Author Topic: Photo organisation and cataloguing  (Read 922 times)

Offline familydar

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Photo organisation and cataloguing
« on: Thursday 07 December 17 16:48 GMT (UK) »
This is a sort of progression from Martin's post here:

http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=783663

I have scanned several thousand family photos and in addition to giving them basic alphanumeric references I have given them Windows 7 metadata tags.  Some photos have several tags - who it is, date, location etc.  I did it as much for me as for anyone else but I have given DVD copies to various family members.

I decided against giving the photos more meaningful names.  By the time you've scanned the umpteenth snap of Great Aunt Lottie at Brighton in 1947 it gets a bit ridiculous.

The physical photos have been given the same alphanumeric refs and are stored in archive quality wallets, which in turn are held within albums labelled A to P (that's where the alpha part of alphanumeric comes in).  The negs (where they exist) are with them.

Like Martin I am concerned that the day will come when the metadata is no longer supported, but it was important to get the job done with whatever was available while there were still people alive who could identify the subjects of the photos.  Hopefully when this sort of metadata is superseded it will be possible to migrate the data accross to whatever takes its place, but it will of course depend on there being someone around with the inclination to do so.

What I would like now is have a couple of printed cross-reference indices generated from the metadata, but when I looked into it at the time I couldn't find anything that might do the job.  I wondered whether there was a DOS command which would output the metadata but if there is I couldn't find it.  If I could just output some sort of text file I'd be happy to manipulate it.

In my fantasy world I would have one index to list the photos by name/id with the tags associated with each photo.  So along the lines of
photo id   tags
A1      Uncle Fred; 1965; Bognor
A2      Granddad Bert; 1970; Shoreditch

And a second one to cross-reference those tags, so you could go to the entry for Granddad Bert for instance and see that he features in photos A2, A7, A10, B31, C12, C15, D7 etc.

It means that whoever takes over from me as the family archivist won't be faced with a collection of quaint old photos of unknown people in unidentified places.

Has anyone come across anything that might do the job?

Jane :-)
ALLEN
BARR, BARRATT, BERRY, BRADLEY,BRAMLEY,BRISTOW,BROWN,BUGBIRD,BUTLER
CAIN,CARR,CHAPMAN,CHARLES,CH*LTON,CHESTER,COCKETT
COLLASON,COLLYER,CORKERY
DARLING, DENYER,DICKERSON,DOLLING,DURBAN
FARMER,FURNELL
GIBSON,GILES,GROOMBRIDGE
HALL,HAMBIDGE,HARMES,HART,HICKS,HILL,HOLLOWAY
JACKSON
K*AT*S
LANCASTER,LINTON
MCDONALD,MCFADEN,MEARS,MILLARD
NICOLAS,NOAK,NORTH
PARFIT,PORTER
RIPPINGALE,ROBINS
SEARLE,SPENCER,STEDHAM
TYLER,TILLY,TUCKWELL
WADE,WAGER,WALKER,WATSON,WEBB,WITHRINGTON,WOOD