Saturday, April 28, 2012

My Take on Pictures, Pictures, Pictures - 21COFH

Earlier this week, I laid out a plan to scan, add meta-data and organize a box of early to mid-twentieth century photos. Here's what I ended up doing:

Most of the photos were the perfect size to scan with my Flip-Pal so I was able to watch TV while scanning the front and back of each picture. There were 181 photos. So I made 362 scans.

After uploading them to the laptop, the files had to be renamed. Since there are such a variety of pictures, many of them unidentified, I went with a generic file naming scheme - Lowe_CandyBox1-1 on through 181, appending an "a" or "b" depending on whether it was the front or the back of the photo.

These JPG files are now my "master" files. If I do any editing it will be done from a copy. Also, if a picture is important enough to do any work on, I will save it as TIFF as well.

Since so many of these pictures are unidentified, I envision them getting more handling than most pictures so I put them in clear enclosures (archivally safe of course) in an archivally safe box.


In order to keep the pictures from "slumping" because the box is not yet full, I came up with a homemade solution using parts from a damaged archival box I had on hand.


Lastly, I created an index. You can do this using Windows Explorer. Set the view to Large Icons so you see a thumbnail of each image along with the file name. Then do a screen capture (or multiple screen captures if you have many images) which you paste into a Word Document. You have your index. I also saved mine as a PDF.



What I accomplished this week covers steps 1-3, 5 and 6 from my original plan, leaving steps 4 and 7 for this coming week.

How did your project go?

© 2012, copyright Michelle Goodrum

2 comments:

  1. I like your workflow and your progress, Michelle. Using the Flip-pal,is a great idea! I do much the same by scanning both sides, but I use f (front) and r (reverse) so the images show up in order in my file list.

    Using a screen shot as an index sheet is absolutely INSPIRED. So simple and so effective. Thanks for the tip!

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    1. Denise, Glad to be of help! Usually you are the one inspiring me!

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