OK, I’m going to archive our family photos. I know it’s going to be a huge task, but it will be worth it when it’s all done.
I have a general idea of what I’d like when this is all done. I want to scan in all photos, crop, balance and correct them (I’m somewhat proficient in Photoshop) then burn them all to disks.
Once that is done for all photos (well, most) I’d like to make a ‘selective’ album that tells the general story of my family through the various pictures and artifacts.
I’d like to hear from anyone who has done anything similar. Are there any tips to share? Is there anything you wish you’d done differently? How did you organize your final archive?
She color copied all of the old significant family photos - color copying worked better than black and white, even though they were B/W or sepia toned photos. She put together an album for each of us that had portrait-style photos of all of our anscestors that she had photos of, plus a few selected family snap-shot type photos of each, and baby pictures, that sort of thing.
It was really something to actually see what my great-grandparents were like when they weren’t posing stuffily for pictures. And to have the baby pictures of my grandparents, parents, and my generation all in one album was pretty neat too.
It was a great gift - she originally did it for my grandmother, who was in a home with Alzheimer’s, so she could look at it without losing all of the originals. When everyone else admired it, she made us each a copy for Christmas.
I’ve scanned those pictures in, but since I’ll eventually inherit the whole lot, I’ll be doing what you’re proposing too. I’ll wait until I have time and/or better photo manipulating software.
“Huge” is right. This will take ages if you have a lot of photos.
I think that most of boofy_bloke’s suggestions are good ones.
Have you decided what format you’re going to burn them in? Low-compression JPEG will, of course, probably be the best option if you want to save some disk space, but saving them as Photoshop (.psd) files will make future manipulation easier and give higher-quality results.
If you don’t have one already, i’d think about getting a DVD burner (as opposed to a CD burner), because you’ll be able to fit many more pictures on each disk. I think that having a comprehensive file system, based on a logical organizing layout, will make your life much easier when you need to find a particular picture.
If you have the time, it might be good to construct a database of sorts, in which you give each picture a few keywords (based on time, location, subject matter, etc.). You could put a very low-res jpeg (just 5kilobytes or so) of each picture in the database, and that way, when you’re looking for a particular image, you can search the database and find out which image number it is, and what disk it is contained on. Having some knowledge of spreadsheets or relational databases would help with a project like this.
I’ll second the notion of a DVD burner. I don’t know how I survived all this time without it. Also, if you have a Mac I could recommend you using iMovie or iDVD to make a production of these photos, but I don’t know what the comparable apps are for the PC (or whether they are as integrated and user-friendly as the iApps).
You probably already know this, but it bears repeating: scan these pictures at high, high resolution (well, at least the ones that are the most precious). You never know what you might want to do with them later. You want to be able to make a decently large print at 300 dpi. Just in case. You never know.
Of course it depends on what the subject of the picture is, how sharp or how good a shape it’s in now—but I’ve learned to not assume that “I’ll never need to print this out any larger than XX inches.” Because you never know. I’ve had to re-scan stuff (and it was sometimes a bitch tracking down the original) because I’d originally scanned it at too low of a setting.
You just never know, you know?
Also I’d like to reinforce mhendo’s suggestion of saving them as PSD files. High quality JPGs are fine for some things, but JPG is a lossy format (you know this already, I am sure). So have a PSD (or TIFF) version. Also (another thing I’ve learned for myself), save a version of the file that is pre-retouching. Maybe it’s just me, but so often when I retouch a picture in Photoshop, I tweak something or lose some detail that later on I’d wish I’d left in (or done differently). Saving the file as it looked when first scanned is not a bad idea—you can go back and “start from scratch” if needs be.
Watch out for burn out. I’ve had a few cousins who tried this and didn’t quite make it. Be sure to set a reasonable time frame for completion of the task. Maybe you could even write yourself up a proposal for your own perusal. How many hours a day are you going to work on it, how many days a week. Bargain with yourself and be sure to leave room for off days when you don’t want to do it.
I’d say provide yourself with some nice rewards along the way too.
Well, i think that you could do this really well with Macromedia Flash, with the added bonus that Flash also provides an interactive, web-based format that allows you to click links and move between images very easily. As i’m finding out, however, the learning curve for Flash is damn steep if you’ve never used it before.
I’m sure Adobe Premier could also do the job fine, although i’m not really familiar with its capabilities. I don’t think the final product is as interactive and flexible as a Flash movie, however.
That’s what I was gonna say. Plus I think it’s got a pretty steep price tag. Though Flash is very cool, no doubt about it.
There’s a Windows Flash app called (I think) “Swish” which is pretty cheap, but I still think some sort of movie maker or DVD maker (for either Mac or PC) would be the easiest way to go. I’ve never used iDVD but I hear it’s really great. I have used iMovie and it’s pretty darn easy. Not interactive, but easy. Don’t know much about the Windows low-cost movie and DVD apps, but I’m sure there are some out there. Don’t know how easy they are to learn, though.
I wouldn’t the ‘presentation’ slide picture DVD route. No, you want to be able to categorize and organize all your pics into neat folders, right?
So just burn directly to a DVD. If you want to make a slide show DVD for family and friends, do so AFTER you’ve backed up the pics, it shouldn’t take you long to select the pics you want and add some nifty music
Thanks, everybody. File format is something I’ve been struggling with. I think I’m going to make the ‘master archive’ in TIFFs. I was thinking of jpegs for a while there, just so I could distribute the discs to people in the family with the instructions “if you want any prints, just take this disc to a photofinisher and they’ll know what to do”, but the compression just isn’t worth the convenience.
I have thought a little bit about presentation, but that’s not really a product of this project. Here I just want to archive everything in one place, in high quality (and somewhat cleaned up). For the interested, I plan on getting a custom book bound with selectedphotographs for my Mother’s 60th birthday in a few years (either using iPhoto’s service or something similar, since I’m not actually on a Mac, but have limited access to one).
I like the database Idea. I have been doing a fair bit of work in Access lately, and this may be perfect. Originally I was worried about he database swelling in size, but just using tiny thumbnails may work! If each picture has a ‘stock code’ & disk number, it should be easy!
Don’t have a DVD burner, so I’ll have to use many CDs for now. I can always change the disc reference # in the database if I consolodate multiple discs onto one DVD later… or con my Mac buddy into burning it for me
i know that most photo places have a service where you can get a copy of your photos in electronic form when you turn in your roll of film. if you have all of the negatives, you may be able to get them digitized with the same equipment. i haven’t had the chance to look around for anything like that - does anybody know if a service like that is offered anywhere for already developed negatives?
I’ve done contracts archiving old photos (early 1900). Save your scans in a lossless compression. You can always convert these to a smaller format to distribute as you wish. As well, if you decide to alter the image, you want suffer from information loss like you would if you saved your scans to a lossy compression format, like jpeg.
And a little side info, it’s taken me 4 months to do 2200 photos, which includes minor alterations to the scans.
Also, look into Adobe Album 2. I use it and find it easy to use with some pretty interesting features.
Yahoo has a good online photo album feature as well. And best of all, it’s free.
