The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/Danny_No_Arms on 2024-08-17 17:22:48.
Stop me if you've heard this one. I have bitten off more than I can chew. I took on several large boxes of family photos and albums spanning decades, with the promise that I would digitize them for the family. I did this because I knew that if anyone else in my family did it, they would take pictures of them with their phones, put the pictures on a memory stick and probably throw the photos out. I wanted to create a high-quality archive of these photos, so that if someone wanted to print a hard copy, they could have a faithful reproduction of the original. However, here we are a few years later and still I have barely started the project.
I do have what I think is a decent scanner, but the actual scanning is not my problem. It is the overall organization that is the challenge. There are tons of photos, different decades, different sizes, and many may be somewhat mixed up. Some photos have writing on the back, most do not. Some are in albums with writing on the pages. It is kind of a jumbled mess.
The end goal is to have a photo collection that is searchable and organized in some kind of layout that makes sense. I can handle the scanning. How do I go about tackling the associated data? Example: I have a stack of photos of the time we went to Uncle Bob's and Aunt Emma's place at the beach, and there are many family members in each picture. Do I use the photo EXIF data for this? Or the file names? If there is writing on the back of some photos that I want to scan in, how to I permanently associate the files together so that we know image01 contains the description from the back of image00?
Also, because of the size of this project, I will need some software that speeds these tasks up. I know there must be people out there who do this for a living for libraries, newspapers, etc., is there a set of best practices outlined that they use?
Thanks!