Future-proofing the tagging of digital photographs.

[Mart 'n' Al]

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articles about EXIF metadata, (storing information in the body of a PHOTOGRAPH) , and found that that system is very out of date and that over the last 20 years da more modern system IPTC has evolved.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

[Guy Etchells]

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

[Archivos]

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 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 which it might be useful to look at.

[jim1]

Irfanview free edition allows IPTC editing.
Just had a play with it & it seems pretty straight forward.
Screenshot.

[ReadyDale]

This, of course, assumes that the software of the future will still be able to recognise jpegs 

[Mart 'n' Al]

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

[dublin1850]

If scanning photos, scan them at the highest resolution your machine is capable of.

[Mart 'n' Al]

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

[Sinann]

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.