Best way to manage historical family photos?

November 10, 2023 5:33 AM

I've recently acquired suitcases full of old family photos dating back to the very early 1900s, and I'm going through and scanning them all. Can you help me figure out how to organise them effectively afterwards?

Some of the photos have annotations with the date or the names of the people, including annotations written much later by other people who might be wrong. Often I can guess the approximate date by guessing the age of children in the picture whose birth date I know. Sometimes people have written approximate dates or locations.

I'm scanning all the pictures and stowing them in Google Photos, but I'd really love a better way to organise them that lets me annotate them with metadata and the "provenance" or accuracy of that metadata. Even better if I can add metadata about the people themselves.

(Google Photos doesn't recognise many of the faces and won't let me tag people it doesn't recognise, so it's not off to a good start).

Does anyone have ideas for a better way to do this? Bonus points for free options and for things where I'm not just going to find myself with a completely unreadable file format in five years' time. More bonus points if I can share the results with other people in the family.

I realise I'm probably looking for a unicorn in a haystack, but you never know!

posted by quacks like a duck to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

I did the same thing and used Google Photos and yeah, tagging the people is hard with GP. Can you give them placeholder names?
posted by Peach at 5:46 AM on November 10, 2023

Would you consider uploading them to Ancestry.com as part of a family tree project? You can "attach" each photo to multiple people on the tree, add dates and locations, and write notes. Seeing how they all fit together would be pretty awesome.
posted by nkknkk at 5:59 AM on November 10, 2023

In my experience, google photos, apple photos, flickr, don't do meta data well, and meta data is a key thing to have these photos be accessible in the future. You need an actual program like LightRoom, which is the one I would recommend though I haven't used it in a while.

Set up folders for each decade. Depending on the next most important piece of info about a file, you could create subfolders for ... last names, places, months, specific people, etc. I recommend a consistent naming structure across photos. The elements I typically capture in the filename are:
Year, using four digits: 0000_
Month, using two digits: 00_
Name of person in photo, using three letters for their initials (use x if you don't know middle): abc_ or LastnameA_ (lastname and first initial)
Location, captured in a sweet spot of descriptive and concise, e.g.: EmeraldCityOz, CapeTownSA, ChichenItzaMX
Event, descriptive and concise, e.g.: BurningManNV, 50Reunion,

Here are a few that have worked well for me:

0000_abc_def_location.jpg
Examples:
2023_qld_Barcelona.jpg - 2023, quacks like a duck in Barcelona
1920s_dfb_fsf_WestEggNY.jpg - Sometime in the 1920s, Daisy F. Buchanan and F. Scott Fitzgerald, in West Egg, NY

0000_LastnameA_location.jpg
2023_DuckQ_ReykjavikIS.jpg - 2023, Quacks L. A. Duck in Reykjavik Iceland
1989_GorbachevM_Berlin.jpg - Mikail Gorbachev in Berlin in 1089

0000_00_Location_Event_01.jpg
2023_10_LasVegasNV_U2Sphere_025.jpg - November 2023 in Las Vegas, NV, U2 at the Sphere, picture 25 of x
posted by cocoagirl at 8:53 AM on November 10, 2023

Organize the key ones into a digital scrap book with some sentences and a family tree and then get them printed out into beautiful spiral notebooks and distribute to key “lineage holder” family members who appreciate this sort of thing.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:07 AM on November 10, 2023

Sort by close family. I would start filenames with last names to better organize sorting. There will be stacks of unidentified photos which can be organized by "unknown". I would suggest setting up a Google Docs spreadsheet with notations, tags, filenames, etc. This can always be imported into a database, if needed
posted by JJ86 at 11:05 AM on November 10, 2023

In Google Photos, in a web browser, if you click the "info" icon it brings up information including "people". If there is a not yet identified face/person, you can add the name there. Then, that name will be part of your people search. Over time, it will add them automatically or ask if these are the same persons. I scanned at least 5,000 photos into GF, and that feature worked well.

Also can add notes in the info section where is says, "Add a description". I put things like "Mary Smith, sister of John and Peggy Smith 1955. Taken in El Paso, Texas at the Smith family farm."

I have not found a good way to organize them. I tried making albums, but the permutations became too much. Divorce and remarriage caused all sorts of conflicts when trying to set up albums to share with different sides of the family. I could not put ex-husband Joe with new husband Tom. THings like that melted my brain and I just left it with the thousands of photos with everyone I knew, tagged.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 12:38 PM on November 10, 2023

I would set up a family tree on Wikitree and then add them to the profiles for each person. That way everyone in your family, both current and future, can find and enjoy them.
posted by Jacqueline at 6:20 PM on November 10, 2023

iMatch will do just about anything. Virtual folders, tags, hierarchical category's, facial recognition, etc
posted by Sophont at 9:14 PM on November 10, 2023

I am doing a similar project. When I started, I used Picasa which has fantastic face recognition and custom tagging features. Once Google bought and abandoned Picasa it took many years to find a suitable replacement. Earlier this year I tried Digikam which is also free and is shaping up to be a good supplement. Both programs allow for custom faces (I can use them for cats and dogs!). I am currently using both programs as they each have different strengths and weaknesses. It's easy to share photos with Digikam which has a link to directly upload photos to flickr. I paid for a flickr account to allow for advanced features, but the free tier may be enough for your needs. I send invitations to the people I want to see each specific group of photos. I am using a Windows PC. Not sure if there are Mac versions of these programs. I believe you can probably find Picasa installers on the web, but if not I can send it.
posted by Carlo at 8:50 AM on November 11, 2023