One of the genealogy-related projects I’ve been putting off for, oh, 10 years or so relates to my family photo collection. I have nearly all of the old photos in my family, and they’ve been sitting in a box, unsorted, for a decade. Late last fall I finally decided to tackle them. It’s turned out to be a huge project, but I’ve finally come to a stopping point (at least with the oldest photos in my collection…the modern ones are a whole other animal). Here’s how I did it:
- I sorted the photos by branch of the family they came from. There’s a little bit of overlap, but not much. Then I separated the photos that show living people from those that don’t, because I want to make sure I’m not putting photos or information on living people on the internet (which is, of course, a bad idea). About halfway through the first branch of photos, I figured out that I should have also put them in roughly chronological order.
- I decided to assign each photo a four-digit number, starting with 1000. This way, I could easily save the photos without having to worry about how to name them after people with unknown names, birth names versus married names, names with multiple spellings, group photos, etc.
- I created a spreadsheet in Excel to serve as an index. It has the following columns:
- Photo number
- Subject (including full names of all of the known people in the photo)
- Date (the exact date if I knew it; a good guess if I didn’t)
- Source (who gave me the the photo)
- Back (any notes, marks, stamps, or other information on the back; when I recognized the handwriting as belonging to a particular person, I note that as well, since some sources are more credible than others in terms of identifying people and places in photos)
- Notes (observations, clues, or other information related to the photo)
- I started scanning. This part was no fun at all; it’s just as slow and tedious as you think it will be. I finally started breaking it down into tiny increments, with a goal of scanning/saving/studying five photos a day. I didn’t make it every day, but when I did, I felt like I was making at least a little bit of progress.
- I saved each photo as a .JPG with just the 4-digit photo number as the file name. Right now they’re all in one big directory, which makes it easier to upload them to the web (more on that later). I later discovered this post by Miriam Robbins Midkiff, which says I should have saved them as .TIF files for preservation purposes. I’m still glad I did them as .JPGs so I could share them online, but I may go back and re-save them as .TIFs.
Part of the reason this took so long is that I found that working with the collection all at once gave me a unique opportunity to really study each photo. When you look at them all as a group, you can more easily see patterns…which houses are in the background, which photos show a particular woman wearing the same hat or necklace, etc. Next , I’ll talk more about the clues I found throughout the project. Then I’ll share some of the tools I found helpful as I tackled this project.
Photo by purple monkey dish washer
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Ugh. There’s many, many boxes of photos at my mother’s that I’m going to start going through next time I’m visiting. I want to do that while she’s still with us as her brain holds important information. I find, though, that she can only help for about an hour and then she grows tired and doesn’t want to think about it anymore. So I have a long way to go before I can even think about scanning them. But your organization advice here is great and I’ll be duplicating it when the time comes!
I love your ‘new’ blog – more exciting to talk about dead people than looking for a job
Debi—actually, one hour increments is probably good anyway. If you do much more than that, they’ll start to get fuzzy in your brain to (or at least, they do in mine). Even one hour per visit is better than nothing.
Plus, if you can get your mom to agree to it, how cool would it be to video tape you and her going through the photos together? That way you can do more of them faster, because you don’t have to worry as much about note-taking. Plus, what a cool thing that would be for your grandkids.
(and I totally agree–dead people are way more fun than talking about unemployment!)
I finally gave up and spent $1,339.63 with tax to have 2500 photos scanned. It is the best money I ever spent.
I’m intrigued by your comment about sharing photos/information about living people. Martin and I were talking about this over breakfast, because I would really kind of like to include some photos of both my parents, but my mother is still living, and I don’t want to ask for permission. I did think of doing it then asking for forgiveness later, but I the adult in me knows that’s probably not a good idea.
.-= Susan Tiner´s last blog ..1. My Dog Jello had Puppies =-.
Susan—I’m probably going to outsource the scanning for at least some of the more modern photos. I couldn’t stand to send away the old ones (and they’re all non-standard sizes anyway), but for stuff from the 1980s…definitely. Otherwise I’ll never get them done.
As for the living people…all my time in HR made me into a privacy freak, because I got to see up close all the ways people stalk each other. Plus, although I love genealogy, not everyone in my family does (in fact, it’s pretty much just me). So I don’t want to drag people into my thing. I also don’t want researchers who are working on the same lines as me to not feel comfortable sharing information because they think I’ll put it out there. So for me, no living people on the internet. But every family is different.
Kerry – ha ha on the 1 hour per visit. I live in another state and only get to her house every year or so. I don’t think either one of us will be alive long enough to get us through all the photos she has at that rate
I think that’s good advice, no living people on the internet. So how do you handle photos of the dead person if he or she is in the same picture with someone living? Do you gray out the face? Cut the whole person out in photoshop?
.-= Susan Tiner´s last blog ..1. My Dog Jello had Puppies =-.
You could probably Photoshop it or crop it or something. I’m lazy, so I just don’t post photos with living people at all. Most of my photos are pre-1945 as a result, but I like the older ones best anyway, so it works for me.
STOP!
You don’t want to be putting all that valuable information you have in a separate spreadsheet. You want to embed it to the JPEG file so that it can never get lost or separated from it. You will still be able to search for it if you use a good photo management package. Look into Adobe Lightroom (you have to buy it, but it’s a very mainstream product with support) or digikam, which is a geekier solution, but free.
The advantage of using a photo management product is not only that your comemnts get stored in the file where you will always have them, but also you have a lot of poweful classification options. Then you can do things like say “Export all images from [FamilyBranch] with [NotLiving] tags to my [PublicInternetAlbum]”
TIFF takes huge amounts of diskspace. If you are intending to do post-processing and enhancements, or intend to throw away the originals (ha ha), by all means you should scan to TIFF. Otherwise, JPEG with 95% compression is fine.
You are absolutely right that scanning is terribly tedious, so you only want to do this once. It’s worth spending some time thinking it through before you go too much into it.
My youngest brother inherited all the family photos. He has started using them in milestone birthday DVD’s, which has been nice, but it would be fun to start really going through them. Unfortunately my mother took a lot of the pictures and she was a horrible picture taker! Cutting off heads, not aligning people properly, that kind of thing.
There are also a huge number of slides – remember slides? – from her year in Europe. Because I’m working on her diary from that year, I’d like at some point to be able to get those unlocked from their slide hell into a format that could be used. It also would be nice to see photos of some of the places she describes. And also to see if she does things like take a picture of half of a pyramid or cut the top of the Sphinx’s head off.
Welcome to the Geneabloggers family. Hope you find the association fruitful; I sure do. I’m fairly new, as well, and have found it most stimulating, especially some of the Daily Themes.
Keep telling your ancestor stories!
Dr. Bill
http://drbilltellsancestorstories.blogspot.com/
Author of “13 Ways to Tell Your Ancestor Stories”
clobbered—the info that’s in my spreadsheet is mostly my own personal notes, so I don’t have it wedded to the photos because I don’t want to share them. It says things like “need to check 1920 census to see if this is a neighbor” and “she looks about five months pregnant—check MN birth index for 1917″ and so forth. There are also a bunch of references to living people in terms of who wrote the notes on the back. So I needed a separate document for that sort of thing. I do also have the relevant shareable info included as captions in Picasa (which fit my “free” budget). More on that is coming in the third post (probably on Wednesday). I have heard great things about Adobe Lightroom though.
Marian—there are companies that can scan photos for you. I haven’t used them (we have family slides too, although I’m not the owner on them), but I know they’re out there.
Dr. Bill—thanks!
Look forward to your next post, and comments there, as well.
Keep these ancestor stories coming!
Bill
http://drbilltellsancestorstories.blogspot.com/
Author of “13 Ways to Tell Your Ancestor Stories”
.-= Dr. Bill (William L.) Smith´s last blog ..Preparation Sunday – Form and Style – Part 2 =-.
Thank you so much for this post! I have to do the same thing and I’ve been putting it off since forever.
The advice you gave about sorting and TIFing is invaluable, as is the advice from clobbered.
Thanks for the inspiration. I won’t deny it’ll sit in the back of my mind for a while, but at least it’s in there now.
.-= Lillian2611´s last blog ..crisis comes when comfort does not =-.
I’m always looking for ways to better organize photos, and I’ve been doing this for a number of years. All of mine are in JPEG format. Here’s what I started out doing and haven’t changed in all these years (except to add new surname file folders):
One folder for each surname, sorted alphabetically, then chronologically within each folder.
Photos identified as follows:
Year Photo taken (or estimated to be taken). Surname, First name (and other identifying info, if needed).
The way I handle overlapping information, e.g., my parents: My mother’s pictures before marriage go into her surname file, after marriage into my father’s surname file. Group pictures – I may put in more than one surname folder, but I number them at the end of each photo file name.
Some of my families have several hundred photos, so within each surname folder I created sub-folders by individual years or by decades, e.g.: 1900-1909, 1910-1929, etc.
The only exception to the “Year Photo Taken” has been: Birth year – death year (of subject), Surname, First Name. I’ve used this format for tombstone pictures and very old pictures when I have numerous families with that surname, or people with same or similiar names.
Something else I started adding to the surname files: pictures of towns, cities, countryside, schools, churches, etc., identifying each with, e.g., Year, Country, County, City, Church Name. I’ve found a number of websites with copyright free photos, such as the Library of Congress. If a picture I really like is copyrighted, I write the owner to ask permission. I haven’t been refused yet. In order to properly credit these photos, I’ve created individual Word docs with small images of the pictures, along with the citation. I include these Word docs in the surname Picture files, so as not to forget about them.
My goal has always been to “write that book” (ha ha) and be able to include representative photos.
Scanning is something I try to schedule, and sometimes I feel overwhelmed. I have albums, boxes, boxes and more boxes – most were saved by my mother, and family members have decided “You should have these.” Agh! Of course, I’m thrilled, because I may find some real jewels…when I have time to look through them.
I forgot to mention that I also do some photo restoration, always saving the original AND “improved” copies…
I guess the key to any method you use is: decide how you’re going to organize and stick with that method. Also, I agree with “Clobbered” that information should not be kept in a separate spreadsheet, for sanity’s sake. And thanks for mentioning the photo management software. I’ll definitely take a look at them, but it may be too late for me, unless there is a “magical import procedure” included.
Great suggestions Paula! I haven’t started the tombstone pictures, but I might steal your idea for those.