77 | Photo Curation with Haleh Shoa

We often find ourselves drowning in a sea of photos—both physical and digital. From cherished family moments to snapshots of everyday life, these images are precious. But how do we make sense of it all? 

In this episode, we’re discussing the art of photo curation and preservation with Haleh Shoa, the founder and CEO of Picturli. Join me as Haleh shares her journey from advertising to creating a business that helps families transform their photo collections into organized, searchable digital libraries. She also explains the significance of understanding technology levels, and the process of working backwards to achieve your photo organization goals. 

Whether you have boxes of old photos or thousands of digital images, this episode is packed with valuable insights to help you preserve your family memories for generations to come. Tune in now to hear more from Haleh and discover how you can start preserving your family memories today. 

And join me as I extend an open invitation to you—to be part of the "100 Hours of Listening" initiative. Whether you're a friend, past client, silent listener, or a fellow professional, your voice matters. This isn't a sales pitch or a consultation; it's an opportunity for you to be heard, without cost or obligation, in a non-judgmental space.

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Transcript

Intro: Welcome to A Pleasant Solution, Embracing An Organized Life. I'm your host, certified life coach, professional organizer and home life expert, Amelia Pleasant Kennedy and I help folks permanently eliminate clutter in their homes and lives. On this podcast we'll go beyond the basics of home organization to talk about why a clutter-free mindset is essential to an aligned and sustainable lifestyle. If you're someone with a to-do list, if you're managing a household and if you're caring for others, this podcast is for you. Let's dive in.

Amelia:  Welcome to Episode 77, “Photo Curation with Haleh Shoa.”

Haleh Shoa is the Founder and CEO of Picturli: a photo organization, curation, archiving, and design studio that helps families, individuals, and businesses transform their chaotic mess of photos into one clear and cohesive digital library. Haleh and her team meticulously organize their clients’ photo collections into a searchable, secure, and easily shareable photo archive. Haleh believes that family histories and personal memories are some of the most valuable treasures that exist and that preserving and sharing them is crucial for future generations.

Amelia: So welcome to the podcast, Haleh. You and I, we met at this year's annual summit of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals. We met for a follow up kind of virtual coffee afterwards, where I learned that you had a long career in advertising before growing the photo curation business that you have now. And I loved learning that you have a full team, and they're all kind of featured on your website. You share their bios and their information. You have a full team working to preserve family stories. And I haven't talked about this topic on the podcast before.

Haleh: Thank you.

Amelia: So I'm really excited to learn from you. Tell the folks a little bit about yourself.

Haleh: First of all, thank you so much for inviting me on your podcast. I'm really excited to be here. And I, yeah, and so I basically started this business in 2016 when I was still working in advertising and it really came from my heart. I really loved preserving my own family history, which I didn't even really realize that that's what I was doing.

When I was in my mid twenties working in advertising, I sort of started getting really interested in my own childhood photos and looking through some of the albums that my parents had brought over, which was basically the only thing they brought from Iran during the Iranian Revolution. And, you know, as I was thumbing through those, there were so many family members that I, you know, like my dad's cousins or my dad's side of the family who I'd never met before. 

So I started getting more and more interested in who they were, what their personalities were. And because I had access to high res scanning, I was able to start really archiving those memories and being able to share them with my family who live on four continents. So I would start emailing them out and it would just really bring out so much conversation and so much joy and a lot of curiosity as well. So it was just, it's been such a beautiful journey in the last 30 years or so that I've been working on my own family stuff. You know, since I was five.

Amelia: And that is such a special moment, right? Being able to connect family members across four continents, that is super impressive. And you just kind of touched on the Iranian Revolution and leaving and coming to the United States. So I would love to kind of ground our conversation in my question that I ask all of my guests, which is what did organization look like for you during your early childhood or perhaps even after you arrived in the States?

Haleh: You know, that's such a good question. So much of that is contextual, culturally. You know, in Iran, we did not have a lot of stuff. We just didn't. I don't remember. Like, I know I had a lot of things that were hand -me -downs for my older sister, who was six years older than me. And a lot of that was made by hand by my mom, whether it was something that was knit, something that was sewn by either my mom or one of my aunts for us.

So what we had wasn't really purchased. It was all sort of handmade. And I don't remember any clutter in our house. You know, the other thing my mother always says, if you want your house to always be clean, always have guests over. So I literally lived in, I don't even remember my parents because I was always around my cousins. I was always at an aunt or uncle's house or they were over and we were just always mingling together. 

So in terms of organization, I just know that we didn't have a lot of stuff and I know that I don't recall ever being overwhelmed with anything either in my room, which I always shared with another family member or even in my parents' room. I think that the notion of sort of clutter and abundance,or what we thought like, I could have anything is when we were here and my mom would start going to a garage sale and saying, I have to have this last 50 cents. And then every day times 10, you know, every weekend. But in terms of my childhood, there was not a lot of stuff and it, it seems really amazing. Even with toys, we didn't even really have that many toys.

Amelia: I really appreciate you sharing that element of the cultural context because it is so valuable and important because it sounds like everything was handmade, made with love, essential, needed, wanted. And when we talk about clutter and overabundance, it's often when we get to the point where we have more than we need or use. So that's just, yeah, manage. Exactly. Exactly. 

Which brings us to this topic of photos, because so many people in the digital age feel like they cannot manage the photos that they have. So when I am working with folks virtually on an organization project, I often start with defining our goal or our end point and then working backwards. Another way of saying this is that I encourage folks to start at the end because by identifying where something will live or be stored, we can then build a system or process to support that goal.

So I'm curious, would you say that photo curation and organization is a similar process, like that idea of working backwards?

Haleh: Yep, similarly to you, we do the exact same thing. When I start working with the client, we do three things at the beginning of every project. One is to understand their level of technology. You know, are they comfortable with technology, whether it is on the computer or on their phone, or if they're comfortable with one and not the other, whether the technology speaks to each other, meaning the client has an iPhone, but if all their computers is PC, so they're not really speaking to each other. So we have different scenarios. So we understand that first. 

And then the second thing is, of course, understanding what their goal is. Like if you were to close your eyes and wish upon a star what your photo collection would look like, what is that? Is it something that you can easily access and be able to pull up in a nanosecond? Is it something that can be shared with your entire family, cousins, aunts, uncles. Is it something that can be passed onto future generations? And typically what they end up getting is something that actually checks all those boxes. But for us to understand what it is, it's really, you know, I have clients actually who just want photo books. So,

They're like, yeah, I know I take a lot of photos, but I just want a photo book from 2022. So, you know, we have to go through 75,000 photos that they have taken and pick five to 700 and then choose from that five or 700 to make a photo album. So it really depends on what the client's goals are and how they want to access and how they want to enjoy.

Amelia: Yeah, so it is somewhat similar in that idea of working backwards. So whether it's a hardcover, beautiful luxury book or a digital file on their phone that they have curated, as you said, with you, cleared out the clutter and landed on those essential photos.

Haleh: Mm -hmm.

Amelia: So I would love to shift a little bit to talk about some of the larger projects you work on. I mean, you just mentioned a personal project, 75,000 photos. For instance, you have the ability to support institutions and projects across multiple family members or extended family members.

Share with us a little bit about how in those situations, you get several folks to collaborate together to curate that particular project.

Haleh: Mm -hmm. So in terms of collaboration, we typically have one point of contact. It's just easier for them and for us. However, we do advise them to really start getting some of the elders involved. A, they love talking to the younger folk in their family. B, they have a lot of sort of historical knowledge of what had happened, even though your aunt A's memory may be entirely different from your aunt B's memory, which we've seen. But it's still really fun to be able to get them involved, to sort of start recording that family history. And even that conversation in and of itself, like at that moment, is making family history to talk about some of the older photos. 

We start every single project with a family chart. So we try to collect the full names of everyone and their birthday, the date of passing, wedding, engagement, whatever it is that we may find in their photos so that we can make sure to embed that information into their library. What that means is when we collect a large collection from, when we gather a large collection from, let's say a family and there's 45 boxes or 50 albums, whatever it is, we make sure that we organize everything chronologically so that when it's archived and scanned, we can rename and redate the files so their library at the end is searchable and sortable. And we found that this methodology that we've used for every single one of our clients really renders a library that is able to be digested easily.

Because imagine you can, you may be able to give me 75,000 pieces of, whether it comes from albums or loose photos or slides or negatives, we make sense of all of that. And, and, and sort of that's where that's where working with us differentiates us from working with like a scanning company, right? Cause we would never give our clients IMG two, three, four, like it's going to say, you know, 1965 Christmas. So you know like when you search for Christmas you can see all the different years of Christmas photos that you have. So, so and so we do….

Amelia: I just, I want to pause here for a second and say that like, I just took a deep breath because anyone listening, right? What you do is so valuable because we are the image takers, right? We go out, we take all these great shots and then they just kind of sit there in a box or on our phones and you bring sense and order to them as well as make them searchable, accessible, easy to find. And immediately I was like, “I need that.” Like that just sounds lovely. Like to be able to search for a particular year or person or celebration. So, I know I interrupted you, but I just wanted to share, like, listening to you. I'm like, “Yes, please!”

Haleh: Yeah, it's definitely something a lot of people, pretty much everyone needs. Everyone needs to at least have their analog stuff digitized. And we all have digital clutter and we can definitely talk about that because it is really clutter. Our phones hold so many great memories, but it also holds so much clutter. All the screenshots, whether accidental or something that you saw on Instagram that you didn't want to forget about that you still forgot about. All the, you know, the burst shots that we took accidentally that was in our phone and I don't know, it was hitting something in our purses or in our hands. The accidental slo -mos that we took that, you know, there's so many things that we take photos of that don't necessarily tell the story of our lives along the side of photos and videos that do tell the story of our lives. So we have a lot of different tips and tricks on how to clean that up.

Amelia: And we will get to those in just a second because I really want listeners to have some clear takeaways of things that they can do or not do to make their own digital and analog photo legacy take shape. So real talk, I have no photos from my son's birth year through that first year of life - from zero to 12 months. They disappeared during a technology upgrade in 2010, 2009, back in the day. So I have all those thoughts and feelings. So I want to offer and ask you, what are a few of the common mistakes that you see folks make when it comes to either physical storage or then maybe digital storage as well?

Haleh: Thank you for asking that extremely important question. And I am, my heart hurts listening to what you're saying. Literally like, I'm like, my heart's hurting for you. And I, you know, let's go to analog. So analog meaning your physical photos and videos and films and slides and negatives, anything that you can touch and feel. All of our memories like to live where we live.

They don't like to live in the garage. They don't like to live in the attic. They don't like to live in the basement. They want to be in the temperature that humans are comfortable in and in the humidity that humans are comfortable in, in the dryness that humans are comfortable in, et cetera. So I highly, highly recommend that if you have a ton of boxes that are living in the attic and you live in a very humid area, just take those out of the attic because they will ultimately start developing mold if they haven't already. 

If you live in a super dry area, say Arizona, or one of those super dry states, your transmissive media, meaning your negatives and your slides will start to really dry up and crumble. So I'm not gonna go into details, but if you have the opportunity please bring your memories inside the house, put them in a closet, on the side of the room. And hopefully this conversation will inspire you to start going through them and perhaps hiring a photo manager to help you archive them. So that's about the analog. So the digital, most important thing to note is the difference between sync and backup. 

So my guess is your photos were neither synced or backed up. So you probably had a digital camera that had an SD card on it. You'd bring it home, super excited that your son was born and put the SD card in there. It would all download to, let's say the old iPhotos library, right? And back in the day, there wasn't this knowledge of making sure that iCloud is turned on so that your items are synced to the cloud. 

And I just want to pause here and explain the difference between backup and sync. A sync is a two-way highway. So you take your phone and take a video or camera. If you have access to any kind of internet, whether it's through mobile data or through Wi -Fi, it pushes it up to the cloud. But as soon as you delete something here, it deletes it from there. And let's say you access what's in the cloud and you're going through your things. And if you delete something there, it will automatically delete here. So it's a two-way highway. 

And conversely, a backup is a one-way highway. So on your phone, you can, if you have access to Dropbox or if you have that platform already and you pay for it, you can download the Dropbox app on your phone and turn on camera uploads. What that does is every photo you take, and yes, even including all the clutter, every photo that you take, it will automatically get backed up to the camera uploaded to Dropbox.

And that is a one-way highway. You could go into Dropbox, most people don't, you could go into Dropbox and start deleting things. And yes, it will delete it from here, but it's not really a photos app per se. So that could be one of your backups. A true backup is if you download all of your assets, either from Google, iCloud, Amazon, Dropbox, wherever it is, onto an external hard drive. Make sure that the external hard drive is duplicated.

So one of them can live off site. In case you do have a disaster, God forbid, at home, you have access to that. And I tend to keep everything sort of in different cloud services for different purposes. Personally, I take, now I have an iPhone before I had an Android, so I was on the Google platform.

I am on all the platforms because I have to be anyway, because this is my business. So this I call, what I take with my phone, I call the intake. And then the outtake is when I download everything, I curate it, meaning I take out all the shampoo bottles, the receipts, the accidental screenshots, my husband's accidental, a million accidental screenshots that he takes. I cleaned it all up.

I take the best of it and I put that somewhere else. I have a family website that we make for our clients. I have one for me and I put it over there. So that is like, that's something that I've created for all of our clients and as well as myself. So I don't really worry about what's on my iPhone anymore because I know that I have a system of downloading it, cleaning it up and backing it up somewhere else.

Amelia: That is a true measure of trust in your process and system. And for everyone listening, we probably don't have that routine, but thank you for clarifying that difference between a sync and a backup and the importance of perhaps having an external hard drive or a Dropbox where things are stored more permanently so that we don't accidentally erase those essential photos that we want to keep or memorabilia. 

So you are an expert and I would love for you to share, you know, a few questions that listeners might want to seek answers to or qualifications that they should look for when vetting a photo digitizing or organization service.

Haleh: That's a really good question. The question a lot of people have is, where do I begin? And you begin with gathering everything that you have. If you want to work on your analog stuff, you begin by gathering all of your photo albums, everything in envelopes, and go through your drawers. We have so many, almost every client, you know, we go and pick up all their stuff and they'll call us a week later, I'll find another box.

Of course you did. And that's okay. But you begin at the beginning. You begin with gathering everything. And that's the first process, whether you work with yourself, if you wanna tackle this yourself, or you work with a different company. In terms of asking the right questions, we have a pretty extensive FAQ section on our website in terms of if you really wanna geek out and understand, we follow the Library of Congress way of scanning everything. So if you scan with my company, we camera scan most items. And that is for several reasons, but it's basically the way museums archive all of their materials. And so you want to understand how they scan it and what you get back. Typically for photographs, it should be 600 DPI and for transmissive media you know, slides and negatives, it should be 4,000 PPI. I think our scans supersede that even. It's not necessary, but we do. And the reason for that is, let's say you want to make a photo album or blow something up, you want to make sure that that scan is done correctly so you don't go back to that original item and have to re -scan it now to be able to blow it up or use it in a book. So that's one thing to look for. 

A second thing to look for is, does the company that you will work with, do they offer curation? I think that's so important. I mean, there's so many companies and photo organizers that help families to organize their stuff, meaning they will download your Dropbox, your Google Photos, your iCloud, everything on your computer on old SD cards on DVDs, CDs, everywhere that you could potentially have any kind of digital assets. But many of them don't curate that for you. So they'll perhaps take out all the duplicates for you, put it in year month folders, if that's your goal. But then you may end up, and you will end up with all the receipts and the, you know, all the clutter, essentially. 

Amelia: Yeah, so to be clear, you mean by curate, just to define for listeners, highlighting the best and most desired images or media and letting go of the clutter.

Haleh: Exactly. Or there's two ways of curating. One approach is to go through and only keep the best of. Another approach is to go through and take out the clutter. What do I mean by that? So any one of us, whether you're on Google, Apple, or Amazon, we're able to go on our phones and go into the area on iPhone. It's under albums. If you go into your iPhone and go into your iPhone,

into your photos app, go under albums and scroll all the way down. Now, if you have the latest upgrade, it will tell you, hey, you have 2,395 duplicates. And you're able to click on that and have the system take out your duplicates. And I trust Apple's duplicate because it's the exact duplicate that it's taking out. So take out your duplicates. You can also go into screenshots.

So Apple does this amazing thing where it organizes everything sort of by type, if you will. So if you go into screenshots, you can see all your screenshots and you can basically highlight all of them and delete them. Because most likely you probably don't want them. You know, you can go into your slow-mos. A lot of people take slow-mo videos and they don't realize, oops, those are all mistakes. You know, or even the other one, the one that's really super fast which I loved, time-lapse, I loved it. I personally love it, so I wasn't time-lapsed, but you can essentially start curating your own library by taking out the clutter. These are some of the strategies that we actually teach our clients moving forward is that you can do this right on your phone. It's a lot easier to do it on the computer, but you have access to that on your phone to be able to delete some of these sort of categorical mistakes that we make.

Amelia: And just one tip that I will add is the way that I do this, and I don't spend a ton of time sorting through my photos, but I love that idea of going into screenshots, going into the various folders. While I have dead space in my calendar, and what I mean by that is when I am standing in line at the grocery store and there's a long line, I can go through 10, 20, 30, 40 photos and delete what I don't need. When I'm waiting at the doctor's office, for example, and you know, I'm sitting there for 20 minutes. Of course I can scroll social media or I can curate and kind of cull through my photos. So if you're listening to this episode and you're thinking like, when would I ever have time to go in and do that?

Haleh: Thank you.

Amelia: Think about those moments where you're sitting in your car waiting to pick up your kid, for example, and even five minutes here, 10 minutes there can really make a difference over the long term of your organization, especially in that, obviously, the digital format versus the physical format.

Haleh:  I love this tip so much, I love it. And also like the doom scroll. Like I find myself, I'm gonna relax, so I'm gonna go on Instagram. You know, I love that. You know, make those quiet moments a little bit more productive. I love that.

Amelia: Yeah, and you get to see your recent or past history and like, you know, smile a bit because of past memories. So I'd love to wrap up our conversation now by asking you outside of your business, maybe in your personal life, what's one creative way you employ organization, however you define that, now as an adult?

Haleh: Yeah, yeah.

I love that question. I love to cook. So that's like one of my passions. And so my kitchen has to be organized because when I'm in the groove, when I'm in the flow in the kitchen, I need to know where everything is. And if something is out of sorts, perhaps the husband put it in the wrong drawer or maybe my cleaning person. You know.

I get a little discombobulated. So my kitchen's very, very organized. Also, my house is the size of this table. So I actually can't even think about buying anything extra. And that's why I actually appreciate the tight space that we have, because it really makes you think, do I really need this whatever it is that I really want to buy? Because I don't have space for it. So.

So my kitchen is always very nicely stocked and very organized. And I can, in my tiny little home, I can easily feed and do a meal for 30 people.

Amelia: I love how purposeful and intentional that is because it shows that you're thoughtful and have the kind of filter when you're out shopping or like, you know, do I have space for this? Can I use it? As well as just the generous nature of I have exactly what I need and can produce a meal that serves anyone who pops by. 

So we'll have to definitely connect in person, Haleh. Thank you so much for chatting with me today. I would love for you to share how folks can connect with you and learn more about your services and give your website and your socials, all the things.

Haleh: I would love that.

Haleh: Yeah, absolutely. Please follow us on Instagram. It's just @picturlii, P -I -C -T -U -R -L -I, spelled a little differently than what your brain wants, how your brain wants to spell it. We do a lot of great content on there that is super helpful. Some of these tips and tricks will be shown on our Instagram. I've also created a seven step guide for you to be able to, if you sign up on our newsletter, which I do and I don't have a lot of time, so you won't really get slammed by me that much, but we try to keep it super helpful and very educational when we do send out our newsletters, but you can sign up on pictureli.com/podcast. And I also offer a 20 minute complimentary consult, which you can also book on our website. 

But yeah, I just want to say, Amelia, thank you so much for having me. And for those listeners who don't know, Amelia is incredibly generous for every guest she brings on. It gives me, it just fills my heart with so much joy that I am talking to someone with such a generous spirit. So I really, really appreciate you. I really appreciate your generosity and it's been so much fun talking to you.

Amelia: Thank you so much. And yes, it is really one of the core values of A Pleasant Solution to give back. And you have given your time. And in exchange, I donate to one of three organizations that are very meaningful to me. So Haleh, it's been a pleasure.

Outro: Hey y'all, share the love. Remember, if you've had at least one valuable takeaway from this episode, someone else will too. I'd encourage you to share it with like-minded folks and suggest they follow the podcast too. I truly appreciate your time and I don't take it for granted.