Adobe Spark for Family History

Today I'm going to add to my #CrazyBusyHelps series with some tools provided from Adobe Spark.  I'm going to focus on their use from a family history angle, but certainly there are many other uses. So I've been teaching about using Adobe Spark for Family History for a few years now and I really do love it, so I thought blogging about it was long overdue.

Adobe Spark has 3 different projects you can create, posts, pages and videos.  I've used all three for Family History purposes and I'll give you a quick example of each:

GRAPHIC
Are the easiest and quickest creations you can make, basically think of it as creating a meme, collage or social media post of some kind.  I've used it mostly for making images to go along with my posts on the blog but my friend Jana Greenhaulgh from the Genealogy Kids blog gave me the idea of creating posts for holiday's and other events to share with your family about their ancestors.  There are many ideas out there, but here are just a couple of fun ways you could use it for family history.

WEB PAGE
This is my favorite tool from Adobe Spark for my family history projects, mainly because it creates a more interactive experience for those you share it with.  Think of it as a webpage dedicated to your ancestor with links, videos, text and pictures, all displayed with beautiful pan and zooming type of effects.
In this case, I've put together a sample from the story of my grandmother's life.  I love how easy the pages are to create, how beautiful they are in their output form, and how easy Adobe makes it for me to share it when I'm ready.



VIDEO
Admittedly, this is the tool I use the least, but it is very easy to use, and a free tool for making videos so it definitely worth considering for your family history projects.  My example here is just one I threw together as an example really quick but as you explore the features I'm certain you'll find more ideas for how this video tool could help you share some of those family stories in a more engaging way than just typing out a story.  You can use simple add and import features to build a beautiful simple video using this tool.



Best features:

• Easy to use, it's a very simple interface
• It's FREE
• Live links that you can share with anyone

There are a few limitations to using Adobe the two main ones are the lack of collaborative tools, which may be just fine for some of you, the second is the lack of a trash feature.  Learn from my mistakes and just don't hit "delete" because once you do, it's gone forever, sadly.  I thought I was deleting an incomplete duplication of my project and accidentally deleted the completed version, I was devastated and had to rebuild, so learn from my mistake. :)