Is your life cluttered with mountains of family photos, both digital and physical, that you’ve been meaning to organize but can’t find the time or know where to start?
Meet Kimberly Melton, founder of Visual Story Media and a rising star in the world of photo organizing. Recently featured on The Debbie Nigro Show, Kimberly shared her passion for helping people bring order to their chaotic photo collections.
Kimberly, based in Charlotte, NC, has a background in marketing and project management. In 2020, she discovered the art of photo management and hasn’t looked back. Recognized by the National Association of Women Business Owners as a “Rising Star,” Kimberly has become a go-to expert for organizing both digital and paper photos.
Why Organize Your Photos?
Kimberly explains that sorting through years of photos can be overwhelming—especially when memories, both joyful and bittersweet, resurface. Visual Story Media offers a range of services to help you organize and share your treasured photos. Whether you want guidance on how to do it yourself or prefer to hand over boxes of photos and let Kimberly’s team handle it all, there’s a solution for everyone.
Services Offered by Visual Story Media
Visual Story Media provides:
1. Digital organization for smartphone photos.
2. Physical-to-digital conversion for old photos.
3. VHS and DVD conversion for videos and slideshows.
4. Customized photo books, perfect for sharing memories with family during holidays.
For those facing unique situations, like dividing family photos after a divorce, Kimberly offers solutions to ensure everyone gets fair access to memories. With Visual Story Media, preserving and sharing your family’s legacy has never been easier.
As Kimberly says, “Delete is not a dirty word”—sometimes the first step in organizing is simply letting go of what’s unnecessary. For anyone ready to dive into organizing their photo collection, Visual Story Media can make it a manageable and even enjoyable journey.
Meet Kimberly and get some great photo organizing motivation in this podcast of our live conversation on The Debbie Nigro Show. If you’d rather read than listen the transcript of the audio is below.
Visit VisualStoryMedia.co to learn more about Kimberly’s services and get started on creating organized, shareable memories that last.
AUDIO TRANSCRIPT:
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And now, back to the Debbie Nigro Show.
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Music
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Alright, the time has come for me to solve a major problem in my life. Hi everybody, I’m Debbie Nigro and I enlisted now a new guest to join us right now because I’m pretty good at picking out stars and this woman, Kimberly Melton, is the star, in my opinion, of the photo organizing world. Her company is Visual Story Media. I came across her and read everything about her.
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I was like, OMG, I need this woman. So I’m inviting you to just listen along if your life is cluttered with family photos, digital media, stuff you’ve been meaning to organize and just can’t seem to get done without help. Help me, Kimberly. How are you today?
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Can I be up in here, Debra?
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have you. I am pleased to introduce you to my audience. I know that you are a Charlotte, North Carolina girl and your roots go back to Chicago too and you have a nice daughter. I read everything about you. But I also realize that you only got into this photo management journey in 2020 and somehow you’re a rising star. The NABO, the National Association of Women Business Owners nominated you for the Rising Star Award which is really to celebrate your entrepreneurial creativity and determination in managing a business that’s less than five years old.
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You rose quick. What brought you this direction?
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Well, I have a wonderful what I call a renaissance background. I’ve been in marketing and management and I’m a project manager and various things like that. And when I heard there is an organization called the Photo Managers, and I heard Kathy Nelson talk about the Photo Managers, I went, oh my God, this is like right up my alley. I started doing genealogy with my grandmother when I was in fourth grade,
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And that’s something that she and I, you know, love to do. And my love of old photos and things like that. And also the project manager in me wants to help people find an easy way to get their photos organized. And when I say photos, though, I mean digital and paper.
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0:02:43
Wow. I think you’re hitting a nerve with a lot of people. I think you went in the right direction. direction as a professional organizer, you give people options about how they want to go about this and they range from let you handle the whole thing to let me just give you advice and down the road. Now this morning, in your honor, I made a little photo montage to put up on my social
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media. I went and got all the pictures that are holding me up and there’s millions of them and as I was making the photo montage, I was going down the rabbit hole of memories. And that was beautiful, painful, ridiculous, and that’s part of the problem, as I understand, why people can’t do this photo organizing thing themselves. They lose it.
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Well, I look at a photo for the beauty of the photo itself. I have no memory behind it when I’m working with people’s photos. But the other thing is, when you open up that box or open up that closet or pull out that box from under the bed, where do you start? How do you do it? It’s not as intuitive. One of the things I’ve found is so many people feel like, oh, everybody else is organized.
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Everybody else knows how to do this. And that is just not the case. It’s not as intuitive as it sounds to do your photos because everybody’s goals are different. Some people just want to organize them so they can give an organized packet to their children. Some people just want to get rid of some photos. Everybody’s got a little bit different flint. So what we do as photo organizers is we help people understand what their goals are and then how to achieve it.
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But let me talk about photo organizers for a moment. I belong to an international organization called the Photo Managers. So they are phenomenal worldwide. And you can go on to the Photo Managers site and find a photo manager in your area. So that’s even better. Or, you know, of course, if you want me, you can choose me too. And what we do is help you figure out how to organize your photos, how to share them with family and friends. A lot of people don’t understand that there are photo sites where you can share your photos with your whole family. So you’re not the only one that has a picture of Aunt Mildred or your mom and dad’s
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wedding. You know, you want the whole family to have access to that. So this is a wonderful opportunity to do that, and the photo managers can help. And what I do is I help my clients find out what their goals are and then we figure out a way to achieve them and then we work on it together. And as you well pointed out at the beginning of the show, I do it in different ways with
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different people. Some people do want, hey, a coach once a month, hey, did you do this? You said you were going to do it last month.
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Have you achieved that goal?
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Yes.
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You know, and then some people just want to hand you three very heavy boxes full of 6,000, 8,000, 10,000 photos and say, just do it. Just do it. Just handle it.
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I got to ask you a question. When you look at somebody else’s photos, you get a big box of photos or two boxes or three boxes and some of it is black and white and some of it is colored, some are on reel, some might be digital, I mean, who knows what. Where do you even begin? What is your, what are you trying, how do you absorb it all?
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You have to look at every single picture, obviously, right? And get to know this person’s family?
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Well, what a great question. So, I’m going to use an example of a family that I did where the family had seven kids, father was 95, and they just wanted, and the kids were all over the world, literally, and they wanted to get these pictures organized. So the first thing I did was divide the pictures by their size, because every size is a period in time.
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So if you look in your brain at an old picture that has the filigree edges, that’s gonna be different than that second iteration, which is the black and white photo with the white bar all the way around it. Then we go into color and then there’s squares, there’s rounded edges. So what I do, especially when it’s sometimes I just
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get a very large box and photos are thrown in there. And I divide them up like that. Then of course remember that your albums are a snapshot in time. So you know we had it easy back then, but do you, hey, I got a, here, I got a question for you. Do you know when the first camera phone came out?
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Yes.
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Camera phone, I don’t know the answer to that. Yeah, 2000.
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Okay, that’s a long time ago.
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It seems like a long time ago for sure.
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So, just if you think about it like that, the digital rose after the camera phone and the film fell. So, what we used to do with E-C, you had your 12, 24, 36 exposure, you took it to the photo mat, you got it developed, you came home and you did two things. Either A, you put it in an album, or B, you just left it in that little packet and put it in your little box.
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the beginning of the digital photography craze, 24 years later, almost 25, people’s phones are full of digital photos they’ve done nothing with. How do you incorporate those photos into the past photos or are they two separate worlds?
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Okay, so the first thing I want you to help me with this, I want you to repeat this after me. Delete is not a dirty word. So just think about it like this, you need to go pick a delete date. This is one of the things I do in my classes and with my clients. Delete is not a dirty word. I give you permission. So deleting is super important. And you need to figure out what works best for you. That may be every Sunday like me. It might be the first or the 15th. But you need to go through that camera roll and shrink down. There are wonderful tools to do that. Olli is a great tool and I’m happy to share that with everybody. It’s on my website. And but then what you do is you digitize your paper photos.
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And you can even add tags or keywords. And what that is is the information that goes in each digital file. Like it was taken on this day. It was taken at your Aunt Mildred’s house. It was the birthday party.
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It was of your daughter Casey, you know, all those kinds of things can be put in there. That way, you can find the photo. A photo that you can’t find just doesn’t really exist. I mean, so you have to help yourself understand how to find them later. And then you put the whole thing together and put it on a photo storage site so everybody can share it. You and your family all have access to these beautiful photos.
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Okay. Well, how about this idea? What do you think about all the photo books and the book offers that keep coming in, mixed tiles and CVS, how you can make digital… Should people make photo books and just throw out the photos after a theme is complete or pictures of a trip is complete? What do you think about that?
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I wouldn’t think so, because you can use those photos another way. The photo book is just a wonderful way. You know, the photo book is the new album. When I was a little girl, I sat on the front porch, and my grandmother told me some stories
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of people in this album of my grandparents, et cetera. Well, we stopped creating the album and now we don’t share the stories of those pictures. And that’s what’s important. I really encourage all your incredible listeners to start thinking about creating photo books so that you can share them. I happen to use multiple companies in the books that I use because every photo book
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is different in what you want to achieve with it. Thick pages, thin pages, beautiful covers, whatever. But just create that story and share them with your friends. I had a client last Christmas with three grown children. They put together, mom and dad, a photo book for each of the kids of their pictures. He said it was just incredible.
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All three grown kids sat around all Christmas Day talking about the stories that they associated with each of those pictures. You couldn’t believe it.
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Yes, photos are memories that create stories. And just this morning, while I was making my little montage in your honor of welcoming you to the show, my other half, Dave, I went over to him and said, look, look at the parties my father used to throw at the house. He was something else. It took me back to a really crazy, fun, commotion-filled time of my life. I said, you know, I’m living a very quiet life. I’ve got to stop that,
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I said. So you’re right. Every photo has a story behind it that has an emotion, that has conversation. So you’re making a very, very good point. Maybe everybody listening should get some photos together for the upcoming holidays and do like you said. But the overwhelm from collecting decades of photos, which I think is generational since obviously, we started having digital photography in 2000,
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thank you very much, Kimberly. But everybody who’s been around for a while has probably had this moment where, what do you do with this? And then as people pass, parents, grandparents, there’s always the photos, who gets the family photos.
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And it’s a job to accept them. I think you’ve done a great job of becoming a professional at this and have some awesome suggestions for people. Let’s go through again what your company, Visual Story Media, can do for people. I know you do old media conversion. That’s a great idea.
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I think you’ve done a great job of getting people to understand what you’re doing. I think you’ve done a great job of getting people to understand what you’re doing. I think you’ve done a great job of getting people to understand what you’re doing.
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company Visual Story Media can do for people? I know you do old media conversion that might be great. We do, I’m going to say four things. We help people with their digital images and getting organized on their phone. We help people transfer their paper photos to digital images so they can be shared. We transfer VHS, DVD, and we also help people do slideshows or videos of and photo books from those photos. So, and then they can be shared just as you pointed out.
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And your voice actually changed when you started talking about going over those memories of photos. And I want people to be able to share their memories of the photos they have with others.
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Yeah, and one last thing I want to bring up that you do that’s very unique, you know, there’s a lot of unfortunately divorce in our culture and you have figured out a way to help people share memories equitably through photo duplication when, you know, you go through the roller coaster and everybody should have access to the photos from the time when especially for the kids. Okay, Kimberly, time well spent, my friend.
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Thank you so much for being on my show.
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I am so excited to talk to you.
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Thank you so much. Thank you. VisualStoryMedia.com. And then, you know, Kimberly, I put her picture up. It is.co? All right.
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VisualStoryMedia.com. I thought I had a typo. And Kimberly Melton, I put up her picture and her contact information on all my social media. We’ll have the podcast afterwards for those of you who may have missed it. Thanks so much, Kimberly.
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Thanks so much, Kimberly. Have a wonderful day.
Transcribed with Cockatoo
