Reimagine, An Innovative Photo Mobile App by MyHeritage

 For a full explanation of this remarkable app, see the MyHeritage Blog, "Introducing Reimagine: An Innovative Photo App by MyHeritage." Here is a video that explains the app. 

https://youtu.be/zawU9mI_lEc

I have it on my iPhone and started with taking a photo of a page of images in a photo scrapbook. It easily separated the photos into individual images and saved each image to my Apple Photos app. I also saved a copy to my photos on MyHeritage.com. Very slick and easy to use. Down near the end of the long article it does say the following:

Anyone can scan a limited number of album pages for free, to experience the power of the photo scanner. Improving a limited number of photos using the photo features is also free. Beyond that, scanning and improving an unlimited number of photos requires a subscription.

A yearly Reimagine subscription costs only $49.99 (or equivalent in local currency) and begins with a 7-day free trial, so users can experience the app before they commit. A monthly subscription costs $7.99/month and does not come with a free trial. Both plans include unlimited use of all Reimagine features.

Users with a MyHeritage Complete plan can colorize, enhance, animate, and repair unlimited photos on Reimagine, and enjoy unlimited photo storage. Scanning full album pages is a new feature that is unique to the Reimagine app, so to scan an unlimited number of photos, a subscription to Reimagine is required even for Complete subscribers. For an introductory period, we’re offering Complete subscribers a discount of 25% off the Reimagine annual plan.

If you have a number of photo albums or scrapbooks, like I have, this app can pay for itself in time saved. coupled with the online MyHeritage website expanded tagging feature, the app could pay for itself in saved time. 

Billions and Billions

 

Actually, Carl Sagan never said "billion and billions." See Wikipedia: Billions and Billions. But the number of online, digitized records is now literally in the billions and billions. Ancestry.com is claiming that they will add an additional 15 billion records to their website in 2023 after claiming to have added 5.2 billion in 2022. See https://youtu.be/MYY8tKM_zfA.  For some time, Ancestry.com has been claiming to have 30 billion records on their website. MyHeritage adds billions of new records every year and currently says that they have over 19 billion records. FamilySearch.org claims to have over 13 billion records. Findmypast.com probably has billions more and the list can go on and on. I guess I need to note that the estimates of the number of people who ever lived is about 100.8 to 121 billion. See https://www.timesnownews.com/web-stories/world/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/photostory/95430679.cms

The number of people on the earth today is also an estimate of about 8 billion. See https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ So, the number of online records in just this small group of genealogy websites is much greater than the number of people presently on the earth. Unfortunately, even with the overage of records most of the world's current population probably doesn't show up in any of the websites. One main reason being the lack of information about living people. 

In case you are thinking that the number of digitized records in the major genealogy websites has somehow made a dent in the existing records, you should also know that the overall global datasphere has exceeded 64 zettabytes. A zettabyte is 1000 exabytes and an exabyte is 1000 petabytes that is 1000 terabytes that is 1000 gigabytes. We are literally drowning in information. 

Despite the billions of records on the major genealogy websites, it is still highly likely that you will be unable to find at least some of the records that theoretically could exist about your own ancestors. But one thing the numbers do point out is that you should be aware of the content of all the major genealogy websites and not astigmatically focus on only one.  That said, it is important to realize that for the foreseeable future, there will always be more paper records locked up in archives and libraries than are available online. 

FamilySearch Investigates Facial Recognition

 Well, we are interested but don't have a lot more information other than our interest. Facial recognition is not a particularly new technology but tagging historical photos is more complicated than identifying possible relationships from. similar facial features. One genealogy program with facial recognition has a moderately low rate of accuracy. Yes, the concept is helpful but if you tell me I have a cousin that isn't much help, I have thousands, actually tens of thousands of cousins. Tagging photos is the first stage in identifying individuals in old photos. Unfortunately, I have thousands of old photos for which I have no identification. Here is an example. 

I know that this photo was likely taken by my Great-grandmother, Margaret Godfrey Jarvis Overson. I can tell approximately when the photo was taken but that is about all I can identify. Even if I knew that I was related to these people, it would not be much help. I am related to a large percentage of all the people that lived in Apache County, Arizona from pioneer times. There is also a possibility that this particular photo, which is a copy of an earlier photo, was taken by Margaret's father, Charles Godfrey DeFriez Jarvis because with the animal hide and the backdrop, this may be from a photo taken as early as the 1880s. It may also be possible that my great-grandmother was just copying the photo from someone else because she was a professional photographer and the photo was taken somewhere else and the people in the photo are not even remotely related to me. Hmm. Photo ID seems to be complicated.