Archiving Old Photos questions.

Currently I have many boxes pictures ,newspaper clippings and photo albums . Everything from wedding photos to backyard play. This is coming from my Grandparents and parents. Brought a Epson v600 scanner online. Here is the questions I am wondering.

 

What do I use to tag the photos with. Searchable database by date,person, event etc. Example. Some are graduation photos.

 

What do I use to store the photos. I can number them onto a HDD or store the database onto a HDD but ideally it would work the best to do a online storage such as dropbox etc. One of the main problems I have with flickr or other similar storage options is that I would have to pay yearly for a extended family thing. And what happens when I get to the point that I cannot pay them or they shut down. Then all my images are lost.

 

Also what database or tag source would have to be able to edit from different sources, such as aunts and uncles that know more about the picture then I do.

If it were me, I wouldn't count on cloud storage. If you have a lot of big image files it will take a long time to load and you will probably exceed the free storage limit. What might make sense would be to upload small JPEG files to a cloud source for people to look at and identify places, dates, etc. and then go back and add that to your full size files. At that point, I would distribute thumb drives or DVDs to everyone who needs them and make a set of M discs for yourself along with storing them on a hard drive for convenience.

If it were me, I wouldn't count on cloud storage. If you have a lot of big image files it will take a long time to load and you will probably exceed the free storage limit. What might make sense would be to upload small JPEG files to a cloud source for people to look at and identify places, dates, etc. and then go back and add that to your full size files. At that point, I would distribute thumb drives or DVDs to everyone who needs them and make a set of M discs for yourself along with storing them on a hard drive for convenience.

 

Sounds like a good idea, but what software or organizing software do I use for that. I can throw 10,000 thumbnails on a cloud source and name it unique but not sure how people would change or add data to it. Or are you talking like a cloud service like flickr or similar? then add tags or data ?

I don't know all the answers to your questions and I'm not sure what the best software/storage solutions are. It depend a lot on how many photo's you have, what the quality is and what the quality you want them to have. I would break your questions down into 4 parts:

- storing the scanned images securely

- organizing them (initially) yourself (?)

- publishing them somewhere online so that people can view them and add comments/tags

- updating your image tags based on comments/tags by others

 

Storage: have at least 1 (removable) backup drive or 1 backup drive and 1 cloud backup.

 

Organizing: Adobe Lightroom (part of the 'Creative Cloud' package) will do the job fine and will help you do quick basic adjustments/enhancements. For example to faded or color casted photos. Adobe Bridge (free) does much the same as Lightroom on the organizing side (rating, tagging) but you'd need to use different software for any adjustments/enhancements to photos.

 

Publishing: multiple options here (Google, Flickr, FourSquare, etc). As far as I know (I may be wrong), publishing to an Adobe gallery is the most reliable way of maintaining tags during publishing/synch.

 

Updating tags: It's likely that people may enter different tags/comments for the same photo's. In many 'solutions', you would need to manually update your tags. Adobe may allow tags added by viewers to be synched automatically. Check this.

 

I'm not sure what software you already use or what your budget is. Something well worth considering is a year's subscription to the Adobe Lightroom plan ($10/mo). This includes Lightroom CC, 1TB of cloud storage and your own portfolio website. The Creative Cloud Plan includes Lightroom + Photoshop + 20GB of cloud storage which may me enough storage anyway.

 

Since all Adobe products use the XMP format, you can use Bridge and Lightroom interchangeably. If at the end of the year (when the photos look in good shape) you could drop the Lightroom subscr. and continue using Bridge (free) with the meta-data (tags).

 

Hope this helps,

 

Mike

 

 

 

Sounds like a good idea, but what software or organizing software do I use for that. I can throw 10,000 thumbnails on a cloud source and name it unique but not sure how people would change or add data to it. Or are you talking like a cloud service like flickr or similar? then add tags or data ?

No clue!

My approach would be: Do a survey to check what* you have (existing) family wise. - Exxample:

• My 79 year old dad owns a Laptop with 500GB HDD. Unfortunately he is pretty eager to keep that disc clean; i.e. his machine is acting Chrome Book and can't get counted on to act as an external storage for another copy of digitized family pictures. (I have no clue if my dad is an unique case, but I suppose you might have similar ones.
  
• The aunt able to recognize faces might be everything but a typist.
  
• There 'll surely be some poor cheapskate too who 'll run out of storage space and sacrifice the family history for something else too
  

(No offense meant! - I am simply trying to accept others as they are.

 

I'd get the stuff scanned into somewhat reasonable folders

I have many boxes

1. So give each box a number.
   
2. Create subfolders within give them descriptive names, when suitable but keep pictures named numerically too.
   
3. Download software like Bulkrename Utility (free!)
   

When you are done scanning start the grunt workl; maybe get Google Picasa (free & discontinued) to optimize scans and use something like JPEGmini (not free) to create highly compressed files from your finished results.

I 'd copy those on a "working" laptop, buy a decent shotgun mic and stand also a 2nd screen to go with that Laptop, strong supermarket reading glasses run Picasa's face recognition tag the people I know, create a backup copy of my Picasa tags on an external disk (or two?) leave one disk at home and hit the road, to interview the really old folks (least vital first) in the family about the faces I don't recognize.

":-) = John Smith, your great grand WTF once removed." does not(!) cut the cake; You want details; at least a paragraph as long as my reply here!

 

Once you got that stuff together you can start renaming the images from 0ß15.jpg to something like "JohnSmith_JillMiller_1922_0815.jpg

An arm's length of image name will be more likely readable in the future, than tags in meta data (that some fool might delete why ever).

 

When you are done, try to distribute copies of the entire set among the family. - Reasonable ultra compression is important! and while you are at it:

Create various sizes too!

Not everybody is a photographer, image lover or blessed with good eyes! - There will most likely be somebody running an elderly 17" laptop at 720p resolution. - Others don't go beyond 1080p - Cater them!

The smaller or more system appropriate / convenient your files are the likelier are they to survive!

 

In doubt: You ended getting these boxes because nobody else gives a damn about them. So wrap a neat digital package of family history and hope that there are enough other memebers that will preserve one for coming generations.

Upon Online storage: If you have one decent story teller among your older folks: Why not create a slideshow (dubbed with the interview recording) and upload it to Youtube? - AFAIK that's free & unlimited and old pictures don't always scan much better than the quality of a grabbed YouTube frame...

Best of luck!

 

If you really want to do your job remotely: I'd weed out all the unknown faces crop a picture of them out and become the family spammer by sending "Who was ?#88 - Please ask your elderly offline relatives in reach & let me know TIA *image attachment*" out. - I'd do at least 2 dozen of these mails at a time, to make packing the tablet worth it for the others. - Oh and I'd prep a recorder, in case they decide to reply by phone...

Why are you scanning and then archiving all your family's old photos? Including your grandparents? Who's going to look at them? IS anyone interested in looking at some vacation trip your grandparents took? Are aunts and uncles really going to look through all these pictures to help you tag them? Don;t they have enough of their own albums they don't want to look at either? Would it be better to just scan some of the best? No one is ever going to look at 10,000 photos on a memory card. Why not just keep the albums for memory sake? What's wrong with just looking at the albums?

I don't know all the answers to your questions and I'm not sure what the best software/storage solutions are. It depend a lot on how many photo's you have, what the quality is and what the quality you want them to have. I would break your questions down into 4 parts:

- storing the scanned images securely

- organizing them (initially) yourself (?)

- publishing them somewhere online so that people can view them and add comments/tags

- updating your image tags based on comments/tags by others

 

Storage: have at least 1 (removable) backup drive or 1 backup drive and 1 cloud backup.

 

Organizing: Adobe Lightroom (part of the 'Creative Cloud' package) will do the job fine and will help you do quick basic adjustments/enhancements. For example to faded or color casted photos. Adobe Bridge (free) does much the same as Lightroom on the organizing side (rating, tagging) but you'd need to use different software for any adjustments/enhancements to photos.

 

Publishing: multiple options here (Google, Flickr, FourSquare, etc). As far as I know (I may be wrong), publishing to an Adobe gallery is the most reliable way of maintaining tags during publishing/synch.

 

Updating tags: It's likely that people may enter different tags/comments for the same photo's. In many 'solutions', you would need to manually update your tags. Adobe may allow tags added by viewers to be synched automatically. Check this.

 

I'm not sure what software you already use or what your budget is. Something well worth considering is a year's subscription to the Adobe Lightroom plan ($10/mo). This includes Lightroom CC, 1TB of cloud storage and your own portfolio website. The Creative Cloud Plan includes Lightroom + Photoshop + 20GB of cloud storage which may me enough storage anyway.

 

Since all Adobe products use the XMP format, you can use Bridge and Lightroom interchangeably. If at the end of the year (when the photos look in good shape) you could drop the Lightroom subscr. and continue using Bridge (free) with the meta-data (tags).

 

Hope this helps,

 

Mike

 

Thanks for the ideas on publishing and cloud storage.

The Adobe plan sounds good but only problem would have is if people do not update them and I end up getting stuck with a ton of images that are on the site with no updating.

 

Don't like that it would cost money to do so, but do understand storage isnt free, and the XMP format may end up helping and if I can get the tags to stay while updating formats I can also update locally.

 

Good ideas I will look into it further.

Why are you scanning and then archiving all your family's old photos? Including your grandparents? Who's going to look at them? IS anyone interested in looking at some vacation trip your grandparents took? Are aunts and uncles really going to look through all these pictures to help you tag them? Don;t they have enough of their own albums they don't want to look at either? Would it be better to just scan some of the best? No one is ever going to look at 10,000 photos on a memory card. Why not just keep the albums for memory sake? What's wrong with just looking at the albums?

 

 

I know a few said no one cares about these images or why would they be dropped into boxes.

The images come from times were albums were the thing and times were you would hand someone a envelope of pictures to see the Vacation or event.

 

Albums are starting to get in bad shape and images of my Aunts, Uncles etc are aging.

My extended family lives in different states and have extended families of there own that continually grow.

Preserving these photos in digital form is what my ultimate goal is.

I don't really need editing software since Epson has some already.

Have figured out some of how Adobe Bridge works.

The only issue I may have now is how to figure out how to get it so photo files can be edited or metataged from a remote source.

Such as mom editing picture tags without software or over complicated.

 

One idea I have it to upload x number of pictures onto flickr or similar , have them add data or info there , then re-download it onto my pc storage, then do another set after that one gets completed.

 

I don't know how Bridge and Flickr work together.

Or maybe I need to mess with Bridge more to figure some details out.

 

What are thoughts on this way of doing it?

Currently I have many boxes pictures ,newspaper clippings and photo albums . Everything from wedding photos to backyard play. This is coming from my Grandparents and parents. Brought a Epson v600 scanner online. Here is the questions I am wondering.

 

What do I use to tag the photos with. Searchable database by date,person, event etc. Example. Some are graduation photos.

 

What do I use to store the photos. I can number them onto a HDD or store the database onto a HDD but ideally it would work the best to do a online storage such as dropbox etc. One of the main problems I have with flickr or other similar storage options is that I would have to pay yearly for a extended family thing. And what happens when I get to the point that I cannot pay them or they shut down. Then all my images are lost.

 

Also what database or tag source would have to be able to edit from different sources, such as aunts and uncles that know more about the picture then I do.

I scan in at 600dpi (for prints) and 16bit depth. 4800 dpi at least for slides at 48bit depth. I send these up to a local internal hard drive. Cataloging is complicated but metadata is important and that's where Lightroom comes in. That's another subject. Then I use two different online backup services: Blaze and iDrive. These automatically back up the images without degradation to both the cloud and an external hard drive that is local. Then I edit these files in Lightroom and store the catalog with the scanned photos. So now I have the original scans in three different places. I have about 2 TB worth of family photos and slides. If the on line companies go bankrupt..I have my local copies. All the copies are identical with versioning so if something really weird happens I can back up a few weeks.

If Lightroom blows up I have the catalog at least in multiple places. If my drive dies, I have on line storage and a local backup. All Backups happen late at night and in one case are continuous in the background.

I used to use DVDs, maybe 10 years ago. Too complicated and they degrade over time.

Why are you scanning and then archiving all your family's old photos? Including your grandparents? Who's going to look at them? IS anyone interested in looking at some vacation trip your grandparents took? Are aunts and uncles really going to look through all these pictures to help you tag them? Don;t they have enough of their own albums they don't want to look at either? Would it be better to just scan some of the best? No one is ever going to look at 10,000 photos on a memory card. Why not just keep the albums for memory sake? What's wrong with just looking at the albums?

Well, you never know. I scan in everything I can get my hands on. I came into some slides made by my aunt and uncle when they were stationed in Japan. They were involved in writing the new Japanese constitution at McArthur's headquarters. They look like beauty shots. Buildings, etc. But looking closely you can see these are War Ministry Apartments. They spent years there. Sometimes you don't know the value of a photo until years..maybe generations later. So I say scan scan scan. Storage is getting cheaper all the time. And flipping through photos on line is more pleasant than holding a photo in your hand and degrading it. Photos fade. Digital scans don't.

I have negatives back to 5th grade, 50 years ago. Some are scanned on FB, for people to tag.

 

I never got to print many of them, and kids from my school years wouldn't see them if I did.

 

I have a box of negatives from my grandfather that I have scanned some of, but not so many.

 

I don't think that there is a perfect answer to a filing method.

 

For slides, I tend to keep the actual slides in separate boxes for people (family events)

and travel (scenery). The complication is family pictures at scenic places.

 

I am scanning many of my negatives and slides, but mostly not those of other

family members.