Management of Family History Photographs               R.E. Butler
                                                                                   Nov 17, 2011

The following notes were prepared in October 2006 for discussion at the OGS CSIG meeting in Ottawa.

The following 2 programs have since become available.
-	Windows Photo Gallery – which displays all photo directories, and also lists of photos grouped according to Tags
-	Windows Live Photo Gallery – which includes face recognition software to facilitate tagging by name.

These programs effectively deal with photos which have been stored in windows directories..

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Management of Family History Photographs               Oct 17, 2006
   General Image Management 

Problem
What is the best way to organize and store digital photos and scanned photos?
Requirements:
- backup capability
- search and retrieval 
- captions, identification, notes.
- printing captions.
- file size reduction

Photos in Family History Databases.
- limited number of photos.
- encumbers text info with photos.

Better to think of image management as a specialized type of electronic document management - EDM.
EDM features:
- document storage
- database about documents - indexed individually, or indexed based on info within documents.

PC DOCs / Hummingbird an example
- files entered into system are renamed and copied into Windows folders
   (renamed because in large systems people will inevitably create duplicate names.)
- data base created based on entered or searchable info. ... creator, date, subject.
- once files in are system, could actually use any auxiliary program to search and re-index.

Looks like the best way to deal with photos is to store them in Windows folders, and then index them later.
Several programs available to index windows folders and produce thumbnails for each image.
Examples:
1.   HP Image Zone.     Came with HP printer/scanner.
Can search on: folder/subfolder, date, keywords in file name, albums (?)

2.  Google PICASA   
Can search on:   subfolder, date
main folders missing.   Cannot seem to drill down to subfolders.

3.  Kalimages
Can search on:    subfolder (?), file names, photo metadata (extra info about photos)

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Photo Metadata - Captions etc.
Metadata is just data about data, in this case, data about the photo.
Some data is photographic "shooting data"      ( EXIF standard )
Another group is captions, headers, keywords ( IPTC standard )
Extra data fields are imbedded into *.jpg files.

Are these standards secure enough to bet your photo future on it?
jpg file standards defined by JPEG, Joint Photographic Experts Group, set up by ISO
- standards originally related to file compression.
- incorporated metadata defined by IPTC, International Press Telecommunications Council.

IPTC includes all major news services in the world.
It is secure enough for them.

Programs which will allow you to enter and display metadata
Nikon Viewer (many fields)
Adobe Photoshop Elements (limited)
Google Picasa (caption only)
Kalimages (many fields)

Programs which do not allow you to enter metadata
Microsoft PhotoEditor
Canon ZoomBrowserEx
HP Image Zone

Programs which blow away metadata
Windows Paint (?)

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Printing Captions with Photos
Could not find a way of printing metadata caption on top of image.
Adobe Photoshop Elements - can add editable text.   
 How to set background of text?

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Reducing file size
Microsoft PhotoEditor - Set jpg quality and size.
Might want to reduce total volume, particularly if emailing, or importing to file.

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Recommendations:
You cannot go wrong by storing your photos in Windows folders, in whatever folder organization makes sense to you.
You can index subsets later, if and when you wish.
You can use multiple programs for indexing and searching.

You cannot go wrong by entering captions and descriptive info (metadata) in IPTC fields in .jpg files.
These can be viewed when identifying photos 20 years from now, more or less like looking at descriptions on the back of old photos.

There are also programs which can search on these metadata fields.

Electronic Document Management and Image Management Systems will surely evolve but accommodate these features.

As of now, I will use:
Windows Explorer, HP Image Zone and Kalimages to search for photos.
Nikon Viewer to enter IPTC data, Kalimages to edit.
Adobe Photoshop elements to print captions with photos
Microsoft Photo Editor to reduce image size by cropping and reducing resolution.

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References:
JPEG.org				Joint Photographic Experts Group
IPTC.org				International Press Telecommunications Council
TASI.ac.uk				Technical Advisory Service for Images.
peccatte.karefil.com/Kalimages		Free demo software, 5 MB download.