generation, the generation afterwards,” Kwaku emphasizes. “Our families will have access to this photo album that is stored in the cloud[,] continuously they will have access to photos of me when I was young, photos of my parents.” By using OneDrive, now the Anim-Boadus family is linking past generations to future generations.