#TBT Guide - What to Look For in Yearbooks

#TBT is otherwise known as #ThrowbackThursday, and also otherwise known as #MyFavoriteDayoftheWeek.
If your school isn’t sharing these fun blast-from-the-past photos on your social media pages yet, it should be. This is a great way to engage alumni and community members in reliving the old “glory days.” And it’s likely to become your favorite day of the week too.

Scanning the old yearbooks is a fun task. It is one of the things I look forward to the most when I visit a new school client.

Although it’s fun, it can also be time-consuming if you don’t know what you’re looking for. One can quickly find themselves taking more than 30 snapshots from one single yearbook. That leaves just 70 more years to get through!

I limit myself to two hours and I can usually get through 80 years worth of yearbooks in that time, taking five to seven pictures from each yearbook. My first timesaving tip is this: the first photo should be of the cover of the yearbook and the following photos will be from that year.
Once you have all the photos, save them in a TBT folder. Flip, crop and rename them with the appropriate year, making it easy to schedule them out for every Thursday morning at 6 am.

Now, what should you look for when it comes to those images from each yearbook? I search for images showing:

School Spirit – The face paint, the apparel, anything showing love for the school.

Technology – It is so funny to see the old typewriters, movie projectors, and even computer monitors from 2000.

Memorable moments – Think about the alumni that will see these posts. If it looks like there is probably a fun story behind the image, make sure to share that.

Cars – It is so fun to flash back in history with the different makes and models of car images.

Big smiles – Everyone loves to see happy faces. Especially happy faces with 80’s hair!

School pictures – You can often grab a group of photos and these are a memorable part of school.

Ads – The ads that support the yearbooks are great to share, especially if some of those businesses are still in your community today.

LOL photos – Whether it is the photo, the caption, or both, if something literally makes you laugh out loud while you look through the yearbook, snap a picture of it.

State Championships – The entire community will love to think back to those memories.

“Unpopular Kids” – OK, there are the kids that are in every sport, and every music group, but then there are photos of some kids that you just know weren’t on the top of the popularity chart. Help highlight some of these amazing alumni too! * Based on the image used below, I am not proclaiming that the debate team was “uncool.” I need those debate skills daily as a parent…