Photos

Overview

In the span of a lifetime, people now take a lot of pictures. Unfortunately, most of them wind up sitting in boxes and rarely looked at. Computers help with that, but unless careful, they become just an electronic replacement for the boxes. The biggest problem is the absolute volume of pictures that are now a part of the 21st century experience.

We have pictures from a number of sources; some going back more than 100 years. The sources include old family photos, slides that my dad took and ones that I did. We went digital in 2000 when I picked up a Sony Cybershot in St. Thomas on a cruise.

While we started out taking slides, we changed over to film at some point. Bonita did a good job getting them organized and filed. Those photos have been scanned and are in the FastFolio directory.

The general plan is to reduce the clutter overhead and duplication that exists in the current collection.

Locations

Digital photos are in Media-Archive/photos-original. I do not assume that this is a complete set. There have been a lot of downloads from cameras and phones over time.

The Inateck drive has about the best collection at this point.

The Work(I:) drive is the location of work in progress. The working directory is I:\Pictures_Work.

The main collection point where photo collections can be dropped off is macey:\\Public2\Photo Project.

Plan

1. Do a pre import review to remove bad pictures, noise if you will, and correct orientation issues.
2. Work in the Mylio tool to import and categorize the photo library.
3. Bring the photos in from various sources, dedup and load into Mylio.
4. Scan slides and load into Mylio.

The slide scanning can happen concurrent with other tasks.

Workflow...The First cut

Paper photos

Scanning photos is easy and straightforward. The Epson photo scanner will scan the front and back of pictures in batches. This will generally result in three images being saved. The front of the picture is saved in both enhanced and unenhanced copies. The back of the picture will be saved if it is not blank. This gives:

Picture   - Original scan
Picture_a - Enhanced original
Picture_b - Back of the picture scan

Note: All original scans are saved in the archive as they were scanned

The photos are copied to the working folder for processing and disposition. Even really bad photos live on in the archive.

When doing the scanning, I initially organize them by date grouping them by decade. Once scanned, they are copied to the working folder. I open the folder and display them as large icons and quickly review.

Some photos appear sidewise or upside down. Orientation problems are fixed. Many images of the backs of photos were scanned but have no useful information. The marks are often a result of the process of developing and printing the photos. These images are removed.

A more in-depth review of the front images is then done. Assuming that the enhanced image is a better representation of the scene, the original is replaced with the enhanced copy.

Larger format photos will need to be scanned on the flatbed. Same plan...scan, store by date and then come back and decide what to do with them. For now, the photos will be stored in a high-quality/low loss format like tiff. This will expand out the storage space requirement, but disk drives are cheap.

Slides

Scanning slides is a little more time consuming since they cannot be done in batches. The Plustek scanner will scan slides and negative film strips. The slides come from the high tech storage site... the box under the sink. Most of the slides are still in boxes although some of them are basically loose. What I want to do is scan a group together and then file them into sleeves rather than putting them back into boxes. The slides should be names according to sheet/slide location on the sheet. After finishing a sheet, scan it to capture any notations on the slides.

Filing and Organizing

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