After a swim with Vero on Sunday, I jumped into the fire with a project that I had put on hold for quite some time. This project involves tedious, monotonous work which some days is fine, others not so much.
I am scanning my parents old photo albums for archival purposes. I figured with the technology around me, why do my parents get to enjoy all the photos? I borrowed the bulk of their albums last year but then a few months ago Mom wanted them back so I kept a few that I was in the middle of scanning. I suppose my eyes were bigger than my belly taking this project on. I would say an entire photo album can take upmost of 5 hours to properly archive.
I am what is referred to as ‘anal’ when it comes to organization of things I’m passionate about. Music, photographs, etc. Granted, if you saw my bedroom, you would think I’m not passionate about my clothing as they are strewn about!
So with the advances in digital photography, I realized that it’s not just enough to scan the photos and crop them. I wanted to know what date the picture was taken to encode that data into the photo. Then, when I organize all the photos, they are by date, or the closest approximation. I think later on when I get bored, I would like to add text to each photo also so that I don’t lose factual information such as who is in the picture. There are quite a few pictures from the parents stash that I just don’t know who is in the picture, but I should have a record of it. I think I may bring the few albums I have scanned to my Mom and sit down with her and write down who was in the picture, or even the story behind the pictures.
Sure, I am ambitious about this project today, but the sheer size of it dwarfs my ambitions and this is why it’s taken me a year to scan three albums and properly tag them.
The COOL thing about tagging my photos by ‘Date Photo Taken’ is that if I upload them to a photo site…let’s say FLICKR, then I can browse my photos by date taken. It’s interesting to look back in the 80s when I was a kid and pinpoint the actual date where the picture was taken. At least I think it’s cool. Some people are just more interested in the actual pictures, not when they were taken. I wish I was like that!
The other thing I start to wonder about is how do the older folk feel about their pictures going on the Internet. I haven’t heard any complaints from my friends about the pictures I put online…if anything it helps them out as they have a cental repository to access the photos. But what about the older folk out there, or more personal pictures like baby photos and whatnot? That’s where I think a courtesy call to people should be issued to find out if they mind if their photos can be placed on the ‘net. Sure, there’s a way to make them private, but it’s a pain to issue guest passes to check out the flickr site if someone wants to check them out. WAY easier to make them public.
One reply on “The Archival Process”
I think the idea of scanning your parents picture are great. Actually I have been in the process of doing Nanny’s and Gary’s parents for the last couple of years. It is very time consuming and I like the idea of putting dates on them and the actual names of the people in the photograph and possibly even the event. Good idea….