What is the best way to share family photo albums with audio?
February 3, 2016 8:11 AM   Subscribe

I'm digitizing my mom's family photo albums (starting from the late 60s). I'm also going to record her comments on the pages during this process. Two part question: 1. In today's internet, what is the best way to put these up so that my extended family can access, both now and years in the future? Requirements: secure, not crazy expensive 2. How do I add the audio so that the viewer can listen to my mom while looking at that photo?

More notes:

I'm using a copy stand and will be taking a single photo of a double-page spread.

I currently use Flickr (grandfathered into their Pro account). I have a pretty deep Collection system (by decade, then by year, then by event: 2000s > 2003 > Christmas). That said, I'm willing to migrate to a better system, especially if I'm missing out on cool features like face recognition.

I was thinking about putting the audio up as individual SoundCloud files, and then add a link to the desired clip in the comments under the photo
posted by cgs to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
If you're willing to set it up a simple way of doing this would be to make a powerpoint presentation with each photo on one slide and then use the inbuilt narrations system to record what she says about each photo. This can then be turned into a video and could be put on youtube as a private video. The worst thing would be the initial making of the slides but after that everything is really simple.
posted by koolkat at 8:37 AM on February 3, 2016


What koolkat suggested but I use Freemake > scan photos > define an order > use slide show feature to pace photos > produce final edition adding a narration > save as .mp4.
posted by Freedomboy at 10:14 AM on February 3, 2016


Response by poster: Hmm... definitely solves for the synced narration, but I think the photo quality would be pretty poor in a PPT
posted by cgs at 10:25 AM on February 3, 2016


Best answer: I just tried this out on a photo album in my personal Omeka.net collection. Omeka is somewhat popular in the digital libraries, archives, museums, and galleries world. Supports Dublin Core metadata. Is somewhat clunky out of the box, but can be customized. Free if you install it on your own server, otherwise currently a minimum of $49 per year for hosted. What's nice is that you can always bulk export your data if you want to go elsewhere, which is much harder or impossible with many services.

Essentially, the audio file appears right under the image file on my Omeka site. Pretty neat. Memail me for the actual link.

I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to do this using only free services, but you run into sustainability issues at some point.

Have you thought about just videorecording your mother speaking as you go through each page and photograph it? The video could be edited into clips, and linked to the higher-res images in whatever photo management system you're using.
posted by bennett being thrown at 5:44 PM on February 3, 2016


One other possibility is this app!
posted by Hermione Granger at 8:12 PM on February 6, 2016


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