Bob and 8,000+ images

Project description (Names changed for privacy)

Bob approached me with media curating project: scan ~1200 photos, ~1400 slides, and combine them with ~5500 online photos. Have them all sorted by year, and package them into online albums that can be viewed by anyone with a link. His main goal was to preserve his history down to his adult children. I also reviewed with Bob options for online and physical means to store the photos for prosperity.

The photos and slides

I asked Bob to tag the physical media with the dates. He sorted the photos into envelopes, marked with  month/year. The slide carousels already had a sticker indicating the span of year(s) of the slides.

The photos were scanned in a flat-bed scanner (I don’t use “auto-feed” photo scanners; they run the risk of physically damaging the photos and introducing streaks in the images). Slides were scanned using a new high volume scanning technique. The slides themselves were in very good shape (minimal dust, no mold/fungus), so no post-processing was required. Brightness variations in the source material were compensated for in post-production editing.

Online images – what’s a date?

The on-line photos required a bit of investigation. Bob gave me his iCloud credentials, and I was able to download all the files in a couple of hours (and informed him when I was done so that he could change his password). The question now - what is the “date” of an online image?

Each JPG photo can contain “meta data”, such as the type of camera, shutter settings, etc, built into the file. One of these meta data is the the “date taken”, which reflects that actual time the shutter was pressed, as recorded by the camera (real camera or phone). But if you were to look on your laptop/computer at a directory of photos, you usually several dates – “date created”, “date modified”, or simply  “date”.  Date created/modified (usually) reflect when the file itself was created/modified. Example: I took the photo last month (“date taken” in the meta data) but only transferred to the computer yesterday (“date created” in the directory listing), and I cropped the photo and saved it today (“date modified” in the directory listing).

Things get more complicated when you upload a file. Using iCloud as an example, things like “date created” and “date modified” are usually not present, but there is a “date”. This usually reflects the “date taken” as seen in the meta-data; but in case the meta-data is missing “date taken”, it reflects the date the photo was uploaded. I also found a few cases where iCloud ignored the “date taken” meta data and used the date uploaded (nothing against iCloud – just illustrating some of the issues in dealing with online-media).

And of course, when I download the files, I need to keep track of the various date fields. The end goal is to get the true “date taken”.

Point of interest: what is the “date taken” of a phone snapshot, uploaded in 2014, of a paper photo taken back in the 1920s?

Putting them all together

I had already placed the images of the locally scanned slides/prints into date-base folders. Now we had to mix in the online photos.

After downloading the online photos and putting them into different folders based on iCloud’s view of the “date” of the photo, I ran a utility to extract the “date taken” meta-data for each photo, and move the file to the appropriate date-based folder. For photos that did not have a “date taken, I looked at the content and filename, to compare to other similar photos and took my best guess.

 After all that, I published the downloaded images into online albums spanning timeframes that Bob requested (by-the-decade from 100 years ago, to by-the-year from the past decade). I asked Bob to review and after a few tweaks, we came up with a final golden-source of images and their home folders.

Final packaging

So the final phase was to create the online and physical storage to memorialize all this. The goal was to have a perpetual online presence, with no yearly fees (no subscriptions), and viewable by anyone with a link. A few options were presented and finally agreed upon. In addition, I copied the final set of folers onto several hard drives to be handed to his family.

Contact me at zpfotos@outlook.com if you have any questions about this project or to discuss your media curating needs.