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Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

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moorfield
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Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#401405

Postby moorfield » April 3rd, 2021, 5:17 pm

Several boxes of old family photos taken from parents house clearance, and their parents house clearance, and so on. Some annotated, some not. Some a valuable record of family history, a lot not. Some a little too precious to lose, but none will come out of the boxes, realistically, and inevitably will get skipped within the next two generations - you know how it is, I'm sure.

So the time has come to start getting these digitized and stored for generations to come, before the originals do/can get lost and skipped. I'm looking for a "cloud" solution for this. Criteria are:

- Free/Low storage cost, ideally not an ongoing subscription service
- Easy to upload from PC/Scanner, not bothered about sorting or grouping, but...
- Ability to annotate individual photos or groups of photos with key words, phrases and/or dates, eg. "moorfield", "2006", "May 2006"
- Said key words, phrases and/or dates must be searchable for future users
- Ability to restrict access to some groups/sets of photos

I'm thinking Google Photos, but I'm not sure it's quite up to the annotation / search bit.

Any thoughts, recommendations welcome - thank you.

ReformedCharacter
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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#401420

Postby ReformedCharacter » April 3rd, 2021, 5:57 pm

moorfield wrote:Several boxes of old family photos taken from parents house clearance, and their parents house clearance, and so on. Some annotated, some not. Some a valuable record of family history, a lot not. Some a little too precious to lose, but none will come out of the boxes, realistically, and inevitably will get skipped within the next two generations - you know how it is, I'm sure.

So the time has come to start getting these digitized and stored for generations to come, before the originals do/can get lost and skipped. I'm looking for a "cloud" solution for this. Criteria are:

- Free/Low storage cost, ideally not an ongoing subscription service
- Easy to upload from PC/Scanner, not bothered about sorting or grouping, but...
- Ability to annotate individual photos or groups of photos with key words, phrases and/or dates, eg. "moorfield", "2006", "May 2006"
- Said key words, phrases and/or dates must be searchable for future users
- Ability to restrict access to some groups/sets of photos

I'm thinking Google Photos, but I'm not sure it's quite up to the annotation / search bit.

Any thoughts, recommendations welcome - thank you.

Google Photos may well do what you want, I've just tried adding a description to a photo and then searching for it. It seemed to work fine but then I didn't try anything particularly complex. Restricting \ allowing access shouldn't be a problem.

RC

JohnB
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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#401427

Postby JohnB » April 3rd, 2021, 6:09 pm

piwigo is good if you can host your own server. Its best if you can put all the metadata inside the photographs (I use Description, Keywords, CreateDate and do clever filters. Exiftool is an excellent tool for manipulating metadata.

Most online systems are poor at reading this metadata, and even worse at writing it back to the files, so its easy to type in lots of things and then loose them at the whim of Google.

For scanning slides, ask around for anyone who's got a slide scanner with a flip-flop hopper system. They work well, and of course anyone who buys one uses it for a week and then never needs it again.

Cornytiv34
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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#401635

Postby Cornytiv34 » April 4th, 2021, 2:23 pm

I have a similar problem with both photos and 35mm slides. I am not sure what a slide scanner with a flip flop hopper is. I tried looking it up but got no sensible result. Could you please explain?
Mike

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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#401681

Postby Lanark » April 4th, 2021, 5:53 pm

I think a cloud solution is even more likely to get lost than a physical album, these cloud companies, Google in particular, give NO guarantee that they will continue to provide a hosting service in even 5 years time never mind 50. If you die and stop logging in regularly theres a very good chance everything will quietly disappear.

My solution to this is to buy a large, really high quality album, one which contains absolutely no plastic, and curate only the best photos so you have something which people might actually want to inherit.

I have scanned things as well, its best to have both options.

JohnB
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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#401701

Postby JohnB » April 4th, 2021, 7:26 pm

You have a hopper that drops slides onto a platter that slides in and out. If you have to clip slides in a holder its really tedious, but here its just putting 10 slides in a hopper and inserting them in turn.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/DIGITNOW-Resol ... ics&sr=1-5

airbus330
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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#402093

Postby airbus330 » April 6th, 2021, 5:24 pm

Have a look at the Photomyne App. It is blindingly good. Renders multiple images. Fixes faded colours. Colorizes B&W. Stores logically. Downloadable in batches to your PC. There is an add-on for Slides. Not free, but its the best I have come across if you have a lot of old media to transfer.

ten0rman
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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#402539

Postby ten0rman » April 8th, 2021, 10:36 am

I bought a slide converter which although it worked, did so poorly, I think because it used a central source of light when what was needed was an even light source all over the rear of the slide. T

hen I found someone who had built a light box and used a digital camera to photograph his slides and turn them into a digital format. As a result, I made my own light box (2 x 25W pearl candlelight bulbs inside a box made from white faced mdf board with a small aperture covered by a translucent screen from a redundant slide viewer) and built an adapter to allow my cheapish digital camera to focus correctly on the translucent screen. Actual photographing was done by placing the slide on the translucent screen, placing the camera + adaptor on top and clicking away. I found that I could photograph up to about 15 slides very quickly indeed - anymore than that and the light box became rather warm from the heat of the bulbs. The copied slides were than transferred into the computer and using a program called The Gimp, I was able to a) correct for pincushion & barrel distortion; b) correct the colours, often by means of an automatic function; and c) correct for any problems caused by dust & hairs etc.

It didn't take long to do all my slides, but then I may not have as many as other people. The longest job was slide correction, especially if the slides were in poor condition, indeed I have one slide that I cannot do anything with, and another which I have only been able to recognise because the skyline was familiar, the actual shot being almost unusable. Even on the good slides, the biggest problem was recognising where some of the places were, eg I swore blind one particular place was on the road at the top of Scotland: it turned out to be The Old Man of Storr on Skye!

HTH,

ten0rman

BobbyD
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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#406010

Postby BobbyD » April 22nd, 2021, 6:42 am

Ultimately all companies go to zero, and all cloud services will cease to exist, but the ones you pay for are less likely to be arbitrarily yanked with a 30 days notice email sent to an address which itself ceased to be a working and maintained email address 12 years earlier.

Ensuring long term compatibility for physical digital storage isn't much easier...

SteMiS
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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#407368

Postby SteMiS » April 27th, 2021, 1:37 pm

airbus330 wrote:Have a look at the Photomyne App. It is blindingly good. Renders multiple images. Fixes faded colours. Colorizes B&W. Stores logically. Downloadable in batches to your PC. There is an add-on for Slides. Not free, but its the best I have come across if you have a lot of old media to transfer.

According to a review on the google play

"Does well except that the app keeps your pictures. Unless you pay a HEFTY amount per month, you can neither download your scanned photos, which you already own, nor share them with loved ones. Pointlessly stingy. Furthermore, $10 a month is far too much for something I'd use a couple of times. Imagine paying $120 a year for this app!! Perhaps I'd consider a small one time payment. Right now, I just wanted to share a very old memory. To the next option I go..."

Photomyne Ltd.24 April 2021
"This is your opinion and we respect it. We believe the app is worth it. You can try it for 3 days free and decide if you want to pay or not. If you have old photos, we believe that you will find the app very useful. We are here if you have any questions."

Does seem rather at odds with what you are saying and indeed what it says on Photomyne's site?

Dod101
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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#407381

Postby Dod101 » April 27th, 2021, 3:14 pm

Picking up on this again, I would certainly be nervous about cloud based storage. What is wrong with a simple portable drive apart obviously from capacity but I am pretty sure that 1 TB will take more than my entire photo collection. Then it just needs software to index and annotate surely?

Dod

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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#407382

Postby scotview » April 27th, 2021, 3:15 pm

I recently scanned my father's photographs/documents. I sorted them historically into where he had grown up as a child and then to different locations during his life.

I used an online system called "Dropbox" and stored the photos at their actual resolution in dated folders. A very useful function of Dropbox is that you can email family members when a batch of photos has been completed by date. They can view the photos within the date folder and can also choose to down load the jpeg photo files onto their own hard drives. It has been a great means of sharing his photos to family at different locations in the UK.

I also have the scanned photos on my hard drive/portable drives.

Dropbox gives you 2GB free storage which will be adequate for my project.

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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#407388

Postby MickR » April 27th, 2021, 4:13 pm

I scanned all my slides over this winter, 4 at a time in a holder. Took ages but not a lot to do anyhow. Stored in a folder per set of slides with date and description. Have saved to an external hard drive, but also Google photos as it's been great to share the results with the family etc.

After the slides, I did take a look and scanning old photos, but each scan was around 50MB each, rather than the 5 for each slide, so almost gave up. However, I played about with the negatives that were still with the photos and bingo, 5 minutes per set of 4, and back to the 5Mb per image. Made a start but this will become next winters project

airbus330
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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#407460

Postby airbus330 » April 27th, 2021, 7:58 pm

SteMiS wrote:
airbus330 wrote:Have a look at the Photomyne App. It is blindingly good. Renders multiple images. Fixes faded colours. Colorizes B&W. Stores logically. Downloadable in batches to your PC. There is an add-on for Slides. Not free, but its the best I have come across if you have a lot of old media to transfer.

According to a review on the google play

"Does well except that the app keeps your pictures. Unless you pay a HEFTY amount per month, you can neither download your scanned photos, which you already own, nor share them with loved ones. Pointlessly stingy. Furthermore, $10 a month is far too much for something I'd use a couple of times. Imagine paying $120 a year for this app!! Perhaps I'd consider a small one time payment. Right now, I just wanted to share a very old memory. To the next option I go..."

Photomyne Ltd.24 April 2021
"This is your opinion and we respect it. We believe the app is worth it. You can try it for 3 days free and decide if you want to pay or not. If you have old photos, we believe that you will find the app very useful. We are here if you have any questions."

Does seem rather at odds with what you are saying and indeed what it says on Photomyne's site?


I did say that it wasn't free, to be fair. It is one of the current moves in photo storage that the days of free cloud storage are on the wane. Google photos is currently changing to a priced model and a reduction of image quality unless you subscribe or use a Google phone. Amazon is generous so long as you are a prime member. Free sites like PhotoBucket went paid a long time back. So, unless you want to store your images locally on a drive, and you have a fair amount of media, then paid for is inevitable. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with local storage, but the OP was asking for an App that was good with making the most of uploading images/slides into digital form. I have tried multiple ways of doing this and Photomyne is both easy, intuitive, quick, has a logical storage system and a very good image repair facility. Like all image apps, it does take a little time to get the best from it. You are also free to download the improved images onto your laptop after doing the uploading using a good quality mobile phone camera. My plan of action is to use it to upload and repair 50 years of photos and slides, download them to a drive, then ditch the subscription and then upload them again onto Google Photos which is better for sharing and display (for which I will have to pay). I'm not sure what the current PM charges are, but I'm paying £8.99 per Year, which isn't too onerous. ALB

SteMiS
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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#407462

Postby SteMiS » April 27th, 2021, 8:06 pm

airbus330 wrote:
SteMiS wrote:
airbus330 wrote:Have a look at the Photomyne App. It is blindingly good. Renders multiple images. Fixes faded colours. Colorizes B&W. Stores logically. Downloadable in batches to your PC. There is an add-on for Slides. Not free, but its the best I have come across if you have a lot of old media to transfer.

According to a review on the google play

"Does well except that the app keeps your pictures. Unless you pay a HEFTY amount per month, you can neither download your scanned photos, which you already own, nor share them with loved ones. Pointlessly stingy. Furthermore, $10 a month is far too much for something I'd use a couple of times. Imagine paying $120 a year for this app!! Perhaps I'd consider a small one time payment. Right now, I just wanted to share a very old memory. To the next option I go..."

Photomyne Ltd.24 April 2021
"This is your opinion and we respect it. We believe the app is worth it. You can try it for 3 days free and decide if you want to pay or not. If you have old photos, we believe that you will find the app very useful. We are here if you have any questions."

Does seem rather at odds with what you are saying and indeed what it says on Photomyne's site?


I did say that it wasn't free, to be fair. It is one of the current moves in photo storage that the days of free cloud storage are on the wane. Google photos is currently changing to a priced model and a reduction of image quality unless you subscribe or use a Google phone. Amazon is generous so long as you are a prime member. Free sites like PhotoBucket went paid a long time back. So, unless you want to store your images locally on a drive, and you have a fair amount of media, then paid for is inevitable. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with local storage, but the OP was asking for an App that was good with making the most of uploading images/slides into digital form. I have tried multiple ways of doing this and Photomyne is both easy, intuitive, quick, has a logical storage system and a very good image repair facility. Like all image apps, it does take a little time to get the best from it. You are also free to download the improved images onto your laptop after doing the uploading using a good quality mobile phone camera. My plan of action is to use it to upload and repair 50 years of photos and slides, download them to a drive, then ditch the subscription and then upload them again onto Google Photos which is better for sharing and display (for which I will have to pay). I'm not sure what the current PM charges are, but I'm paying £8.99 per Year, which isn't too onerous. ALB

Thank you.
I don't need on-line storage as I keep my photos on my hard disk backed up to an external hard drive (although conceivably I may at some point use an online backup as well). My problem is that I've a load of loose photos, pre digital, which I could do to digitalise, so I'm looking for an efficient way of doing that which doesn't involve processing them one by one on my scanner. Photomyne looks perfect as long as I can download them onto my hard drive and am not locked into a perpetual subscription if I ever want to see them again...

airbus330
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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#407503

Postby airbus330 » April 27th, 2021, 11:07 pm

SteMiS wrote:
airbus330 wrote:
SteMiS wrote:don't need on-line storage as I keep my photos on my hard disk backed up to an external hard drive (although conceivably I may at some point use an online backup as well). My problem is that I've a load of loose photos, pre digital, which I could do to digitalise, so I'm looking for an efficient way of doing that which doesn't involve processing them one by one on my scanner. Photomyne looks perfect as long as I can download them onto my hard drive and am not locked into a perpetual subscription if I ever want to see them again...


You're doing the same as me then. One other happy wheeze is that u can put 4 photos at a time on a table, take a single pic of the four and it automatically separates them and processes them into 4 separate images. This is designed so you can do photo album pages without removing the prints. There is a little loss a quality, but the speed u get through the chore is great. Another useful feature is that you can add text to each photo, the text is also downloaded with each photo on to your pc as a separate txt file. Anyway, give the free trial a go, I feel I should be on commission from them :lol:

stevensfo
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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#407573

Postby stevensfo » April 28th, 2021, 9:43 am

Lanark wrote:I think a cloud solution is even more likely to get lost than a physical album, these cloud companies, Google in particular, give NO guarantee that they will continue to provide a hosting service in even 5 years time never mind 50. If you die and stop logging in regularly theres a very good chance everything will quietly disappear.

My solution to this is to buy a large, really high quality album, one which contains absolutely no plastic, and curate only the best photos so you have something which people might actually want to inherit.

I have scanned things as well, its best to have both options.


My family tree research was put on hold years ago and when I retire in a year or so, one of my projects will be to sort out the hundreds, if not thousands, of photos, old slides as well as family tree info.

I also came to the conclusion that the best approach is to start a proper hard album, maybe in triplicate to hand out to family members. My mum has old albums that must be nearly 70 years old, and they're all in decent condition. Some relatives started doing the same thing with their photos many years ago. There are really so many photos, far too many, so the idea is to select the very best and most appropriate and interesting photos for the album, combined with family tree info. This for all photos, not just the old ones. My wife goes crazy with her phone and over the years she must have thousands of boring holiday snaps that nobody will ever look at.

Steve

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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#408864

Postby gryffron » May 2nd, 2021, 11:23 pm

I also agree that any “free” cloud solution is unlikely to offer any longevity. They can disappear at a moments notice, or often none at all. Free cloud solutions are ok as an “extra” backup, but not even suitable as a primary backup.

stevensfo wrote:I also came to the conclusion that the best approach is to start a proper hard album, maybe in triplicate to hand out to family members. My mum has old albums that must be nearly 70 years old, and they're all in decent condition.

There’s also those create-your-own photo books as a modern solution. You can annotate those with as much commentary as you want. Copy to all the grandkids. They’ll appreciate it in forty years time when they get the family history bug.

Gryff

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Re: Scanning/Storing Old Family Photos

#412035

Postby Charlottesquare » May 15th, 2021, 1:13 am

One option/thought might be to send copies of all your best photos to a "One Name Study" if you want long term posterity for genealogical purposes.

A One Name Study seems to try to collect and document all persons carrying that name into a single family history, there is one for one of my family names, Liddiard.

https://one-name.org/

https://one-name.org/Results

Now I think this will possibly not be of much use with common surnames, but for the one I mention there is only estimated to have ever been about 15,000 of us and the person who runs our One Name Study has I believe pieced together circa 8,000 of these.

They also may organise things like reunions (we had one in Aldbourne, Wiltshire, a few years back.) They also try to collate DNA samples (if one is willing to have the test) re the males of the family, to assist establishing branches etc. They also seem to support family websites etc "Promote your study through a Guild profile and share family stories in our Journal. We can help you set up a website on our server, saving you time and money. We can preserve your research for future generations either online or in our archives."

These sorts of entities may be how say genealogical records may be preserved for future generations, my sisters and myself have conducted quite a lot of work tracking different family lines, each doing one or two, but we really are not sure our offspring, especially with houses seeming to get smaller, will be willing or able to store all the ringbinders of data accumulated. (I alone have 7 ringbinders full of records, documents and photos)

Appreciate this thread is photography not genealogy, but as some may not have heard of ONS thought it might be of interest.


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