After scanning scanning and more scanning along with editing, cropping, tweaking, saving, optimizing, naming, organizing, naming again and again my mom and I have made some decisions about the final method of organization of our large library of photographs. Yay! (Honestly, we’re both obsessive about organization, so it was pretty pathetic watching the two of us trying to make some final decisions – but we did it!)
Our decisions were based on how our family would likely want to view the photos. We decided to use Google’s Picasa software on my computer, synced to a number of web albums in a new Google account named birdfamilypics. We’ll share the login to this account so we can administer the online photo albums.
Albums will be created based on where we lived followed by the year. For example, “Santa Ana 1970-72” is the name of an album. As a family, we’ve lived in 5 or 6 places so that limits the number of albums to a reasonable handful. All photos will be tagged with events like “birthday” or “graduation” allowing the viewer to pull in photos across the albums when they select a tag. Additional tags where it makes sense will be added.
Even further, Picasa has an exceptional facial recognition feature which in effect, allows you to create “people tags” and view all photos where “Marty” appears. So, if you want to view Marty’s birthdays, Picasa makes it simple by allowing the viewer to choose Marty, then the birthday tag.
We had labored on and on about the file naming structure and in the end that did not really matter since the combination of album, tag, and facial recognition makes the organization and retrieval of images very easy.
Now, will somebody please appreciate us for all the hard work we’ve done so far? 🙂
Welcome to MartyBird.com 