I understand the old system of adding photo information to the front of photos is still in practice. And being taught. In other words, draw a wide border on your photo and type onto it.

Because I’m old and cranky, I’d like to point out a couple of huge problems with this method. One, it takes forever if you have thousands, or even hundreds, of photos. Two, the information is not search-able unless you also include it in mile-long file-names. Two-and-a-Half, changing and updating is unbelievably tedious and messy.

Oh, and Three, depending on the software you’re using, just opening a photo can strip out the maker notes. Not everyone cares about maker notes or even knows what they are, so here’s a short demonstration.

These are maker notes.

Here are the maker notes after opening a copy of the same photo in Adobe Photoshop Elements, cropping it and re-saving.

I use Adobe Elements for editing copies of my tif scans and I think it works fine for that. I’ve used it for so long I can’t even imagine doing anything else. But I wouldn’t open a photo off my digital camera with it if you paid me. I recently discovered that my digital photos that were exposed to the PSE Organizer back in 2006 or so had their maker notes stripped out and they weren’t even edited, just imported.

I will not have Picasa on my computer so I can’t check this for myself. But, I suggest you do. Make a copy of one of your photos that hasn’t been exposed to Picasa yet, import it into Picasa and then have a look at the EXIF.

I can’t speak for the other major or minor photo-editing software that’s around. I know that ACDSee Pro 2.5 is safe.

Back to the subject at hand.

Searching Sub-folders

If you’re using IPTC to annotate your photos instead, or if you’re using my suggestion for MRIN filing where you have many sub-folders inside another folder, you can still do searches across all the files.

In XnView, for instance. You can pick any top folder and choose to include the sub-folders. There’s all kinds of other ways to narrow down your search from there. XnView will also search file-types other than images depending what you’re looking for. For instance, a search for a particular word in a file-name will bring up all kinds of file formats.

GeoSetter is another one where you can slice and dice your search options everywhichway to Sunday.

XnView and GeoSetter are the two free ones. And then there’s my other favorite, Photo Mechanic, where you can open a single folder, or folder containing sub-folders, and then Find or Find & Replace.

IPTC has been around for a few decades and I don’t think it’s going away. I’m confident working with my photos this way, including thousands of digitized source documents in image format. If you’re in this for the long-term you might consider moving this way. Think of it as source documentation for photographs because that ‘s really what it is. Except it’s easier because there are no semi-colons.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

My ignorance is humiliating me again. Here’s a few new odds & ends about photos.

1.) I upgraded to Adobe Elements v.9 not because I wanted to, not because I need any new toys, but because I wasn’t too thrilled with the way v.5 was working on Windows 7. Maybe it would have been OK and I could have found my way around eventually, but maybe not and I didn’t have time to find out before the weekend sale ended so I took the safe route.

I can’t find a shortcut for the Editor. There’s only a choice to go directly to the Organizer, (which I don’t use) or to open the main Welcome Screen that’s disgustingly huge and ugly and then the Editor where the Welcome Screen follows me with an advertisement for Adobe ID. In the upper right-hand corner of the Welcome Screen is another little button that leads to this:

If I hadn’t been desperately looking I wouldn’t have seen it. And choosing the last option doesn’t help at all because then it opens the Editor and plasters the big, ugly Welcome Screen across the open Editor window. Obviously, they want my attention about something here and I’m guessing it’s Adobe ID.

But why? I’ve used Adobe Elements since I was in the womb and never needed so much advertising in my face to be able to do some simple photo editing. Why now? What is Adobe ID? Why do I need it now? Will getting it make the big ugly blue screen go away? I doubt it because the screen also houses links to other advertising. If you’re not in the U.S. you can’t get an Adobe ID anyway. I tried because I’m desperate to make that damn screen go away. I’ll do anything.

I’ll even look it up on the Internet. Here it is. Look for this folder. I did look, and I couldn’t find it before.

I found it this time. Look for PhotoshopElementsEditor.exe and make a shortcut to wherever you keep your shortcuts. No more Welcome Screen. Yay!!!

2.) In the early days of my photo restoration project, (a few weeks ago) I found some folders (2004-2008 to be exact) that do not have any maker notes. Maker notes is the information added to your photos by the camera manufacturer that looks like this: (except longer)

A lack of makernotes looks like this:

Interestingly, the timing on those folders from about 2004-2006 coincides with my intermittent attempts to use Adobe Elements Organizer. And, as I found other much better software, I moved entirely away from it.

I queried Phil Harvey on the matter of disappearing maker notes and he said Adobe is the most notorious for wiping them off the map. So, there it is. If you use any kind of Adobe organizer, you might want to check that out.

There must be something else going on, though, because it doesn’t explain the 2007-2008 photos. But maybe it does. Maybe I was making one last-ditch attempt and those got hit too.

In case you haven’t read it anywhere else by now, I’m down to recommending ExifTool, ExifToolGUI, GeoSetter and Photo Mechanic. I use XnView as my default thumbnail browser and photo viewer. I should probably do some detailed analysis there to be sure. Anything else, it’s at your own peril.

3.) Here’s some life-altering news over at my house. And I would have told you before except I didn’t know. LZW is a lossless compression. Which means my thousands of photos that were LZW-compressed by Windows Live Photo Gallery can be uncompressed. That shortens my pain considerably; by months.

Although I will need to revisit this situation when I get to the jpg’s again and there’s lots of those. All I have to do with the tif’s is open the photos and re-save them one at a time with the ‘None’ option. My great-great-great grandmother for instance, squished down to 15 MB, instantly pops back up to 31 MB.

That never occurred to me because there’s a None option. If None is none, then LZW must be something else. Well, it is sort of. If you want to make your uncompressed tif’s smaller for storage, like powdered eggs, use LZW. When you want to print them, reconstitute the size using None.

Windows Live Photo Gallery did change the metadata as well but, according to Phil, not critically. And I’ve already fixed the GPS mess. Microsoft says they’ve fixed that problem recently. Like I said, I won’t have it on my computer again but I’m glad, at least, they somewhat fixed the GPS problem because hundreds of thousands of people were going to stumble into it in ignorance. Also read Geoff Coupe’s blog for the progression of other WLPG problems there because he’s followed it for a long time.

Now I have to apologize to my cousin for keeping her up way past her bedtime uploading two discs of photos to our shared Dropbox folder.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

Picasa 3 has been out for awhile and has lots of fun new features. Today, I’ll look at geotagging.

Say, you’re cruising through some thumbnails in Picasa.

And it suddenly occurs to you that you’d like to add co-ordinates to them.  You can select one or many and click Tools/Geotag/Geotag for Google Earth (or the blue Geotag globe at the bottom of the screen) and it will open directly into Google Earth (assuming you have it installed.)

In the box in the upper left, type in the location of the picture(s) including street address if you have one and click the Search button.  When you’re at your location, adjust the map so the cross-hairs are right on your target and click Geotag or Geotag All.  That’s all there is to it.

Once you’ve geotagged a picture, you can go back to Google Earth anytime in the future and see your thumbnail at its right location by clicking on Tools/Geotag/View in Google Earth.  It will also show your other geotagged pictures in the area of the map you’re looking at.

If you go back to Picasa, right-click on a thumbnail and click Properties, you’ll see the co-ordinates near the end of the list.

Here’s the neat part:  These co-ordinates will also show up in other software.  Of the software on my computer, so far, I find it works with MediaDex, Adobe Elements and ACDSee Pro.  What this means is that if you do it once you don’t have to repeat the process.

MediaDex doesn’t have any integrated mapping software so it simply means that you can see the co-ordinates if you want to.  Also you can search it quite easily if you have one co-ordinate.  MediaDex has over 100 search fields so if it’s in there you can find it.

The photo metadata in Adobe Elements will also show co-ordinates that have already been put there by Picasa.  Adobe Elements works with Yahoo! Maps.  The map sits in a sidebar of the Organizer with zoom tools. You can right-click on a photo that already has co-ordinates, choose ‘Show on Map’ and it will place a pin there.  What you can also do is drag and drop a photo onto the map or right-click on a thumbnail and choose ‘Place on Map’.  This will bring up a box where you type in the address.

It will find the location, add the co-ordinates to your metadata, plot it on the map and immediately navigate to the location where it’s pinned on the map. You can do this with one picture at a time or many. Since I had Picasa open at the same time I notice it was immediately updating there as well.  In Adobe Elements, it will show you if you have more than one picture at the same location.

Then you have the option of sharing your maps.  You can create a Flash Photo Gallery to upload to a website or upload to Flickr.

In ACDSee Pro, latitude and longitude show up under GPS in EXIF information. I don’t see any way of getting it in there directly, but if it’s already embedded using other software it will show up.  On jpg’s.

I like Picasa because it’s directly connected to Google Maps. You can zoom in almost to street level and place your pin within feet of your desired location. You can add as many pictures as you want, Export to Google Earth File and send it to anyone who can also open it with Google Earth.  It helps to put your photos in context because they’re overlaid on a map. When you’ve geotagged several pictures in the same location, clicking on the top one will create a display like this:

As you click on individual thumbnails they will come up in larger view. The one caveat about Picasa, though, is that it only works with jpg’s. Although it seems to work with tiff’s, i.e. will let you add tags and GPS information, it does not translate to other software.

For this reason it would be better to work with Adobe Elements even though the maps aren’t as much fun or as forgiving. It won’t let you search a location by co-ordinates. It has to be an address even if you don’t have one. I would guess there are better options overall in Photoshop or Lightroom.

After much duress I figured out how to make a latitude/longitude metadata template for MediaDex.  This works well if you have many pictures with the same co-ordinates and want to geotag them all in a split second.  Adobe Elements and MediaDex are in sync with each other as far as tiff’s go, although the co-ordinates don’t translate from MediaDex to Adobe Elements, only the other way around.

OK, now for the bad news.  I hoped Legacy could import co-ordinates along with importing pictures but, alas, it’s not there yet.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

Every once in awhile I get into a photo-starvation state. So many ancestors, so relatively few photos and when I ask this is what I get: “There are no more family photographs, you have them all.” Then, when I get really busy with something else someone finds another batch and sends them off to me for scanning.

This is sheer laziness on the part of other family members. They could just as easily learn to do it themselves. But this is how it goes: Someone finds some pictures, someone else is visiting and they say, “Oh, I found these old pictures the other day, know anyone who might want them?” And the other person says, “Send them to JL. JL likes old photos.”

After scanning and editing thousands of pictures I’m not so sure that JL still likes old photos. If I’d had any idea how many old family photos there actually are I don’t know if I would have ever liked old photos. I do like the really old ones, though. The studio shots where you can crawl inside someone’s soul. Anything from about 1960 onward I could fore-go. A really bad combination of cheap cameras, color film and too many group shots with people about the size of alfalfa sprouts. Or maybe that was only my relatives.

So, assuming I can psych myself up for another solitary scanning blitz, here’s the plan.

Go into Adobe Elements and click on File/Import/[scanner name]. Or ACDSee Pro Photo Manager, that’s even better.

Before I get into the scanning, I sort the pictures into general groups. Then I clean them with 99% isopropyl alcohol if I can. This only works on the shiny ones and sometimes it doesn’t work at all. According to Murphy’s Law most photos will have black splotches, irremovable rust stains and what looks like dog-pee across noses, chins and teeth.

Set up the scanning for larger than screen size, 300 or 400 or 600 dpi depending on the size of the original and whether they’re something I’ll want to print (in which case make them larger.) Lay a photo on the scanner, preview, draw the cursor around, scan, repeat. After about 30 or 100 I straighten and crop them and save them all as uncompressed tiff’s.

At this point it gets a little tricky because these pictures probably need to fit into existing folders. Having dual monitors I can open a folder on one and use the other for renaming my new pictures to fit my system. This is not as easy as it sounds since I use a file-naming convention of year-family name-#. ACDSee Pro has a great batch-mode for renaming files so I just fake it for now and fix it all later.

This would also be the time to add the IPTC info. Captions from the backs of the photos, all the people’s names, a copyright notice indicating where the photos came from.

After this is all complete, I make copies for editing. Color correction, then the clone tool and healing brush in Adobe Elements for cleaning up the marks and scratches, the rust, the dog-pee. This part can go on for weeks and generally gets me wondering why I’m spending my life this way.

I make smaller copies of some and link them into Legacy. I put some into zip folders and send them off to interested parties by YouSendIt. I put others on CD, buy brown padded envelopes and trudge to the post office for stamps. If it’s close to Christmas (yippee! it is, except I’m starting the present batch 6 months too late to be finished in time) I make them look like Christmas presents. Then I pack up the originals and send those out according to the instructions also received. I try to do this on the same trip as the CD’s to save on trudging time.

To go through this time after time you’ve really gotta love scanning photos.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

If you are using Internet Explorer and notice large gaps on some pages of this website and wonder what they are, they’re videos. If you’d like to see them, install the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. It’s free and it will take only a few seconds. Otherwise, switch to Firefox. Firefox will tell you when you need a plug-in instead of leaving you in a hole.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

IPTC is a standard for embedding metadata in photographs. This is a summary of what is and isn’t IPTC-compatible software.

Picasa. Free organizer and simple editor. It works, for both IPTC keywords and captions, on jpg’s.  Putting captions and keywords on anything other than jpg’s here is a waste of your time. You can write keywords and captions to tiff’s and psd’s but it’s proprietary, i.e. you will not see this information in IPTC fields in other software.  If you have IPTC captions, keywords, locations, copyright, source, etc. entered on tiff’s and psd’s in other software it will not show up in Picasa.  There are no information fields beyond keywords and captions so it’s treading on the outer edges of what IPTC can be.  Nowhere in this software does it even say the word IPTC but that’s what it is.

Photo Info. Free. Not an organizer but a Microsoft add-on that sits in your context menu and writes IPTC to jpg’s and tiff’s and a few exotic file formats.  Has a range of fields to cover most anything you could want.  Also has a batch mode.  A little slow and sticky in its execution but worth having.  You’ll still need something else that can read and search IPTC on a global level. (2010 update: No longer what it was. Now something entirely different called Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2)

XnView. Free photo viewer as well as IPTC-editor that can work in batch mode. Very nice program. Has a few quirks in regards to field length. I also recommend this to my non-technical friends and family as an IPTC-viewer as it has an easy layout anyone can understand.

2010 update: Also see File Search & Edit for more info on XnView and ExifToolGUI.

Also, GeoSetter for GPS and IPTC. It’s available at no charge, integrated with Google Maps and the IPTC is run by ExifTool.  IPTC editor par excellence.

iTag. A nice little program for adding captions, keywords and copyrights to jpg’s and tiff’s. Fairly limited but it’s a start.

I have looked at several other free programs that claim to write IPTC info.  Invariably they only write to jpg’s.  There’s probably a hundred of that caliber.

Windows File Properties in XP is not IPTC.  Although it shows EXIF information, the summary fields available for adding information are not EXIF either.  They’re not anything except Windows File Properties.  I do not recommend this as a way to annotate files unless you’re a masochist.

FastStone Viewer. Free.  Does not read or write IPTC.  If you change and re-save photos here sometimes it will strip out any embedded IPTC info because it doesn’t recognize its relevance.  Sometimes it leaves it in.  You’d have to experiment to know which is which. If you’re serious about annotating your photos it would be best to stay away from this.

iMatch touts itself as a professional-quality image-management system, including IPTC.  In my humble opinion it’s a train-wreck.  If you don’t believe me you can try it free for 30 days.

ACDSee Pro Photo Manager. Editor, Organizer and general Photo Wizard.  Reads IPTC on psd’s, tiff’s and jpg’s.  Writes to tiff’s and jpg’s.  It has detailed batch modes for anything you could possibly need.  It can also catalog text documents, pdf’s, etc.  I like it a lot. Suitable for anyone, beginner to advanced. 1 GB of RAM recommended.  There’s a lesser version called Photo Manager although I haven’t worked with that one.  From what I’ve read it seems the keywords are IPTC and the categories belong to the ACDSee database itself.

Adobe Photoshop Elements.  Editor and Organizer. Can read and write to psd’s, tiff’s and jpg’s.  (Nothing writes to bmp’s.)  If you add captions, copyrights, etc. in the Editor it will save when you save changes to the photos.  If you add tags and captions using the Organizer you have to remember to use “Write Tag and Properties Info to Photos” under File on the main menu to make it stick. It does not have batch mode for anything other than ‘tags’ (their word for keywords) but does have Search options. The IPTC fields are split between the Editor and the Organizer so this is a very overly-complicated way to annotate photos.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Editor and Organizer. A more mature presentation if Adobe Elements insults your intelligence.  Video tour available and the usual free trial.

MediaDex. Organizer. Reads, writes and searches IPTC with a virtually unlimited range of fields. Although not recommended as a beginner’s program, anyone with fair-to-middling experience and some patience can work with this. Tech support is limited to one primary responder at their forum and a fairly unintelligible manual. It can be maddeningly unintuitive and utterly useless in places but its depth and range of options makes it very attractive. Love it or hate it. It has immense potential and I’m praying for a Version 3.0. It took me about a month to hit a comfort zone with it.

2011 update: MediaDex has been defunct since 2008. It’s now called Canto Single User. I don’t recommend it. My favorite IPTC editors these days are Photo Mechanic and GeoSetter.

There are others such as Photo Mechanic and BreezeBrowser, dedicated to photo metadata rather than other things. Photo Mechanic is fine-dining.  If nothing else, go taste it.  All of the retail products have trial versions and that’s the best way to find the one to suit you.

Legacy Family Tree, Passage Express and JAlbum will import IPTC captions from jpg’s and uncompressed tiff’s.  Passage Express acts somewhat erratically with this although I still don’t know why.

If you allow Windows to re-size your photos when you email them it will strip out any IPTC-embedded info so send your photos at their original size.  This is not a failure of IPTC, it’s just the idiocy of Windows.  If you need more space than email allows, sign up for a free YouSendIt account or a free account at Dropbox and share your photos without compromise.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

Email from a reader:

I have studied all your postings on digital photo organization. I am at a brick wall and I need some help.

I have been using Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0. I like the way it functions. However, for some reason, it keeps crashing on my computer. I believe this is because the program was written such a long time ago that XP is having difficulty with it.

I can download a free version of Photoshop that will work on my computer BUT it does not have the functions that my old Photoshop has. Once I migrate my images to the new FREE program, I will lose lots of features that I’ve come to depend on.

The newest basic Adobe organizer is $99!!!! Yikes.

I’ve been checking out Mediadex, based on your recommendation, but I’m afraid the learning curve is too steep for me. I’m really just after organization. I don’t want to use Picasa. I don’t like the “price” you pay for the free program, if you know what I mean.

You mentioned a Microsoft program. Does it function as an organizer?

I need to make a decision, since I have some great cemetery pictures in my camera, just waiting to be added to my sources! Any direction you could give me would be greatly appreciated.

DH

Your request puts me in an awkward position. As I read it, you’re asking for two things. One, to repeat nearly my entire past year of writing. Two, to scrap everything I’ve said and start over with a different plan.

I can see why you’re at a brick wall. You’ve emptied the room and there’s nothing left but walls. Adobe Elements is too expensive for you, MediaDex is too hard for you and you don’t want Picasa. You don’t want a free program but you don’t want to pay for one either.

You don’t mention what your complaints are with Picasa except that it’s free.

Some of the best software around is free and in all kinds of categories and there’s lots of it, but sometimes it can’t be done. I buy software when I’ve got the screemie-meemies fiddling around with free stuff that just won’t do it.

I went to MediaDex because it can organize all kinds of files, not just photographs, and that’s where my wants are. I was reticent to mention it, though, because I knew it would be beyond some people’s capacity to handle.

Regardless of which, I can’t function without IPTC. By the time you get a few thousand photos in a complex multi-purpose folder structure it’s virtually impossible to have any flexibility without embedded keywords. And it’s also nice to be able to embed captions instead of using something proprietary that can’t be read in other software.

The Microsoft program I mentioned, probably Photo Info, is not an organizer, as I said in the post. It’s for adding IPTC information to your photos. You don’t even need Photo Info because you can do it all in XnView. A viewer is not the same thing as an organizer unless you can search by keywords and other things. XnView can. FastStone, for instance, cannot.

Adding cemetery pictures to my sources involves annotating (IPTC) the photos first and then putting them into my digital Source Library, and then linking them into Legacy.

Photoshop Album 2.0 (no longer available) is a ‘teaser’ but if it’s enough for some people it’s enough. Sorry it’s crashing your computer. It’s beyond me to know why. Apparently, the new version doesn’t suit you. Another dud.

The $99 Adobe program, Adobe Elements, is an editor as well as an organizer and you get a lot for your money. It has depth without being difficult. Many people, myself included, use it because we can’t afford Photoshop, which costs in the hundreds and would be functional-overkill anyway. I also like ACDSee Pro Photo Manager, which is on sale (coupon code: 2PRO20) until June 30th, bringing the price in the same range as Adobe Elements.

(A simpler organizer and editor ACDSee Photo Manager, coupon code: 10PM20, also on sale until June 30th.)

I don’t know everything that’s out there so I can’t fully advise you. And I don’t have any alternate secret plan that I’ve been holding back on. If I haven’t been able to help you, you need to be reading someone else’s ideas. The Internet is your oyster.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

If you use Legacy Family Tree and you look in your C-drive you’ll see a folder under ‘Legacy’ called Pictures. If you used the default installation location. If not, you’ll know where else you put it.

I don’t keep reams of people-photos linked to Legacy. I only link the ones to be used in reports. I put them into Legacy/Pictures and then link them into the database using the Picture Center.

Obviously, it’s easier to have them all in one folder than have to browse around my computer through a multitude of them. The pictures exist in their original sizes in a different folder structure, so the ones in Legacy/Pictures to be used in reports are copies.

The location doesn’t matter as long as it works for you. I keep this additional set in Legacy so I can do as I please. One thing that pleases me is to have pictures showing in the same proportion in reports.

This is even more of an issue in the new Legacy Charting.

In order to get this result you have to crop the pictures in the same proportion.

Within reason, the pixel dimensions don’t matter, as Legacy will adjust for that. Too small will pixellate as it does anywhere. The proportion does matter. Look for proportional crop options in your graphics software.

This is what it looks like in Adobe Elements. Somewhere around 1.5 works pretty well for portrait shots. I use 1.618, the Golden Mean of Sacred Geometry, for aesthetic reasons. If it was good enough for Leonardo da Vinci it’s good enough for me.

Sometimes there’s not enough background to get the faces at a similar depth. If you’re careful, you can add “canvas” to extend the picture, fill in the extra space with a similar color or pattern and then crop.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

I know. It’s been a slow week at JLog but I can’t be everywhere at once. And I know you’re all busy checking out the new Legacy Charting anyway. I can hardly compete for excitement.

I’m just down in the muck of IPTC and photo-filing. It’s almost enough to make me want to burn my hard-drive and take up crocheting.

At one time or another I’ve filed photos by:

date-extension
date-surname, first name-extension
surname, first name-extension-date
surname, first name-date-extension

Between this and that sometimes hyphens, sometimes underscores, sometimes spaces. And then there’s photos sent by other people with naming conventions I couldn’t have thought up myself if I tried. Yearspacemonthanotherspace and the capital alphabet: A, BB, BD, DD, EEE, etc. Meaning what, I don’t know. And then there’s everyone and their dog’s version of what’s coming off their digital cameras. It’s not that I’m wildly disorganized after all this time; I’m just disgruntled with something that could be/should be easier to manage.

In the meantime, IPTC came along to save me from myself. In fact, it’s come along to save genealogists everywhere. So I ran over there and started putting keywords and captions on everything. Keywords for searching. Captions for reading. It would be nice if Windows Picture and Fax Viewer automatically showed captions underneath pictures but, alas, it does not. Picasa does read IPTC captions on jpg’s as well as writing keywords to them. Not the most sophisticated version of IPTC I’ve ever seen but it’ll do in a pinch.

There are many other IPTC-fields but for the non-professionals amongst us, those are the basics. You might also want to use Copyright and Source URL if you’re collecting other people’s pictures. As a matter of respect. And you might as well copyright your own for the future. Different softwares have a different range of fields available.

The magic of IPTC is that it’s no longer necessary to try to fit a description of a photo in the file-name itself. You can kiss that good-bye forever and give your photos simple names.

Some people start at “1″ and keep on going. The closest thing to a no-filing filing system. People will disagree. There’s no one right way to do it, only what makes sense to you. Some people like to put the date, then a family name, then an extension. Some people like to put a family name first and then the date. What I’ve decided is that it doesn’t matter, but it would help to be consistent. I’m going with date first, because events happen chronologically so it makes the most sense to me. If I don’t know the exact date a decade will do. For instance:

1880s-forsyth-001.tiff
or
1880sforsyth001.tiff

This doesn’t mean I throw every single photo I have in one folder, in fact they’re in dozens of folders across my hard-drive but I think up some main names to use and keep them separated that way. I have all my photos linked to MediaDex so I can easily see the next available numbers there. Any software that gives you a list view will do the same.

MediaDex

Since I presently have trial versions of Photo Mechanic and ACDSee Pro Photo Manager, I’m trying to make the most of my time with them. Photo Mechanic does well on Search & Replace of individual IPTC-fields.

Photo Mechanic

Used in cases, for instance, where I’ve put a copyright name in 6 different formats and I want to bring consistency to it. It also takes IPTC screen-shots, meaning if you’ve filled out all fields for a photo that has an edited copy, you can copy and then paste all info from one photo to the other.

ACDSee Pro Photo Manager has batch conversion tools for many things. I’m using that for file formats, file renaming and some of the IPTC changes.

ACDSee Pro Photo Manager

It also has a brilliant way of auto-typing in the IPTC-fields to speed up the process and keep you consistent with wording. It really helps when you’re searching later if you’ve been consistent with your keywords. The grey rectangle on the right side of the keyword field leads to the keyword list, where keywords can be chosen, added and edited. I’m looking for a “purge unused” button but don’t see one. That would be handy.

I still use MediaDex as my main organizer as it handles all file-types, not just graphics and it has a fantastic search engine. (2011 update: MediaDex has been defunct since 2008. It’s now called Canto Single User. I don’t recommend it. I use GeoSetter or Photo Mechanic almost exclusively now.)

Software that writes IPTC also has a way to search it, so if you’ve annotated your photos well with keywords and captions, that’s really all you need for finding them. After you get past about 5,000 that can become an issue. And then you’ve got the file-names themselves with the dates and main family names. And the visuals.

A few caveats. Software that reads and/or writes IPTC works most commonly with tiff’s or jpg’s, some with only jpg’s. If you have a middle-of-the-road digital camera, the photos probably come straight off it as jpg’s, no choice, and that’s fine. Old pictures you’re scanning should be saved as tiff’s with no compression and a copy for editing. The edited copy can be called “copy” or you can just add an extension to distinguish it from the original such as:

1880sforsyth001.tiff
1880sforsyth001-e.tiff

If all your pictures are either tiff’s or jpg’s you’ve got what you need to be IPTC-friendly. ACDSee Pro, for instance, does not write IPTC to psd’s from Adobe, (although it will read it) and it’s not the only one. I will be changing all my psd’s to tiff’s to avoid future problems. Not only because I’m thinking of keeping this software, but because it will make my photos more compatible with everything.

XnView, a free IPTC-viewer, will read IPTC on psd’s and tiff’s but it will only write it to jpg’s. (Update: It does write to tiff’s now and has been added to my list of most-used IPTC software.) And so it goes throughout graphics software. If you find one that reads and writes to jpg’s and tiff’s, and you can get all your photos into those two formats, you’re positioned about the best you can be for graphics software in general.

Tiff is a good high-quality format for your old pictures. I would say scan them larger than the pixel dimensions of your monitor or what you think will be your future monitor but who actually knows what that means. Pictures I saved at 1024 x 768 that filled the screen on a previous monitor now look lost in an ocean of background on my present 1280 x 1024.

If it’s pictures you may want to reprint, they need to be scanned large enough for that. No-one wants to see their ancestors on a fraction of their monitor when they could fill the whole screen so scan your pictures large, save them as uncompressed tiff’s and everyone will be happier. I have not taken an official poll on this but never mind, just trust me.

Another time-wasting thing to avoid: Some software gives options for categorizing, keywording, labeling, starring favorites 1 to 5, etc. that is proprietary to that software. This is not to be confused with the IPTC categories and keywords. In other words, if the database becomes corrupted for any number of reasons and you have to re-install, or delete your database and start over, all this type of work will be lost.

If you do a regular backup of the software installation itself (under C-drive/Program Files) to, say, an external hard-drive you would be able to retrieve your work after a catastrophic event but you better make sure you back it up over and over as you work. If you stick to only IPTC-information this is embedded in your photos and will stay there regardless of what else goes on with your computer or a particular software. Of course, you’d be backing up your photos regularly.

Another thing to look out for is batch renaming, reformatting, etc. If you use software that does not recognize IPTC it will simply delete it as being irrelevant. Windows Image Resizer and FastStone are two examples. Make sure you test-drive a photo with your software before you do something catastrophic to hundreds of them.

As soon as I finish whipping 12,000 photos into perfect filing order, I’ll be right back.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.

Let’s say it’s about the middle of December and you haven’t been paying any attention to the fact that Christmas is coming. But you’re starting to think maybe you should. Except it’s cold outside, your car’s buried under two feet of snow, you’re broke and, frankly, you’d rather look up census records than shop anyway. What you really need about now is something to save you from yourself.

Step 1. Make a list of all the people in your immediate family. Depending on your age, start with your parents or your grandparents. Or yourself. What we’re going to do is make a family tree, so pick the starting couple according to how many descendants you think will fit on one monitor-size tree.

Step 2. Find a graphic of a tree. If you use Legacy, just copy one out of the Legacy/TreeImages folder. Or look up ‘Tree’ in Google Images. As long as you don’t post your creation online or in any other publication you can probably get away with using a copyrighted one. Gather together individual photos of each person on your list. If you don’t have such things, crop the best you can find out of group photos. Save all these together in one folder.

Step 3. Download and install FastStone Viewer if you don’t already have it. It’s free, it’s 4 MB and it’s fine. This project can also be done in a different manner with Adobe Elements, or some such, if you have a photo editor.

In FastStone Viewer, click on the tree and then Create/Wallpaper Anywhere. Drag the edges of the tree to make it fill the screen.

FastStone Image Viewer, Wallpaper Anywhere

And then add the other pictures. And frame-masks if you like.

It’s self-explanatory, but if not, follow the instructions for making a collage in Photo Collage. There’s no forward/backward buttons here for moving layers so once you’ve got your people aligned do not click on the tree as it will bring it forward and your people will be hidden behind. You can get them out, it’s just a nuisance thing. If you like, you can then take your creation into the Draw Board and add text.

If you want your photos all lined up nicely it’s better to use something like Adobe Elements where there’s a grid. Here, just start with a new blank file the size you want, and then drag and drop the other pictures onto it, resizing them as you go. There’s also different options here for frames and filters.

Adobe Photoshop Elements

If you have time to look around for some clip art, you can add bells and tinsel and gingerbread Santa Clauses. Adobe Elements has a few bits or you can Google “free Christmas clip art”. Try to get into this. The census records will still be there when you get back.

Or if you like, you can spherize your relatives and use them for tree ornaments. Note: I did not say should.

If there’s still time you can print your creation and stick a stamp on it. If not, don’t we love email.

There, saved by the bell.

©2012 JLog. All Rights Reserved.