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General => The Common Room => Topic started by: Mart 'n' Al on Tuesday 05 December 17 12:55 GMT (UK)
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I am a recently retired computer consultant, specialising in office automation and my partner is a taxonomist. In all our time together our careers have not really overlapped until yesterday. We recently came into a large selection of old family photographs, and decided we needed to catalogue them. I jokingly said to her how do we future proof the tagging of these photographs.
I looked into it, reading articles about EXIF metadata, (storing information in the body of a PHOTOGRAPH) , and found that that system is very out of date and that over the last 20 years da more modern system IPTC has evolved. I thought I would search on rootschat for more information, and immediately got some hits, only to find they were dated 2006. And there were only three of them. I'm really surprised that this subject hasn't come up more frequently. I'm currently researching this whole concept and will probably add feedback in due course, but in the meantime I would welcome any advice on tagging photographs in general, recommended software, and anything else relevant full stop
I would guess that this post will eventually be moved to the IT section, but I think it is something of great interest and relevance to everybody.
Martin
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If you have image software such as Photoshop the easiest thing to do is to increase the height of the "paper" then write the information under the picture.
That way it picture is identified on the screen and if printed out on the prints as well.
Cheers
Guy
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Archivists and records managers have been working on how to store, catalogue and preserve digital records and there's lots of different advice out there on how this can be done. The Digital Preservation Coalition (www.dpconline.org) have information on the preservation of digital media, while the Archives & Records Association has a list of various cataloguing standards (http://www.archives.org.uk/about/sections-interest-groups/archives-a-technology/news-and-events.html) which explain how to describe items.
There's some open source cataloguing software out there, including ones which have capacity for digital images, such as Archivematica (http://www.archivematica.org/en/) which it might be useful to look at.
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Irfanview free edition allows IPTC editing.
Just had a play with it & it seems pretty straight forward.
Screenshot.
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This, of course, assumes that the software of the future will still be able to recognise jpegs :D
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Ready Dale, that assumes we have a future AT ALL.
Thanks for the comments. I missed the fact that Irfanview can help, surely the best freeware of all time.
The idea of adding the information on a blank strip in the picture does have some merit as well. But it wouldn't be machine readable in my writing.
I'm surprised this topic hasn't come up more.
Any more input?
Martin
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If scanning photos, scan them at the highest resolution your machine is capable of.
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Dublin, thanks for the reminder. I experimented the other day, scanning a photo on my scanner at it's highest resolution, and compared with taking a photo of the photo with my fairly basic camera in my tablet. EIGHTEEN times more pixels, makes it an easy choice, even allowing for a bit if hand shakiness.
Martin
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You lost me at the thread title stage.
I thought tagging was something that happened on face book and the like (not that I understand what it means) but I'm guessing that's not what you are talking about here.
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What Martin wants to do is put information into the photo unseen which can be accessed by anyone viewing it rather than adding a comment which might get lost or erased. This is for future generations who don't have to say "I've got a photo but don't know who it is or where it was taken". With embedded metadata the info travels with the photo.
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And rather than spend hours doing a visual search through thousands of images in a virtual photo album, tell the computer to search for a specific tag (or whatever takes over from tags) and it finds them in an instant. Although I don't "do" facebook I think their tags work on a similar principle.
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Trying to get people to actually save photos properly at all, is a bit of a hobby horse for me. Like almost everything else, they appear to have become almost disposable, undervalued because of the sheer volume. I imagine that these days, more photos are taken on any single day than in the first hundred or so years. How many will survive though?
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These comments are so true. Vital parts of the next generation's heritage need preserving, but they are currently treated as instant 'NOW' moments and seemingly instantly disposable.
I know for some it is a bag of worms, but Google are obliged to get rid of StreetView data once it is superseded. What if our great grandchildren find out that pictures of their street and the residents were disposed of? I'm getting off-topic, I'm just concerned about making my box of flaky photos available in 100 years.
Martin
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Anything we use today will be obsolete in a 100 years so whatever you use will have a limited shelf life.
The only sure way is an album with all the photos labelled.
Seem to have come full circle.
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Tagging sounds interesting, I shall investigate a bit more although I think I'd prefer simply writing under the scanned photo and on the back of the physical photo and let who ever ends up with them change to whatever new method comes along, perhaps it's because I don't have children that I can't drum up any concern about 100 years time. I'll do me best to have all I've collect in a useable state and hope I can find someone willing to keep it (and enjoy) rather than skip it.
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If you haven't found it already, ExifTool by Phl Harvey is a very handy little application. While aimed at photographers, it reads/writes many metadata formats and has a command-line interface allowing you to update multiple files at the same time (with all the benefits and associated risks).
I share your surprise that this question doesn't seem to be well catered for. I have been confused by the plethora of models and standards, but I guess there are many reasons to catalogue digital material, of which genealogy is only one.
I quite liked the look of Dublin Core metadata standard, but I had not worked out how to implement it. Alternatively, I considered using Adobe Photo Editor to organise digital images. While it creates a separate database, I believe it has the functionality to write meta-data directly to the files as well.
However, as you can probably tell, I haven't implemented anything yet, relying on my family history software and careful filenames. That works for a few photographs, but for my fh software at least, to do that for my parents slide collection is rather unwieldy, never mind the digital photos of my own family.
I don't know if there's any fh software out there that will add gedcom meta-data to the images of sources. For example the individuals of interest in a census image. I'm aware that without my fh software, my collection of census records and certificates are difficult to appreciate by themselves, and I don't really expect others to learn how to use my fh software.
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Tagging sounds interesting, I shall investigate a bit more although I think I'd prefer simply writing under the scanned photo and on the back of the physical photo and let who ever ends up with them change to whatever new method comes along, perhaps it's because I don't have children that I can't drum up any concern about 100 years time. I'll do me best to have all I've collect in a useable state and hope I can find someone willing to keep it (and enjoy) rather than skip it.
As an ex-technician, I am very dubious about computerisation. Like Sinann, I label each digital photo on the computer, with a number for each one regarding the trip etc, and write on the back of physical photos. Having to learn basic programming in the early 1980's :o :o :o I took a very jaundiced view of the future "progress" the enthusiasts were carrying on about.
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I use the EXIF Tags and Comments available under Windows 10 to add details that are useful to me. I suspect, as with many Microsoft 'features', these are probably non-standard and not readable by some other software. Like others I am dubious about future standards that may apply, so I just do what suits me now.
My RootsMagic software links media to the relevant people to form an integrated database, but I also try to make files searchable independantly using the Windows OS.
I am prompted by this thread to investigate further, but I don't have great expectations of finding a universal system . . . :-\
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If you can attach metadata files to the raster (eg jpg) image, this would be invaluable for reference purposes in the distant and not so distant future.
I was involved with geospatial data when it was a new tool for environmental management in the UK. We we happily captured data, made our maps and manipulated and interrogated them, and gradually added more and more datasets. Records were kept, but these were generally in the form of hard copy worksheets, but this didn't really matter as we were all working independently.
Then came the Foot & Mouth epidemic of 2001, local authorities and environmental organisations needed to disseminate maps and info quickly, and we suddenly realised the importance of easily accessible and standardised metadata.
I know this is not the same as attaching metadata to photos, but it is similar because spatial data without any background information is practically useless, and the same applies to photos.
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These are all very interesting, and I hope this thread runs and runs and helps people in the future. I still haven't decided on my strategy, but I will report here in due course. I hadn't heard of Dublin Core metadata standard, but my taxonomist partner is familiar with it. When i look back over nearly 40 years of working with computers, it is interesting to think about what I implemented as leading edge technology over the years, but now would be considered ripe for the skip.
My one thought is that the longer I leave deciding on a strategy, the closer we will be to having an Artificial Intelligence solution that decides for me. And I am not joking. My collection of holiday photos on Google can be split be clicking on options to show my photos, by main colour, and even clicking on dog/cat/sheep/horse or church or castle or various modes of transport, and it usually gets them right, although it does seem to struggle between some dogs and some sheep. I take a lot of photos of coats of arms, but it can't identify those. Yet.
Martin
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Not directly related to the initial subject, but, to me, of considerable interest, is, who owns the copyright to photos etc "in the cloud".
Is it the photographer, the computer operator (hopefully the same person), the programme, or the cloud operator.
Also, what happens to said information if the cloud operator suffers from a serious attack of bankruptcy, let alone cyber attack, or electro-magnetic pulse?
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The copyright holder depends on the jurisdiction some countries do not respect copyright.
In the main the copyright of a photograph is held by the photographer or the person who commissioned the photograph but that may change depending on the specific circumstances.
Owning a photograph is not the same as owning the copyright of it.
If the cloud operator goes bankrupt in most cases the photograph will be lost (wiped from the hard drives when they are reused by someone else) or sold on.
If an electromagnetic pulse occurred the hard drive will most likely be wiped clean.
Cheers
Guy
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Copyright might also be affected by the terms and conditions you sign up to with the 'cloud' operator :-\
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Anyone interested in this topic may find the photography section at https://iptc.org/ of interest.
The IPTC standard is reputed to be the most widely used and accepted standard among professional photographers worldwide and the IPTC sets the global standards for News Media
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US based company, with an interesting app
"that enables users to describe their photos in their own words and use QromaScan’s cutting edge voice recognition technology to detect and embed photo metadata tags for key details such like the date, location and people. A new Relationship Manager detects the use of common nouns used for describing family members such as ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ and automatically tags the image with their full names."
Requires an iphone, data appears to be recorded using EXIF and IPTC.
http://qroma.net/qromascan.html (http://qroma.net/qromascan.html)
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I'm Tony Knight, and I am the developer of QromaScan, which was mentioned here.
So QromaScan has had the ability to create metadata using voice recognition since our first release about 2 years ago. You scan your photos with our special lightbox and your iPhone, and then use voice recognition to describe the date, location and people in the image, and they are converted to industry standard standard photo metadata.
QromaScan v3, which we released about a month ago introduces something called natural language tagging. This means that you describe a photo your own way, as you might if you wrote it on the back of a photo, and our technology uses machine learning and linguistic parsing to find things like the date the photo was taken, where it was taken, and who is in it. The full description is also embedded into the image, and writing the metadata to the file accomplishes two purposes.
First, when the image is opened, the user can see things like a map of the where the images was taken, a description to tell the user the backstory of what was going on, and other historically important information that you might have otherwise written on the back of the photo. The second purpose is probably the most important of all. Applying this industry standard metadata means that image is now indexed by your operating system and is searchable across all of your other images. I have more than 44,000 images, but I can find almost any one in seconds because they are all tagged with metadata for date, location and people. Whether I am on my phone, tablet, computer, or even any computer connected via a web browser, I can type something like "Izzy Paris" and I can quickly find just the photos of my daughter in Paris 4 years ago.
I think photo tagging is in many ways as important as the photo itself. It provides context in a way that will be used many generations from now by those you pass your photos down to.
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Marking my place on this thread so that I can keep up with further posts. So far, it's been very interesting.
sami
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Just to quickly share my way of tagging photos using the free software Adobe Bridge:
In the screenshot I've attached, on the right you can see my list of keywords (the words to tag). These you add yourself beforehand then when you've selected your photo(s), just check the box of the keyword(s) you want and they're stored in the image.
On the left you see many of the keywords I've used for this folder; If I want to see all photos taken in Adelaide then I click Adelaide and they're all shown, if I want to see all photos with Anna then I click Anna and they're all shown, etc. and because they're stored in the image itself you're able to search using these tags on any platform, not just in Adobe Bridge.
Tagging like this means you can find any image fast without entering all kinds of words into the filename. How I name my images is simply from the "date taken" info stored in the photos. This way keeps them in chronological order and you know your descendants won't need to ask experts for a date on your photo, it's all there right down to the second.
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I've done some digging to remind myself where I got to previously.
The <a href="http://www.metadataworkinggroup.or">metadata working group</a> have an old, but useful description of the different standards for storing metadata within a digital image (primarily EXIF, IPTC-IIM and XMP) and where they overlap.
My impression is the new standard is XMP (as developed between Adobe and IPTC) and linked to earlier by Falkyrn. Ken Watson describes the capability of different software to handle the metadata formats (http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/labelling.html (http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/labelling.html)), though perhaps the IPTC have <a href="https://iptc.org/standards/photo-metadata/software-support/">more recent information</a>. Ken also describes how to visually caption your images as suggested in earlier post by Guy.
I don't think there is an agreed metadata structure for genealogical purposes. I found <a href=https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/075d/6a2dec028a154345a57fb61c279e6050c60a.pdf>this paper</a> from 2012 describing the issue.
While there isn't a standard for genealogy specifically, as Archivos indicated, there are lots of standards out there for archiving. I was/am uncertain how to use them though.
Perhaps the most common approach is to use keywords to add meta-data, and if most common, perhaps it will be the most long-lasting approach. Even then, I'm not sure keyword hierarchies are consistently managed between applications.
I'm interested in hearing what others do. Maybe duplicating metadata is best - in the filename; within EXIF, IPTC, XMP; as a caption; in a separate file; as an annotated hard-copy...
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Having read this thread and many of the links with interest I feel my best option for the time being is to continue to use the Windows Tag and Comment features. These seem to be readable by most programming languages (e.g. PHP has a function called "exif_read_data") so it should be easy enough to write a short script to convert the Windows tags to suit whatever system becomes the industry standard in future . . . if it is ever standardized. I don't feel there is much point in fretting over the long term future at this stage, there are too many "standards" and I have no way of knowing which, if any, will become the "USB" of metadata :-\
But I will keep watching to see what others are thinking . . .