When is a substandard photo a great photo?

I’ve recently updated my Facebook photo from the Christmas version to my normal one. The normal one is taken from an unusual angle, and it’s a bit fuzzy. I love it, though, because of the photographer and the circumstances in which it was taken.

My niece turned 13 early last year, and for her birthday her parents had approved a mobile phone. This is no ordinary 13-year-old – she looks after her things amid the chaos of living in a small house full of teenage girls. So the day this photo was taken I took her shopping to buy her the Aunty Carole present,  and we looked for her mobile at the same time.

In the end the mobile she wanted was more expensive than her parents had approved, but with my contribution would work out. We called her Dad, he said yes, and we bought the phone and went home with it.

The battery had a bit of charge, and she started playing with the camera. She took this photo of me as I was leaving – the car keys are in my hand.

So every time I see this photo it reminds me of her, and what a good day we had that day. It’s not a great photo as a portrait of me, but I love it. She’s taller than me, as you can see.

Memories

So it’s the memories associated with the photo that make it special. I used to find this when I would edit the enormous numbers of prints from an overseas holiday. We used to go to exotic places with wildlife (and we will again one day), and we’d come home with dozens of rolls of film. When the photos were developed I’d sort through them and choose the best to put in an album. [This is like a history lesson, we don’t do this any more!]

Sometimes it was hard to choose the right photo, because the memories attached to the photo outweighed the objective interest of the photo itself. The first lion we spotted in Africa resulted in a photo of a small blob in a large expanse of yellow grass, which could just as easily have been a bush. Anyone looking at the photo would not give it a second glance, but for me it brings back the excitement of the day, with everyone leaning out that side of the truck trying to decide what it was, and realising it was a lion! The first iceberg on the way to the Antarctic peninsula is equally unspectacular. So the photos are in the albums even though they mean nothing, and may be uninterpretable, to anyone else.

Family history

Perhaps this is a by-product of the Camera Age, where we all take way too many photos and keep them all. Or the Tourist Age. I was recently subjected to the digital photos of a nephew’s trip to Egypt, all 1050 of them. Overseas trips are particularly susceptible to this. After I had chosen the photos and put them in the album I would check with my husband to see if I’d left any out that he has particular memories of – a shot re remembers trying to take of a leopard, or whatever, that had no significance for me.

Looking through old family albums, then, may not be the time-consuming process it is for more recent ones, but the same principle applies. Before you flick past to the next page, looking for a face you recognise, think about the photo you are looking at.

Why that building? Or that tree? What could it’s significance have been? Who took it? Is the format different from all the others, an indication that someone else’s camera was involved?  Do the same people, or buildings, or even trees, keep turning up? Is it just a blob in the grass?

Useful software

dreamstimefree_7966554_320x240Not directly related to genealogy, perhaps, but you might be surprised by how useful these programs can be.

Mindmapping

Mindmapping is a way of organising information or ideas. It is fantastic when when you are at the planning stage of a project for getting all your ideas down and organised. It’s very helpful for making decisions – you can get all the information you need down, all the fors and againsts, and everything becomes clearer. I don’t know why it works better than writing straight lists, but it does. I used to use it at university to plan essays. In those days I used pencil on a large drawing pad, or A3 paper. These days I use computer software, which allows changes and rearrangement more readily than pencil on paper.

There are a lot of different packages around, and after trying out a few I decided on Mindmeister. It is web-based, allowing collaboration with others, and it can also run off-line, which is quicker. The basic version is free to use and has limitations such as the number of mindmaps you can have at any one time. The premium version is a reasonable yearly fee that works out to something like $4 per month and allows unlimited mindmaps and offline access. Another free mindmap application, not web-based, is Freemind.

Photo albums

There are a lot of picture-hosting sites around that allow you to upload albums of photos to share with others. I use Picasa, one of the growing Google family of applications. I’ve mentioned Picasa before. It allows public sharing, which means anyone can see it, or private sharing, which involves a long key in the filename which you give to people you want to share it with.

This is a great way to share photos with relatives. You upload the album once, add photos as you wish, and send the link to your relatives. When you find a new cousin you can just send the link instead of sending photos as attachments. They can download the photos, and even though they may not be the same quality at least they have them and they can never be lost completely. Picasa is completely free.

Time tracking

Another web-based application I use is Harvest, to track my time and account for it. I create projects and tasks and start the timer when I am working on them. It also has an invoicing option. Although I started using it primarily for client work I also track my own genealogy research and general time-wasting. It is a very interesting exercise to do this for a week or two and find out exactly how much time you spend. Harvest has a number of monthly pricing packages.

A slightly different form of time-tracking that I’ve been experimenting with is RescueTime. This tracks exactly what you are doing on your computer – websites and applications – and gives you a list with time against each one. You can categorise them however you want; for example, I have MS Outlook and Gmail categorised as “email” and it is quite startling to see how long I spend in these applications every day. I can also set goals with warnings, so I can get a warning after I spent more than my allocated hour on email. I can also give each category a priority, from which my daily productivity is calculated. RescueTime is free.

Label those photographs!

Amy Sarah and MargaretWe are always being reminded to label all our old photographs so that future generations know who is in them, and this is good advice. How many photos have we seen of our parents, grandparents, and further back if we are lucky, and we do not know who is in them and neither does any one else? A simple label on the back would have been so helpful! So yes, we should write on the back of the photos, with a soft pencil, at least a 2B or 3B, and include as much information as we have or can find out – names, relationships, place, and date or an approximation.

Digital photos

What about the photos we are taking now? I have been using a digital camera for over five years now and I rarely, if ever, make prints from them, so there is no opportunity to write on the back. Perhaps you are the same. I file the photos under a folder structure that tells me what the photos are related to but I rarely rename them from that awful img000001.jpg name given by the camera, relying on thumbnails once they are on my laptop to show me who is in the photo, and the file date to tell me when it was taken.

This is an adequate strategy for me right now, but will it help my family and our descendants in a few years time? If I get hit by a courier van tomorrow will they know what they are? If an interested niece is looking over them in 30 years time will she even recognise the other people in the photos that she appears in as a child? Leaving aside the issue of whether digital files will be accessible in a few years time unless we continually back them up onto the latest media, we need to identify our digital photos as completely as the printed ones. Who is in them, where was it taken, and by whom, and at what date, and what was the occasion.

Scanned photos

If you have borrowed photos from relatives or friends and scanned them. What have you named the files? If they are just called img0001.jpg and you don’t change the name you may remember in 20 or 50 years who is in it but your children may not. The old Agfa scanner made me think up a name then and there before it did the scan so I would try to name the people and include an estimated year in the name. My nice new Canon scanner names the files Scan10001.tif and so on, which makes the scanning process much quicker, and I have to go through them later and give them real names.

How can your computer help?

File Properties - Summary TabYour software may allow you to add more information. I use Windows XP and so I cannot speak for other operating systems. In Windows Explorer when I right-click on the file name and then select Properties I get a General tab which displays the name of file, type of file, the program to display the file, location, file size, dates and times of creation, modification and access, and whether the file is read-only or hidden.

I also see a Summary tab, which allows me to enter Title, Subject, Author, Category, Keywords and Comments. These fields can be very useful to add more information than you can reasonably include in the file name, such as the names of every person in a wedding group or family gathering photo, where you got the photo from, and the original photographer. The information you enter should be carried over when you change programs and operating systems, although there is no guarantee.

PicasaOther photo-organising software allows similar information to be included. I use Picasa to organise photos because it loads thumbnails quickly so I can see all the photos in a folder at once; I can organise photos into an appropriate order instead of just by file name or date; I can create albums of photos taken from any folders organised as I wish and upload the albums to the web for public or private viewing; and I can do basic enhancement of photos such as cropping, contrast adjustment and red-eye removal while saving the original in a separate folder. I can also add captions to each photo. The size of the thumbnails can be controlled – larger to recognise individuals, as in the photo; smaller to see what’s in the folder at a glance. Picasa is one of the Google family of tools and is well-designed and reliable. I like software that plays nice together with others, but there are alternatives.

FastStone Image ViewerI also use FastStone Image Viewer, which allows me to do bulk renames, resizes and conversions of photos, as well as the standard viewing and organising. Thumbnails are, again, very quick to load. It has a long list of features that I have not even begun to explore in depth, including the ability to crop, adjust contrast and colour, change resolution and add text or watermarks, all in batch mode, and all at once if you prefer, so you can whip through a whole folder at once. I use FastStone for preparing images for the web and for my family tree software.

Both tools can be downloaded for free. Of course, if you rely on these programs to include extra information on your photos there is no guarantee that it will be available to future generations.

Another possibility, although more limited, is to use the features of your family tree program. I use The Master Genealogist which allows the inclusion of exhibits – photos,scanned images of documents, audio, video, etc, and extra information can be stored about the exhibit concerned. The drawbacks to relying on family tree software are – 1. the possibility of changing software in the future; and 2. not all the photos you take will be included. If you take 30 photos at your grandchild’s birthday party you might include one as an exhibit, or perhaps two.

It’s a difficult issue to come to terms with, and I wish I could say that I have been diligent in recording information on my own photos, but no. Other than using the name of the file to identify the people, date and place of the photo, I have not, as yet, been systematic in recording information about the photos I scan, and even less in the photos I take now, but I have been inspired to continue. Possibly the File Properties solution is the best so far, especially if I could find a batch method of updating it.

I would love to know what your solution is.