Organising scanned photos

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Fulhair

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Andy
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I'm scanning our family photos which is a long and dull job. Some of the albums are on a specifc event or subjects but mostly it's just loads of photos in the developers sleeves in no particular order. So far done about 2,000 ans stil more to go.

The photos are mostly from my childhood hence I can't really give them a place or year. I've shown some to my parents and they recall wherer they were taken but it's a bit ad hoc.

The question is can anyone suggest a good way of organising the scanned photos?

I would like to be able to look for a particular person, or combination of people. And if I can sideshow them with the family, quickly add comments or location tags for later review. Also want to consider move the files into a folder system that would be reasonably logical.

With my limited searching, the only thing I've seen to date that picks out faces in Picassa, but this doesn't seem to work that well (may be it's to do with the same person as a child then growing to an adult).

Cheers
Fulhair
 
Your best bet is probably either Lightroom or Aperture, great for organising photo's with the ability to add tag words.

TBH. I think you're asking for the moon on a stick if you're expecting software to able perform face recognition with child/adult variations :lol:
 
Lightroom v4 has a Maps mode to allow you to geotag images and you can download a 30 day trial.

Otherwise as RaglanSurf said
 
Lightroom and a whole bunch of methodical tagging as you import the pictures I'm afraid.
 
A slightly off the wall idea.

Open a flickr account just for these scanned pics.

Create a load of sets. Put each image in as many of the sets as you like.

Any good?
 
RaglanSurf said:
Your best bet is probably either Lightroom or Aperture, great for organising photo's with the ability to add tag words.

TBH. I think you're asking for the moon on a stick if you're expecting software to able perform face recognition with child/adult variations :lol:
Click to expand...

Agree on the first. I've scanned photos from my kids growing up, and decided that I would name the faces Baby A, Young A, and A. Seems to work; Aperture does suggest new scans against these names. Mind you, sometimes the scans are of a tree or a rock... :shrug:
 
Thanks all for the comments. I'll put a copy of Lightroom on my christmas list!
 
FWIW I have a system for filing my film that I've been using for many years.

Each film roll gets a reference: YYYYMM_Fxx where the first part is the month the film was processed, the 'F' stands for 'film' and xx is the index number of the roll in that month. For example, 201105_F02 would be the second roll developed in May 2011. Fortunately, I've never needed more than 99 numbers in one month :)

I keep my film strips and slides in Kenro binders, so the reference gets written on the paper or plastic sleeve in which each roll is stored.

I can then refer to the frame number on the film for each individual shot, which is how the scan file is named on disk - e.g. 201105_F02_24.tif is frame 24 on the roll.

I then organise the Lightroom folder structure by year and month

Scans
2011
01
02
03
04
05
201105_F01
201105_F02​
06​

etc.

I used to keep a ring binder with a hand written index to all the shots, with a page per film, but these days I just rely on keywording in Lightroom and, if necessary, Collections to group together stuff from across different rolls of film, such as a trip to Berlin in 1987.

Makes it easy to locate the original negative or slide if I ever need to go back to it, or to find the scanned file on disk if I have the original to hand.

I then just keep separate top level directories for Scans and Digital, but with Digital I just organise by day in addition to month as it's easy to renumber them by capture date on import to Lightroom - so those files are numbered YYYYMMDD_xxxx.RAW
 
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