1) Photos you look at when the subjects are still alive
2) Photos that you remember people by and cherish people for
1 = are all the typical family group pics, lots of posing
2 = the photos where the subjects may not even know that they are being photographed, while doing the things they are cherished for by others. Sometimes they might not even like the presented actvities, but everyone else around them appreciates it .
- Photos of people repairing their family's gadgets
- Photos of people doing mundane tasks, ironing their clothes, cooking dinner for everyone, being exhausted, reading to others...
- This is what prevails while people are still alive who remember you. What you will be remembered by. Mostly what you did for other people and how people observed you.
Take photos of your parents and loved relatives during daily life and their tasks. You will be far more moved and inspired by these pics, than by typical family group photos.
Agree, but the other part of the advice I think is important and maybe even not fully explained in this blog post. Taking great photos is about using great light, this matters more than composition (you can crop in post) in my opinion. Rule of thirds is just a guideline, not a rule, if you’ve got great light and an interesting subject I couldn’t care less where those thirds lines sit. I mostly shoot on an old hassleblad with 6x6 square negatives and I often frame my shots with my subjects in the middle of the frame.
I have also done what the OP is describing, scanning all my family’s negatives. I wanted to devote the amount of time it takes me to scan and color correct a frame to a scant few of the images. My family liked to take “snaps” of places and vacations (think non-descript cornfields or national park visitor centers) and hostage photos of the kids clearly taken against our will.
I taught myself how to shoot on film to learn what I was doing, but going to the community darkrooom was the real education. I learned how good photographers used the light and saw the world by watching them develop and seeing the end product. Photography is just like any other endeavor, you get out of it what you put into it. For your kids and your kids kids, don’t just put into it some AI-computationally adjusted selfies and snaps of the tops of kids heads. Put some effort in, figure out what good light is, and take candid photos.
I found a harddisk with a ton of ripped MiniDV footage of the kids when they were young. What I value most isn't the kids. Sure, they're adorable and I have a ton of snapshots from them...but it's things like 'oh, we had that TV then, oh, that room still had carpet, man, the trees were really short, oh that really annoying noise the parrot makes? He's been doing it for more than 20 years.'
It's not the subjects, it's the context that is cherished.
I've gone on vacation and taken photos of the sights. wow, look at that beach/mountain/breathtaking view, etc. Later viewing them, they are usually kind of dull.
But if you put a friend or family member in the landscape, they become 1000x more memorable. keepers. Like your advice, unposed and just in the frame can be more powerful than a posed image.
I borrowed a couple Annie Liebovitz portrait books from the library for inspiration. Lots of good poses in there, rather than the standard straight ahead picture.
My favorite is the one of Bruce Springsteen sitting on his motorbike. I'm going to try and recreate it.
I've seen various photos of Keith Richards. What's amazing is he's not a handsome man, but somehow the photos of him are incredible.
I lost all of my photos (along with everything else) when growing up, so taking pictures and videos was important to me as I became an adult.
I'm 59 now. In the 1990s I started taking VHS videos of family events. Sometimes I would walk around "interviewing", sometimes I would walk around and try to normally talk to people while holding that huge recorder. (That didn't work). I even set it up on a tripod and just let the recorder run while my parents and others visited.
This past year I've ripped a couple of dozen DVDs out of all of those tapes. In the past two weeks I've then ffmpeg'ed them to mp4s and loaded on an SD drive and put in a e-picture frame.
Now we have 30-40 hours of "family memory TV" playing constantly in our living room. It is one of the most amazing things I've done with technology. I can't describe the feeling of looking back 30+ years to see folks who are long gone -- or now adults with their own kids!
God I'm glad I didn't record all of this on a cell phone or use social media. It would have been impossible to have the patience and time to scale all of those walled gardens for this project.
Best videos? The "family interview show", where I ask questions and everybody performs some kind of art. Wish I'd done one of those every year. Second best? Just setting the cam up and letting it run. Third place are videos of family members doing things that'll never happen again, like watching a sonogram of a new baby on the way.
Worst videos? As I know (and knew at the time!), a bunch of videos and pictures of things we were looking at that were interesting to us at the time but stuff you could find online in a couple of seconds. Unless it has audio commentary, it was a pointless exercise.
Great tips in here! And I know this isn’t about videos… but, don’t forget about videos.
I love taking pictures. In particular, candid moment-capturing portraits that reveal something about the subject. Also, technically challenging ones with really long exposures (eg around a campfire), or narrow depth of field (eg of my kids playing in the backyard). I like to think I’ve taken plenty of “good” photos of my family over the years.
But something I’ve found is what I go back to the most are those poor quality, poorly edited, silly little videos I take of my family just living life. I used to avoid video because the outcome was just too hard to control. They would never turn out “good”.
But flipping through my digital albums now, I wish i took more videos. A poor video can capture a lot… maybe even more than a great picture. So I find myself taking a lot more videos now.
I gave my daughter a toy camera around age 2.5 or 3 and didn't realize it also captured video. She had unintentionally discovered the video function and has since captured many conversations, photos of our old house, videos of car rides, and loving moments between our family.
She's had it for almost 3 years now and it's been one of her longest lasting toys and is, without a doubt, the most meaningful. It gives "seeing the world through her eyes" a whole new meaning.
I do an annual one-take video around the house with the family, just talking about what has changed. Open cabinets and show what is in them. Talk about what is going on that week and what you are looking forward to. It usually goes for 20-30 minutes.
There is a related problem, which I hit while scanning family archives going back slightly more than 100 years. There is no good photo archival software.
If you now rushed to click "reply" to say that yes, of course there is, right here, hold your horses. You probably do not understand the problem.
Good photo archival software would let me keep my photos in formats that will be readable 25 years from now. It must not rely on any company being in business or offering any service.
It must support storing the same picture in multiple formats. It must support assigning dates to pictures that are not the same as the file date nor the EXIF date. It must support assigning imprecise dates (just a year, or ideally an interval).
It must support storing multiple files as part of the same "image", and I do not mean multiple versions/formats of an image here. Examples: front and back of a scanned paper photo, or 24 scans of a large format picture that are then merged together into a resulting stitched image.
All that information must be preserved in ways that will let me recover it even without any software (e.g. files in the filesystem).
I used many solutions over the years, and got royally screwed by most, the most recent one being Apple shutting down Aperture (which did most of these things pretty well). I am now close to writing my own software.
EDIT: to all those who respond with "just store it as files" — yes, of course they should be stored as files. But that's not an answer. You do want searchability, nice visual access, and other niceties on top of the basic plumbing.
There was a similar journey for our family after our parents passed and indeed, the photos with people doing ordinary things are the ones we share and enjoy. The Grand Canyon has a way of looking the same now as it did in 1955 and so those photos were discarded. Five boxes of photo albums were examined and the photos to keep were cut out and sent to be digitized organized by year and topic. I am glad someone wrote about their experience and the tips that come from having spent examining a life well photographed.
If you just start taking photos (with permission) and keep taking them eventually your subjects will get used to you being there and start acting normally again in most cases. It doesn't cost anything to take photos, except your time, so just keep spamming the trigger. Each exposure is a chance at a good photo, for the most part.
The thing about family photos that's most important is to have THE NAMES of everyone in the photo, not "mom" or "lucy"... actual full names, so that someone in a generation or two can actually understand who is who. My wife's family had that... but then the photos were ripped out of the album, and all context was lost. 8(
As much as possible, I've got every face tagged in my photos so sproutlet has something useful when the time comes.
> It doesn't cost anything to take photos, except your time, so just keep spamming the trigger
This, this, this, and this!!!
My mother is the one that takes the initiative of taking pictures of people during events (whether important or just small outings). What she has a hard time understanding is that you must spam the trigger. She tries to frame the picture perfectly, and everyone on their most photogenic faces. Then, she takes ONE shot and oh... somebody closed their eyes a bit. "Let's go for another one, everyone go back in place!"
What she doesn't understand is that the best and most memorable pictures isn't the one where people are smiling straight into the camera. It's when people are doing something they enjoy and don't even notice the camera and don't do a perfect model pose.
I'm lucky if I delete only 9 of the 10 photos I took!
>eventually your subjects will get used to you being there and start acting normally again
This is my issue. Social media has made this much more difficult for me, people generally want to look good in all the pictures. I never post them anywhere, maybe to a small group chat, but still it's the natural instinct many people have when they see a camera out.
So I find people getting self-conscious or otherwise uncomfortable/annoyed when I try to get candid shots. But I know they will appreciate them later, and often do, but it's hard to push past this initial reaction.
These threads have been helpful and motivating -- I will try to reference them later with family to explain why I'm taking all these pictures, and why they shouldn't stress too much about how they look.
I can understand the sentiment not to add extra work of scanning pictures of items that have seemingly not changed over the years. But I personally find these pictures interesting. I love to look at old pictures of say a square or a street and see how much or little has changed. I guess it depends on the viewer but I hope my kids don‘t feel the need to dump the hundreds and thousands of pictures of things they’re not a focus of.
But I agree 100% on the non staged photo motive part. I took a lot of photos of my kids over the years and other people asked me to do the same for their kids. With the question why the fotos looked so good. I always explained my two secrets.
1. Go down to the same level as your kid. Most parents snap pictures of their little ones from above. This looks like a screenshot from the eye. The different perspective to see a kid how another kid sees it is more fascinating.
2. Don‘t Stage the Fotos. Try to capture interesting moments. You may have to lurk or wait. If you know the person well you get a feeling when a certain emotion will show on their face. That is something a staged photo won‘t give you.
Doing group photos like this becomes more and more difficult of course. And when kids age they become more and more aware of the camera.
My wife and I* scanned 4000+ film prints with an Epson scanner I bought in frustration at not finding a well regarded negative scanner. It took a weekend. They're untagged except by any writing on the film packs or the photos themselves.
It isn't that big of a deal. I'd do it for pay for other people if someone absolutely needed it, but it isn't that hard. 100GB including the static gallery site I set up, currently in glacier and on two NAS.
I second his opinion. No point to take the 15 million's photo of the eiffel tower. Loved ones of course. But also the street! What I find the most interesting in old family pictures is a window into how people I know, or only apart by only one degree of separation, lived at a completely different time. What seemed mundane at the time is often the most amusing a century later. That's also what I like in old movies. Like just the streets of Paris in the early 70s look foreign to a modern eye. Hardly any traffic, you could park anywhere, hardly any advertising boards.
After doing some in-house scanning I sent a bunch of stuff out. At the time, there was a company in CA that put stuff on a pallet to India. A bit butt clenching but it was great and I wrote a review for CNET where I was in the Blog Network at the time. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/reviewing-the-result...
Was probably more selective than you. And agree that a lot of the day-to-day stuff outside of the house in particular simply wasn't recorded. No photos of my mother's chemistry lab for example.
I've thrown a lot of stuff out but could probably get more scanned but not sure after looking at it if another pass is worthwhile.
As for "include the photographer": unfortunately the photographer (aka me) is usually the only one who reads these articles. Whenever I ask someone else to take pictures of me they ask me to strike an artificial pose and then take a full-body shot. Hopefully one day my nephews will say "we don't know what uncle probably_wrong really looked like, but his pictures were great".
As for the suggestion: I stick to the rule "do not make albums with more than 36 pictures" which is the number of photos a roll of film used to deliver reliably. If you take 300 pictures and stick to the top 1% you'll quickly learn which pictures are worth keeping. Your friends and family will be silently grateful.
Just to share my experience: My brother and I recently digitized all our family photos. The process doesn't have to be so daunting. We found someone on facebook marketplace with a high quality scanner, and paid them to scan every photo and put it on a USB stick. I don't remember how much it cost but it was pennies per photo.
Not a dig at you but I laughed a bit when reading it.
"it's not hard, just pay someone to do it for you"
I get the sentiment though. I've spent countless of hours trying to read up on digitizing our VHS collection while the proper thing would've been to just have a company do it for me. The main concern for me though is that they might just run the most basic settings and I'm telling myself that doing it myself will allow me to future proof the format a bit better.
Does anyone have any recommendations of a site or a self-hosted option for uploading photo collections? I’d love to share photos of our child with the grandparents but end up just sending the odd snap through WhatsApp, it would be nice to make an actual collection.
There are things I really like, e.g. that you can restrict access per user.
But there's no comment/chat/discussion facility, so you cannot easily get feedback on your photos.
There's also NextCloud, but I think the solutions there are a bit more rudimentary. However, if you already use NextCloud (or a similar solution like a CMS for example), you could look for a plugin. https://nextcloud.com/
I highly suggest Immich [1], it's an open-source and self-host alternative for Google Photos. It's still under very active development, but I think it's the best out there.
I inherited similar boxes of thousands of unorganized photos when my mom died. I threw them all away. They weren’t meaningful enough to her to organize, and they meant even less to me.
My lesson is I don’t take photos. I realized long ago that I never look at them again.
There's nothing wrong with not wanting to take photos (or keep other people's photos around) if that's not your thing. Other relatives and descendants who are into family history and genealogy might find those photos very interesting, possibly even priceless, so instead of doing it for yourself you might want to consider doing it for them.
I love taking photos and realised I had this problem so I spent some effort setting up a server that delivers a random (biased in various ways), labelled photo from my (huge) collection on demand via http, with parameters for size etc, and then set up some rpi based photo frames (using old monitors) that show a random photo every 30s, and similar for desktop background on all the computers in the house. Now I feel like I'm familiar with all my photos. I also have a simple web-based UI that shows the history of the last few dozen photos fetched so if one catches my eye I can find it easily, and a way to tag photos to include them in the "random" rotation more frequently.
Our photo library currently consists of 300,000 photos. It goes back 20 years, and while i would like to say it is curated, the sheer amount of photos makes that task pretty much impossible.
We take a lot of photos, both of family/friends/pets, but also landscapes and nature, and when curating the photo library, i often find myself deleting the landscape photos of 10 years ago. We don't need to keep 200+ photos of sunsets. Yes it was a pretty sunset, but there are hundreds of those every year, and unless it includes photos of our family or something else "special", the photo doesn't stand out, and will eventually be a candidate for being deleted.
I just finished the years curating, and have deleted almost 60,000 photos from the library. Sunsets, blurry photos (that doesn't have any other value), screenshots, and lots more.
Eventually i will however have to curate it even more. When our kids eventually "inherit" the photo library, they'll most likely be overwhelmed by the sheer size of it, and simply discard it. On the other hand i don't want to leave them without photos of their childhood, and who's to say what matters to them as memories.
If you can code, you can run them by AWS rekognition to do face recognition. It works amazingly well (you need a score >98 for a match). Where I am impressed is that it is also remarkably resilient to faces aging, and in some case identify some toddlers from an adult face. In your case if it only goes 20 years it is maybe less critical, but in my case I have photos going back to late XIX century, and good luck guessing who was that toddler without a legend!
DSLR photos are for art, not memories. I use only my Android phone for memories (among other things).
I have a daily job that transfers photos from my phone to my PC.
Once a month, I copy all the photos/videos of the previous month into a directory. I fire up a simple Flask web app I wrote that builds a page showing all the photos/videos that are in a directory. Under each photo/video, I have:
- A checkbox on whether I want to keep it
- A textbox for putting a caption. Here I write whatever was going on that day (or when I took the photo)
- A field for entering tags (plain text, tags separated by commas).
When I hit a button:
- It copies all my selected photos/videos to another directory.
- In a static site generator, it creates entries for each day there is a photo/video. It adds rich text (e.g. Markdown) to the SSG entry with links to the copied photos/videos, and "captions". The tags I had entered apply to the blog entry/day (not to the individual photo).
That's it. I'm done.
Separately, I have a daily cron job to build the site, and make a new page showing me all entries for today's date (i.e. all photos/videos taken on Jan 27th). This way I can see what I was doing on this day 4 years ago, etc.
I keep whatever I want. If I go for a monthly book club meeting, I take a picture of the building it's in and note down what book I read.
It's very manageable. At one point I had a bug and didn't update it for several years. When I finally got around to fixing the bug, it didn't take long to catch up on that backlog.
I don't curate my DSLR photos. No time for that. It's why I don't use it for memories.
> Labels matter. Even a few words helped me know when-and-where something happened: “1955 Nova Scotia” or my grandfather’s name. One of the saddest experiences was looking at a family-gathering photo from the 50s with several people in it, and having no idea who’s in it.
Dear lord, yes. My in-laws have just boxes and boxes of photos, some going way back into the late 1800s. The old ones are mostly people and faces. But we have no idea who these people are. My in-laws think they are related to them, otherwise, why would they be kept? But not a clue who this person is.
It's terribly sad in a way. My spouse doesn't want to throw it all away, it's family history presumably, but we have no idea if it'll ever be a history we know.
And so they sit in an attic, waiting for some magical technology to rescue it.
Online photo libraries have gotten much better at matching up people in photos over the last few years. I don't think it's completely crazy to assume that they might one soon be able to figure out something useful about family relations too (e.g. this mystery person was at these 3 known people's weddings, so they're likely another sibling of so-and-so).
My friend owns a little "clean out old houses" business in Japan. Recently we threw out dozens of large boxes of old photographs; the grandma told us she didn't need them anymore. The rest of the family all had their own lives in Tokyo, and could care less about the past. Sad to see, but I've seen it many many times.
And if you use Nextcloud on Android to back up your photos, it may have been not syncing the location since mid-December when Google removed certain permissions from the App Store version.
I bit peculiar and specific but came to mind and may save some person's geotagging.
I'm in the middle of a similar project but using a mirrorless camera with a macro lens and a repro stand.
I second most of this, but would like to offer a different opinion about triage. In my experience, doing the triage often takes as much time as digitizing the slides. "Mindless" mass digitization where I just optimize for throughput has been a good strategy for the collections I've worked on.
Instead I'm more careful of what I choose to post process after I digitization. I haven't been throwing much away yet, I usually just don't process the stuff I don't find interesting. Storage is cheap these days.
I thought that was a strange approach, too - I'd have thought it'd be far quicker to cull post-scanning. Plus, then you have the whole catalog digitized in case someone else wants to come along and make different editorial choices later on.
[+] [-] julianpye|1 year ago|reply
1) Photos you look at when the subjects are still alive
2) Photos that you remember people by and cherish people for
Take photos of your parents and loved relatives during daily life and their tasks. You will be far more moved and inspired by these pics, than by typical family group photos.[+] [-] MarkMarine|1 year ago|reply
I have also done what the OP is describing, scanning all my family’s negatives. I wanted to devote the amount of time it takes me to scan and color correct a frame to a scant few of the images. My family liked to take “snaps” of places and vacations (think non-descript cornfields or national park visitor centers) and hostage photos of the kids clearly taken against our will.
I taught myself how to shoot on film to learn what I was doing, but going to the community darkrooom was the real education. I learned how good photographers used the light and saw the world by watching them develop and seeing the end product. Photography is just like any other endeavor, you get out of it what you put into it. For your kids and your kids kids, don’t just put into it some AI-computationally adjusted selfies and snaps of the tops of kids heads. Put some effort in, figure out what good light is, and take candid photos.
[+] [-] Damogran6|1 year ago|reply
It's not the subjects, it's the context that is cherished.
[+] [-] m463|1 year ago|reply
I have another probably simplistic insight.
I've gone on vacation and taken photos of the sights. wow, look at that beach/mountain/breathtaking view, etc. Later viewing them, they are usually kind of dull.
But if you put a friend or family member in the landscape, they become 1000x more memorable. keepers. Like your advice, unposed and just in the frame can be more powerful than a posed image.
[+] [-] WalterBright|1 year ago|reply
My favorite is the one of Bruce Springsteen sitting on his motorbike. I'm going to try and recreate it.
I've seen various photos of Keith Richards. What's amazing is he's not a handsome man, but somehow the photos of him are incredible.
[+] [-] ErigmolCt|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|1 year ago|reply
I'm 59 now. In the 1990s I started taking VHS videos of family events. Sometimes I would walk around "interviewing", sometimes I would walk around and try to normally talk to people while holding that huge recorder. (That didn't work). I even set it up on a tripod and just let the recorder run while my parents and others visited.
This past year I've ripped a couple of dozen DVDs out of all of those tapes. In the past two weeks I've then ffmpeg'ed them to mp4s and loaded on an SD drive and put in a e-picture frame.
Now we have 30-40 hours of "family memory TV" playing constantly in our living room. It is one of the most amazing things I've done with technology. I can't describe the feeling of looking back 30+ years to see folks who are long gone -- or now adults with their own kids!
God I'm glad I didn't record all of this on a cell phone or use social media. It would have been impossible to have the patience and time to scale all of those walled gardens for this project.
Best videos? The "family interview show", where I ask questions and everybody performs some kind of art. Wish I'd done one of those every year. Second best? Just setting the cam up and letting it run. Third place are videos of family members doing things that'll never happen again, like watching a sonogram of a new baby on the way.
Worst videos? As I know (and knew at the time!), a bunch of videos and pictures of things we were looking at that were interesting to us at the time but stuff you could find online in a couple of seconds. Unless it has audio commentary, it was a pointless exercise.
[+] [-] arscan|1 year ago|reply
I love taking pictures. In particular, candid moment-capturing portraits that reveal something about the subject. Also, technically challenging ones with really long exposures (eg around a campfire), or narrow depth of field (eg of my kids playing in the backyard). I like to think I’ve taken plenty of “good” photos of my family over the years.
But something I’ve found is what I go back to the most are those poor quality, poorly edited, silly little videos I take of my family just living life. I used to avoid video because the outcome was just too hard to control. They would never turn out “good”.
But flipping through my digital albums now, I wish i took more videos. A poor video can capture a lot… maybe even more than a great picture. So I find myself taking a lot more videos now.
[+] [-] prismatix|1 year ago|reply
She's had it for almost 3 years now and it's been one of her longest lasting toys and is, without a doubt, the most meaningful. It gives "seeing the world through her eyes" a whole new meaning.
[+] [-] aaronax|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jwr|1 year ago|reply
If you now rushed to click "reply" to say that yes, of course there is, right here, hold your horses. You probably do not understand the problem.
Good photo archival software would let me keep my photos in formats that will be readable 25 years from now. It must not rely on any company being in business or offering any service.
It must support storing the same picture in multiple formats. It must support assigning dates to pictures that are not the same as the file date nor the EXIF date. It must support assigning imprecise dates (just a year, or ideally an interval).
It must support storing multiple files as part of the same "image", and I do not mean multiple versions/formats of an image here. Examples: front and back of a scanned paper photo, or 24 scans of a large format picture that are then merged together into a resulting stitched image.
All that information must be preserved in ways that will let me recover it even without any software (e.g. files in the filesystem).
I used many solutions over the years, and got royally screwed by most, the most recent one being Apple shutting down Aperture (which did most of these things pretty well). I am now close to writing my own software.
EDIT: to all those who respond with "just store it as files" — yes, of course they should be stored as files. But that's not an answer. You do want searchability, nice visual access, and other niceties on top of the basic plumbing.
[+] [-] dano|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mikewarot|1 year ago|reply
The thing about family photos that's most important is to have THE NAMES of everyone in the photo, not "mom" or "lucy"... actual full names, so that someone in a generation or two can actually understand who is who. My wife's family had that... but then the photos were ripped out of the album, and all context was lost. 8(
As much as possible, I've got every face tagged in my photos so sproutlet has something useful when the time comes.
[+] [-] Pooge|1 year ago|reply
This, this, this, and this!!!
My mother is the one that takes the initiative of taking pictures of people during events (whether important or just small outings). What she has a hard time understanding is that you must spam the trigger. She tries to frame the picture perfectly, and everyone on their most photogenic faces. Then, she takes ONE shot and oh... somebody closed their eyes a bit. "Let's go for another one, everyone go back in place!"
What she doesn't understand is that the best and most memorable pictures isn't the one where people are smiling straight into the camera. It's when people are doing something they enjoy and don't even notice the camera and don't do a perfect model pose.
I'm lucky if I delete only 9 of the 10 photos I took!
[+] [-] nstlgia_junkie|1 year ago|reply
This is my issue. Social media has made this much more difficult for me, people generally want to look good in all the pictures. I never post them anywhere, maybe to a small group chat, but still it's the natural instinct many people have when they see a camera out.
So I find people getting self-conscious or otherwise uncomfortable/annoyed when I try to get candid shots. But I know they will appreciate them later, and often do, but it's hard to push past this initial reaction.
These threads have been helpful and motivating -- I will try to reference them later with family to explain why I'm taking all these pictures, and why they shouldn't stress too much about how they look.
[+] [-] larusso|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ErigmolCt|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] genewitch|1 year ago|reply
It isn't that big of a deal. I'd do it for pay for other people if someone absolutely needed it, but it isn't that hard. 100GB including the static gallery site I set up, currently in glacier and on two NAS.
[+] [-] cm2187|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|1 year ago|reply
After doing some in-house scanning I sent a bunch of stuff out. At the time, there was a company in CA that put stuff on a pallet to India. A bit butt clenching but it was great and I wrote a review for CNET where I was in the Blog Network at the time. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/reviewing-the-result...
Was probably more selective than you. And agree that a lot of the day-to-day stuff outside of the house in particular simply wasn't recorded. No photos of my mother's chemistry lab for example.
I've thrown a lot of stuff out but could probably get more scanned but not sure after looking at it if another pass is worthwhile.
[+] [-] probably_wrong|1 year ago|reply
As for "include the photographer": unfortunately the photographer (aka me) is usually the only one who reads these articles. Whenever I ask someone else to take pictures of me they ask me to strike an artificial pose and then take a full-body shot. Hopefully one day my nephews will say "we don't know what uncle probably_wrong really looked like, but his pictures were great".
As for the suggestion: I stick to the rule "do not make albums with more than 36 pictures" which is the number of photos a roll of film used to deliver reliably. If you take 300 pictures and stick to the top 1% you'll quickly learn which pictures are worth keeping. Your friends and family will be silently grateful.
[+] [-] CharlieDigital|1 year ago|reply
Completely transformed our catalog of memories. When you weave scenery with experiences and people, something magical happens.
Our recent trip to Taiwan: https://youtu.be/7LWxVzZco0A
[+] [-] barrettondricka|1 year ago|reply
Snapped a photo of my room first thing.
[+] [-] pigcat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] suddenclarity|1 year ago|reply
"it's not hard, just pay someone to do it for you"
I get the sentiment though. I've spent countless of hours trying to read up on digitizing our VHS collection while the proper thing would've been to just have a company do it for me. The main concern for me though is that they might just run the most basic settings and I'm telling myself that doing it myself will allow me to future proof the format a bit better.
[+] [-] spiffotron|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ochrist|1 year ago|reply
There are things I really like, e.g. that you can restrict access per user.
But there's no comment/chat/discussion facility, so you cannot easily get feedback on your photos.
There's also NextCloud, but I think the solutions there are a bit more rudimentary. However, if you already use NextCloud (or a similar solution like a CMS for example), you could look for a plugin. https://nextcloud.com/
[+] [-] reddalo|1 year ago|reply
[1] https://immich.app/
[+] [-] rsolva|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Bishonen88|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] SoftTalker|1 year ago|reply
My lesson is I don’t take photos. I realized long ago that I never look at them again.
[+] [-] elevatedastalt|1 year ago|reply
I'm not even going to argue coz something tells me it's going to be futile.
[+] [-] kmoser|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] merlynkline|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 8fingerlouie|1 year ago|reply
We take a lot of photos, both of family/friends/pets, but also landscapes and nature, and when curating the photo library, i often find myself deleting the landscape photos of 10 years ago. We don't need to keep 200+ photos of sunsets. Yes it was a pretty sunset, but there are hundreds of those every year, and unless it includes photos of our family or something else "special", the photo doesn't stand out, and will eventually be a candidate for being deleted.
I just finished the years curating, and have deleted almost 60,000 photos from the library. Sunsets, blurry photos (that doesn't have any other value), screenshots, and lots more.
Eventually i will however have to curate it even more. When our kids eventually "inherit" the photo library, they'll most likely be overwhelmed by the sheer size of it, and simply discard it. On the other hand i don't want to leave them without photos of their childhood, and who's to say what matters to them as memories.
[+] [-] cm2187|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] BeetleB|1 year ago|reply
DSLR photos are for art, not memories. I use only my Android phone for memories (among other things).
I have a daily job that transfers photos from my phone to my PC.
Once a month, I copy all the photos/videos of the previous month into a directory. I fire up a simple Flask web app I wrote that builds a page showing all the photos/videos that are in a directory. Under each photo/video, I have:
- A checkbox on whether I want to keep it
- A textbox for putting a caption. Here I write whatever was going on that day (or when I took the photo)
- A field for entering tags (plain text, tags separated by commas).
When I hit a button:
- It copies all my selected photos/videos to another directory.
- In a static site generator, it creates entries for each day there is a photo/video. It adds rich text (e.g. Markdown) to the SSG entry with links to the copied photos/videos, and "captions". The tags I had entered apply to the blog entry/day (not to the individual photo).
That's it. I'm done.
Separately, I have a daily cron job to build the site, and make a new page showing me all entries for today's date (i.e. all photos/videos taken on Jan 27th). This way I can see what I was doing on this day 4 years ago, etc.
I keep whatever I want. If I go for a monthly book club meeting, I take a picture of the building it's in and note down what book I read.
It's very manageable. At one point I had a bug and didn't update it for several years. When I finally got around to fixing the bug, it didn't take long to catch up on that backlog.
I don't curate my DSLR photos. No time for that. It's why I don't use it for memories.
[+] [-] Balgair|1 year ago|reply
Dear lord, yes. My in-laws have just boxes and boxes of photos, some going way back into the late 1800s. The old ones are mostly people and faces. But we have no idea who these people are. My in-laws think they are related to them, otherwise, why would they be kept? But not a clue who this person is.
It's terribly sad in a way. My spouse doesn't want to throw it all away, it's family history presumably, but we have no idea if it'll ever be a history we know.
And so they sit in an attic, waiting for some magical technology to rescue it.
Labels matter.
[+] [-] lmm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mc3301|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] esafak|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronax|1 year ago|reply
I bit peculiar and specific but came to mind and may save some person's geotagging.
[+] [-] pinoy420|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] torbjornbp|1 year ago|reply
I second most of this, but would like to offer a different opinion about triage. In my experience, doing the triage often takes as much time as digitizing the slides. "Mindless" mass digitization where I just optimize for throughput has been a good strategy for the collections I've worked on.
Instead I'm more careful of what I choose to post process after I digitization. I haven't been throwing much away yet, I usually just don't process the stuff I don't find interesting. Storage is cheap these days.
[+] [-] turbojet1321|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dtgriscom|1 year ago|reply