How To Fix Tiny screen prints and photos

Don’t you just hate seeing those tiny newspaper items on the family tree?

I don’t mean tiny as few words. I mean tiny as not cropped to fit the screen.

I do not hate them because you cannot read them, because you can read them, if you click on them a couple of time, the image finally comes up in a large format

I hate them because the tree looks sloppy when someone does not take the time to crop around the newspaper clipping or family photo.

Well, I came across a tree that had many of these not cropped screen prints and I had to do something about it.

I created a tree and copied all the not cropped items from the Meredith tree, then put them into the created tree. I then fixed the items; cropped to fit the profile box. Link To Tree

I know she did not create these tiny screen prints; she just copied them from a tree owner who had created them; as many tree owners do, on Ancestry dot com.

Anyway, I created a tree where I could hold the tiny items and fix them for future tree owners. I then brought into the tree, the 28 or so items that looked tiny and fixed them. I then looked at some of the items and did more cropping and rearranged the text so that it would fix better into the profile boxes of the people; instead of a long news clip, the item is now a square, containing two column of the news clip.

I also put an index on the parent box; an index to the identification of the items, so that viewers could see which items fit with which person on a tree.

I did not put any information such as names and dates on the tree because I did not want people to think that it was a tree where all these people were brothers and sisters. I just numbered each item.

Here is a close up look at the items on the left side of the tree:

This is what the index looks like:

Below is a Step by Step Lesson on how to crop an item that has a lot of white space around it.

HOW TO:

You crop out the white spaces in the screen print by using the crop tool on the photo editor. Here are the steps to take, to crop, remove the white space or make the image larger.

Find the crop tool; in this case is is under Picture

You will notice small lines appear around the page.

Click on one of the black tools and move them. **Be aware that the photo will distorted if you use the middle lines so always use the corner tools and move the tool at an angle**.

When you finish moving the black corners, this is what you will see

The finished screen print will no longer have all the white area around it.

I cropped all the items I had brought into the created tree, using the above “How To” method.

Once I was satisfied with the corrections, I contacted the owner and told her about the tree that held fixed copies of the screen prints, that I found on her tree. I also sent a message to the person who initially created the items and told him about the tree with all the fixed items.

It took a while to fix the items but in the long run it was worth it. Many people will benefit from the clean items and I got a blog post idea from the effort.

Here are some of the examples of fixed items.

You will see the fixed items plus the long items I cut and rearranged to fix in a square instead of a long news clip.