How to share a family media database without overwhelming family?
May 11, 2021 9:21 PM Subscribe
An elderly family member has a huge amount of collected photos, videos, and text, and wants to share it with family as a sort of legacy. What's the best way to share it without overload or TMI?
There's some good stuff in there, like scanned old photos and genealogy and personal writing and family videos and such. But it's huge (like, giga-terabytes) and interspersed with private ephemeral data, random emails from other people, other people's downloaded photos, and god knows what else. It's more of a hard drive dump than a curated set of media, and it's just too huge for human consumption.
I don't want to dissuade him from sharing, but I'd like to find a better way for him to share rather than dumping the entire unfiltered thing on people's heads.
Posting on social media is an option, but doesn't entirely progress toward his goal of making a family archive.
I think he'd like a way to annotate photos or video (and text and music) with written or verbal notes, and get feedback, then archive it somewhere. It'd be good if the workflow made him focus on certain eras of his life, or certain categories, without repeating himself.
There's some good stuff in there, like scanned old photos and genealogy and personal writing and family videos and such. But it's huge (like, giga-terabytes) and interspersed with private ephemeral data, random emails from other people, other people's downloaded photos, and god knows what else. It's more of a hard drive dump than a curated set of media, and it's just too huge for human consumption.
I don't want to dissuade him from sharing, but I'd like to find a better way for him to share rather than dumping the entire unfiltered thing on people's heads.
Posting on social media is an option, but doesn't entirely progress toward his goal of making a family archive.
I think he'd like a way to annotate photos or video (and text and music) with written or verbal notes, and get feedback, then archive it somewhere. It'd be good if the workflow made him focus on certain eras of his life, or certain categories, without repeating himself.
Can they create an outline of what would essentially be an autobiography of their life and then put the various items under the various headings?
"The Early Years" and then put a folder of pictures and notes from childhood. "Family Tree" and list the various relatives along with pictures and scans of letters, etc. "123 Main St" and link any items from those years when they lived at that address.
Can even make a chapter/folder of uncategorized (random) emails. Dump all the random items there.
If you get them thinking linearly like an autobiography, it might help them focus.
posted by AugustWest at 11:33 PM on May 11, 2021
"The Early Years" and then put a folder of pictures and notes from childhood. "Family Tree" and list the various relatives along with pictures and scans of letters, etc. "123 Main St" and link any items from those years when they lived at that address.
Can even make a chapter/folder of uncategorized (random) emails. Dump all the random items there.
If you get them thinking linearly like an autobiography, it might help them focus.
posted by AugustWest at 11:33 PM on May 11, 2021
Tropy is a higher-ed-developed software designed for organizing research photos and files and notes from visits to archives. Could be overkill but with that much stuff it might not be:
https://tropy.org/
posted by lillygog at 4:17 AM on May 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
https://tropy.org/
posted by lillygog at 4:17 AM on May 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
You should back it up in any case, a a google or other drive space is a good way to go.
posted by theora55 at 7:25 AM on May 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by theora55 at 7:25 AM on May 12, 2021 [1 favorite]
Figure out a way to tag stuff, if your chosen method of hosting makes it available. That in itself could be an overwhelming project, but perhaps start with the most important /interesting items first, perhaps?
posted by lhauser at 8:04 AM on May 12, 2021
posted by lhauser at 8:04 AM on May 12, 2021
First off, before you start, make good secure backups of the data. Even if it's just a removable hard drive, it'll be better than nothing.
The thrust of this question appears to be getting a curated subset of this archive, which leads to a kind of chicken & egg problem; someone will have to go through this archive to curate it, but you also say it's too much for a person to handle. Unless the elderly family member has knowledge of what a curated subset looks like and can provide that easily, the only thing I can think to do would be to do the curation work in parallel. Divide up the archive and send it to family members to have them curate that portion and then recombine it after you're done.
posted by Aleyn at 11:57 AM on May 12, 2021
The thrust of this question appears to be getting a curated subset of this archive, which leads to a kind of chicken & egg problem; someone will have to go through this archive to curate it, but you also say it's too much for a person to handle. Unless the elderly family member has knowledge of what a curated subset looks like and can provide that easily, the only thing I can think to do would be to do the curation work in parallel. Divide up the archive and send it to family members to have them curate that portion and then recombine it after you're done.
posted by Aleyn at 11:57 AM on May 12, 2021
If photos are in Google photos, you can search for specific people or objects. Or search something like "paper" or "text". Especially if there's metadata, this might make the information useable enough to be fun. You could then create an album with just the photos with specific people in it and share it with only those people.
posted by lookoutbelow at 9:40 PM on May 13, 2021
posted by lookoutbelow at 9:40 PM on May 13, 2021
This thread is closed to new comments.
Comments can be added to individual files.
Focus on getting him to sort it into logical folders. By decade, or by person. Pictures of other people can maybe be restricted to only those people, so they can decide who can see them.
posted by Elysum at 9:51 PM on May 11, 2021 [1 favorite]