Managing Family Photos

Resources - Photos

Tons of pictures, some scans of old photos, some new photos taken with digital cameras. How to handle them?

My plan is detailed, hideously complex, and is as yet not fully realized, that’s the down side. On the upside…it works flawlessly…in my mind!

First the philosophy, then the procedure and tools.

Images, Exhibits, Photos, etc, definitions

• Images: just a digital representation of something. Catchall for a scan of a birth certificate, scan of a photo, digital photo, whatever. It’s the superset of exhibits and photos
• Exhibits: documents used to provide information for genealogy, source documents, stuff that is really ONLY interesting or useful in the context of TNG or my desktop genealogy program
• Photos: pictures of people, sometimes will be linked to TNG items, sometimes not.

Philosophy

• Data about the image should stay with the image, in the file itself. That’s METADATA, or data about the data. Different types of info are stored in different sections, you’ll see the terms EXIF, IPTC and XMP, it’s all metadata. Type of camera, description, location, people’s name, caption, keywords, shutter speed, etc. So, I’ll identify the photos as to who, what, where, when, why, and how, and store that information IN the photo so it’s never lost and it’s accessible to all
• The original image (scan or digital pic) must be preserved unretouched. Smaller versions for web display, retouching, cropping etc are done on a version of the original. The version will have the main image’s key metadata, and some of it’s own info that describes the modifications or purpose of that version.
• Applications that display the photos (genealogy web app, photo gallery, facebook, whatever) should display the metadata fields so that I am not retyping information.
• Many of my photos are as yet unidentified. People, place, and date will change. I need a system in which the filename, which must be unique, doesn’t matter at all. I just need to be able to file photos in some sort of logical fashion.
• Photos are evidence of an event, so other than being displayed in a web gallery, when they are linked in my genealogy program it will be as exhibits to an event
• People in the genealogy program can have a “Person photo” which is like their avatar. That’s a separate directory, cropped pic, no metadata really needed, compressed JPG, smaller size.
• TNG is a genealogy program that can display pictures, it’s not a photo gallery program and I don’t want it to be. TNG’s media display will be used for exhibits – when an image adds to the text or tree information already there - source stuff – but not so much for just plain photos, I’ll link over the gallery for that.

Person Photos / Avatars

• Pick a nice shot of each person available, copy to “My Documents/Genealogy/exhibits/default_photos” directory
• Load up XnView, crop photos as needed to get headshots of each person, then convert to JPG, resize to max 120 pixels on the largest size. XnView is easy and fast for this kind of thing.
• Rename to main.Ixxx.jpg (main is the name of my TNG tree, Ixxx is the individual’s number)
• Upload to server, exhibits directory

Modern Era Photos

• Digital pics download as JPG from my camera. Put in “My Dropbox/Photos/Modern_Era” directory. The Photos directory is managed by Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG).
• Load WLPG and sort, cull, and identify there.  Modern pics are more plentiful, less precious, I just don’t take as much care with them at this point. Perhaps a few will eventually merit inclusion in the family tree archive, but for now, not so much.
• I’ll identify location using keyword subdirectory structure: USA/Texas/Houston/HSPCA. That gets stored in the keyword metadata of the file.
• Identify people with the WLPG person identifier / face recognition stuff. If I upload them to Facebook, it can automatically tag the right person, kinda neat (if also a bit creepy).
• Use keywords for event identification as well: Christmas/2010 or Weddings/Kathy and Bobby.
• Add text description on some, not on others, kind of inconsistent.
• Crop and fix photos as desired. This is a destructive step, the original is going to be lost, so…if you think that one of the pics may eventually be an archival keeper, covert it to TIF and put it in the “family history photos” section (see below).
• Then over to XnView for renaming (WLPG just doesn’t do this really at all). Filenames are date + serial number. They’re grouped into subdirectori'es by event (2009_Christmas) or general topic (Pets) as desired. Photos/Modern_Era/Subdirectory/yyyy-mm-dd_xxx.jpg. I use underscore rather than spaces just for “better safe than sorry” purposes. Though, with XnView it’s TOTALLY easy to convert all spaces to underscore if I need that later.
• FTP to my webserver, for display in the PhocaGallery portion of my site

Family History Photos

• TIF files, image itself not to be touched (no cropping, straightening, etc after the initial scan). Put in “My Documents/Family History/new” directory for now, will move to decade subdirectory later.
• Load Photools IMatch for management of family history photos. This (complex) Digital Asset Management program is the best I’ve found for taking excellent care of my precious digital files.
• Categorize photos – dates, location, people, status.
• Annotate photos with caption, version notes, caption writer, copyright, where the photo came from, where the original hard copy is stored, who provided it to me, when did I scan it, guesses as to date, place and people if it’s not known.
• This information gets stored into the photo’s metadata as I have configured it – here’s the complex part, I have to decide how to store stuff
• Eventually, for the people identified I want to put a hyperlink to the TNG person page
• Location keywords (USA/Texas/Houston/My House) gets coded to Geotag area of metadata
• Date category gets coded to “decade” keyword, which then guides me to directory structure for file storage. Filename will come from the date photo was taken
• Eventually I’ll be able to manage versions of the file – a cleaned up version for looks, a smaller version for web, etc – with synchronized and coordinated metadata so that if I identify a person in a photo, it automatically will update all versions of that photo with the new person. That’s a future version of the IMatch software.
• For now, once I have photos identified as I want them, I create “web versions” that are same size and dpi as the scans, but JPG format. A 12MB TIF becomes a 2MB jpg. I put these in a completely different folder structure (my documents/my website/public_html/photos) so that it’s easy to just FTP the entire directory to the webserver, and then later, FTP synchronize of directories as things change.

On the Web

• Web photo gallery, Zenphoto, for all of the family history photos.
• Zenphoto automatically creates albums for each directory (decade), and ingests the photos, creating thumbnails as needed
• I’ve customized the theme to automatically display the metadata – title, description, location, keywords, etc
• User can click on keyword (name or location) and see all photos with the same keywords – dynamic gallery
• Most important – zenphoto allows for comments on each picture, so as the fam looks through, they can catch errors and notify me directly and easily
• TNG for now just has the avatar photos, and that’s done automatically using TNG capabilities with the filename convention (tree.ID#.jpg)
• I might someday have some family photos that I would make avatars of and do the tree.FAM#.jpg deal
• TNG Media in my implementation is documents and other source information, not so much pictures

Still to Do

• Create metadata field in the pictures that has a hyperlink from person’s name to person’s TNG page, that way the user could be in the zenphoto gallery and then click over to the TNG tree
• Create tag type in desktop genealogy program that links from person to a page in Zenphoto that shows all photos they’ve been tagged in
• Create events in genealogy program for the events that I have photos of, and find a way to link to all people involved
• Desktop genealogy program and TNG need to recognize and display metadata, they may do it already, haven’t gotten to that yet
• Always – try to make it less ugly!

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