My extended family is scanning in old photos and putting them on one of those shared online drive services. Is there a good way to organize them?
When I used an Apple I used to add meta-data with key words. Now I have discovered that that is not possible with an Windows machine. (Am I mistaken?)
Presently I have a photo called “ABC123” in a folder marked 1999 “Summer.” Some photos have more descriptive names “Salisbury Park” in a folder named “2001 April.” I suppose that counts as a system. But it is not searchable for a person’s name for example.
There ought to be a way to do this. How do professionals handle this? There ought to be an app for that.
I scanned in all our family photos, almost 30,000 total (our family, my parents and my in-laws old albums) and I use manually added meta-descriptions (copy & paste repeatedly), geo location, face recognition and sometimes date. For date, you need to manually override the scan date and enter the date taken. It’s laborious and often I have no idea when the actual photo was taken.
I used that data to create albums for our most viewed sorts like family reunions, birthdays or vacations. For the rest I just do a manual search. This has been a very labour intensive process. I’m still chipping away at it 5 years later.
Hopefully you can figure out a way to do this in Windows.
Lastly - if you look for software, my suggestion is to double check how many photos their database can handle. They are often limitations before they slow to a crawl. When I originally scanned mine, I was over the limit Apple Photos could handle then. I called Apple support about why it was running so slow. The tech was stunned when I told him how many I had in there. Their database can now handle 100,000 photos (so they say).
I use filenames to give an idea of when and what and where they were, organised into folders of what seems to me to be a sensible grouping, at least for those who are likely to know the people involved, e.g. by family, and/or major events (say, Smith’s>Christmas2005, or whatever).
It pays to spend some time thinking about how you, and anyone you want to put this together for, actually think about family groupings and special occasions: the best way it what makes sense to you.
For the ancient ones going back into the nineteenth century, I was thinking of layering the photo on to a background and adding descriptive text and any other notes I might have on the people concerned. If there’s an app to add metadata that could be picked up by any photo display program, that might be worth exploring; but actually including the additional information into the displayed image seems a bit more future-proof.
One problem is that we want these thing accessible into the foreseeable future. A propitiatory app might work well for a couple of years but then be abandoned.
I still use Picasa, which is a superseded Google product, but it does pretty much everything I need. As others have said, there are plenty of apps that can do all that and more.
The main thing you want are ones that can assign keywords and tags, and preferably allow bulk processing (which means you can add tags to all selected images at once).
Things to be aware of that will make your life easier:
Pick a system and stick to it. It might take ages to assign keywords, but they will not necessarily export if you decide to change photo cataloguing system, which is why I stick with Picasa.
Go for facial recognition as a built-in feature. For a library of family images its great as it will pick out all the faces in a crowd scene and you can tie them to each pic.
Cull your images if you are just downloading everything digitally from your phone or camera. While they can handle vast amounts of data, its a waste of your time and attention to be labelling four lousy images plus the very good fifth one in the set.
If you get custom fields - for scanned images make one of them ‘Original held’ Someone in the family should be custodian of the original pics and there may be a need at some point to source out the original.,
Scan at the highest resultion possible in TIFF for stability. If you want to send them by email, do a JPG thumbnail as well. The days of worrying about filling up your drives are over, man.
If you want to go the manual route, you can right-click on an image and select Properties. Go to the Properties tab and you can enter lots of meta data. Most of the apps/software just make it easier to update and store this metadata in the image. If you want to do this yourself and want to learn Powershell, there are multiple websites that can teach you how to write your own scripts to read and update this through a script.
I have skipped putting metadata into photos any more. I found that it doesn’t always come up.
I rename the file, typically by surname_first name_year or place. So it would look like HEAD Edward 2020 GQ post for a photo. If it has a second or third person I will add those names as well. That does make it easy to search for a name.
I have also folders for each person, so I have an Head Edward folder with all photos of me in it. For my father I would have Head Edward Sr.
The big problem would come when there are a lot of people in the photo. You could either do a text file with the names, or make a copy of the photo and put the names on the people.
What is best is a matter of opinion, so let’s move this to IMHO (from GQ). This will also allow everyone to give their opinions of different packages and organization methods and will also allow the sharing of personal experiences.
I agree with this. In Windows 10 Explorer, right-click on the photo, select the details tab and you can add a title, subject, comments, tags, etc. Lots of options. But the OP talks about putting the photos on one of the “shared online drive services.” In that case, you should decide which service you want to use and see what options it has.
Google Photos is likely your best option. It does an extremely good job of sorting by itself (via facial recognition), which will get you 80% of the way there, and will be shareable to as many people as you like. Depending on how much data you have, you’ll likely need to spring for increased storage (it’s cheap).