I love talking to people about digital legacy. It’s a new problem, a product of the digital age that hasn’t had much consideration — how do you organize, safeguard and pass on stuff you can’t touch, like memories? So far, there are few solutions.
Ancient humans told stories around the cook fire. Later, we took photographs to make memories tangible as they happened. We organized these into family albums, then got more creative with scrapbooks.
But today, though we capture and share our memories like never before (we took over 1 trillion photos in 2015), most of them are intangible. Most of our pictures are somewhere in social media, websites, or cloud services like Flickr, Google Photos, Apple Photos and Dropbox. We’re creating the most comprehensive data trail of any generation, yet we’re still in the infancy of managing our digital legacy.
Take a moment and consider these important questions:
- Have I considered my digital legacy?
- Where do my precious memories and stories live?
- How will I pass on my story to my family and my friends?
- Am I in control of my life story?
If you didn’t have an immediate answer to any (or all) of the above, you’re not alone. Most of us are too busy living for today and planning for the future to spend time organizing our past in pictures. But if we entrust apps and cloud services to do the work for us, we’re letting algorithms and businesses define our life stories.
Gather and Protect your Digital Legacy with Mylio
At Mylio, we’ve been in the business of changing the way the world remembers since 2013. Mylio is an app you can install on all your Apple (macOS, iOS), Windows and Android devices to bring all your digital photos into one library so you can access, edit, organize, protect and share from any connected device. If you haven’t tried Mylio for yourself, you can download Mylio for free now, or download the 30-day trial of the full-featured MylioMax.
Done? All set? Now that you have all your photos organized and protected, it’s time to tell your story. Mylio recently introduced a new feature in Version 1.8 (released May 2016) to make this easier than ever before. Introducing: Events.
Here’s a short video overview:
What are Events in Mylio?
One of the most useful and popular views in Mylio is the Calendar, and with Events layered over it to give it context, now it’s even better. Events connect you to your past, present and future using time ranges relating to the memorable events in your life. Mylio’s Events give you a new way to view all the files in your library — photos, videos and PDFs — by grouping them into the time windows you set:
These Event time windows can span a minute or a decade, depending on how you choose to set them up. Just like Life, some important events are brief (like a romantic evening), while others will span years (like going to college). Now you can define the memories that matter most, and see all related photos and files collected automatically.
Events vs. Folders vs. Albums in Mylio
Until now, Mylio users have been using folders and albums to keep things in order, and these haven’t gone away. Folders are a great way to view and edit the real file system on your computer, with those edits changing how your files are stored on your hard drive. Albums, on the other hand, allow you to collect selected files without changing their saved location on the drive. While each of these systems are useful in their own ways, both are very manual processes. Events offers a faster way to view all files that were created during a significant event or period of time. Simply add the event start and end date, and all files in that range are gathered automatically and immediately. In the example below, I’ve created three Events: Getting Married, Honeymoon, and Birth of Son (yes, in that order).
Using Event Categories
Most of our memories are related to different areas of our life like Family, Travel and Work. Mylio gives you the option to group the Events you add into categories and prioritize the events that you care about the most. Your highest priority categories determine the first events to be listed when you go to Calendar View with Events enabled.
Tip: You can edit categories as you create Events. Click on the word Other, the default category, to open the category list. Click on the gear icon on the right of any category to edit or move it in the order. Click Add to create a new custom category.
Viewing Your Life Calendar
Calendar View offers a way to view files by decade, year, month or day as one continuous timeline. With Events turned on, colored bars show up with the Event name on any dates that correspond to the events you’ve entered.
There it is: your life story! (Though technically, this one’s mine).
You can zoom in to the moments that matter most, making it faster than ever to share your stories. Something coming up on the horizon? You can enter future events before they happen, and they’ll be populated with your images when they arrive.
Protecting Your Digital Legacy
Now that you have a Life Calendar, it’s important that you protect it, backing up your original photos and all the Events information. Mylio helps you do this by showing your protection state in a Protection box in the top left of the interface. To earn the green protection shield that tells you your files and data are safe, you’ll need to have all your originals and your Mylio catalog information on at least two devices. One of the easiest setups for this uses a computer and a USB hard drive that you designate to store your originals. Rather than cover this process in detail here, I recommend you check out the protection instructions on Mylio’s amazing support website.
Mylio and the new Events feature give you the peace of mind to answer the important questions about your Digital Legacy. You can know where your original files are, know they’re backed up, see them collected into a beautiful Life Calendar, and access and share your stories from any device, any time.
If you’re giving Events in Mylio a try, we’d love your feedback. Please share your thoughts with us using the feedback form on our Reviews page. Your thoughts will help us continue to improve how Mylio manages and protects your digital legacy.