21COFH - The Candy Box (of Heritage Photos) - Week 9

My great grandmother, Frances Lowe, stored many of her family pictures in candy boxes. Older family members have commented to me that they remember going through those boxes and looking at the family photos. I guess it was the Lowe family equivalent of a photo album.

One of those candy boxes contains the family's oldest pictures and it is this one I chose to work with this week. Following the eight steps I outlined, here are the challenges and observations I encountered.

• I didn't have an appropriate box to store them in so I opted to leave the pictures in the candy box and order a couple of boxes from one of the archival suppliers. This way they will be in the best possible storage container and can be stored upright making it easier to locate a particular picture.
• I wrote the descriptive paragraph and put together an inventory table in OneNote. See below.
• The scanning process was painstakingly slow. I've gotten spoiled with the FlipPal and had forgotten how slow the flatbed scanner is for scanning .tif files at 600dpi.
• In order to speed up the scanning process, I opted to scan the pictures into their own special folder and let the program name them. So initially they were named scan001, scan002, etc. See below.
• Then after I was done scanning and had completed the inventory table, I added a column for file names and developed names for the files.

Then it was easy to copy and paste those names as a rename to the actual .tif file. The letter a or b was appended to the end of the file name to designate the front and back.

• As for maintaining the original order. Weelllll, I've kept the actual pictures in the order they were in the candy box. The inventory is numbered so I can see what order they were in but the digitized files will not be in the "original" order. I'm not too concerned as Frances was so very good about labeling these photos and we can still see the order in the inventory.

Now it's confession time. I realized midway through this week's project that a bunch of pictures I remembered as being in that box were no longer there. Apparently I had removed them several years ago and organized them by the 3 surnames to which they applied. So now they are back where they belong. Sheez.

Finally, the write up and inventory table will be printed off and put in with the collection of photos.

So, I still need to put this mini collection in it's special box when it arrives and I need to burn some CDs to distribute to family members. It occurs to me that it might be fun to do a story or chart type presentation with these pictures because Frances pretty much has her entire family tree in this box. Trying not to get too distracted... but it's an appealling thought. Any ideas on how to go about doing something like that? Powerpoint maybe?

URL for this post: http://turning-of-generations.blogspot.com/2012/03/21cofh-candy-box-of-heritage-photos.html

© 2012, copyright Michelle Goodrum