Storage of Photographs

Two years ago I started volunteering at a small county historical society & museum. I am interested in input about how to store and catalogue photographs.

Any suggestions on the above?

Hi, OzarkLakeside,

Welcome to TechSoup, and glad that you are here. I also am in the Ozarks, in southern Missouri.

I wonder if you could give a little more information on what kind of photos you have -- digital, printed -- and how many. What kind of access do you want to be able to provide for people? Are you wanting to share them online, or make sure that they are archived for historical research? Any information along those lines would help to make suggestions on what might help.

Best wishes,

Sasha

Our photos are printed - large, medium & small. I am trying to digitize, mostly on my home equipment. Unfortunately, that restricts the size to scan deck (8.63-11.75 inches) of my all in one.

My primary purpose is preservation and display. Secondarily, to be able to use some of the photos in promotional materials for the museum/Society. We are self supporting and all volunteers.

Sharing on-line is probably not possible in the near future since both the Historical Society have dial-up access.

Mostly I am currently fumbling around with digital scanning and storing. Just started trying to make some sort of sense in storage process. Adding information regarding the photo is a prime issue. I have digitized only a few hundred photos. We probably have in the thousands - not tens of thousands of total photographs.

If the photographs are on your computer, I would take a look at Picasa by Google.  Its a free photo album and basic editing software that has a lot of features and is very easy to use.

As far as archiving goes, you could pick up an external hard drive for under $100.  Some of them come bundled with backup software.  Before deciding on what to buy, I would suggest you listen to the webinar TechSoup hosted on backup.  On the right of this page you'll see an area for downloadable files and below them a recording of the event.

This is a great thread and I am going to move this over to our Software forum so folks there can chime in as well.

Best,

Megan

Hi from Nairobi.

If your project is for long term storage / archive do not forget about backing up your work, it might seem like a chore but it is a lot easier than having to start scanning all over again. Also do not skimp on scanning resolution. It is always possible to reduce the resolution if you need to for something like use on a web site but you can not do much to up the quality of a low res scan.

Hope this helps

Pete

Hi OzarkLakeside,

I just heard about a resource that might be a real help to you. It's called the Missouri Digital Heritage Initiative.

They seem to be formed specifically to support work such as yours.

Best wishes,

Sasha

If you need to keep your costs right down then Picasa is a workable solution. As a professional photographer on the side I can't live without Adobe's Lightroom. It costs $300 but is my opinion the best photo tool out there for DAM (Digital Asset Management). I have a catalog of 22,000 images, keyworded for location, subject, dates and everything else you could want. It pays to adopt this kind of image management tool early on and be rigorous in your tagging/keywording as it's a nightmare to go back over old catalogs to update them. been there, hated it.

I tried iView's MediaPro and Microsoft bought them out and really ruined the application, now Expression Media. Was a good tool for management but Lightroom has great editing and adjustment tools so powerful and easy (fast too) that I hardly use Photoshop for most shoots.

Seriously consider a trial of  Lightroom 2.4. Does not scan though, need your current setup for that. From Lightroom you can create web galleries fast, share your entire catalog with others and much more. Not hard to get the hang of either which for Adobe is impressive.

It is pricey and not available through TechSoup but you may want to consider Picture Perfect museum cataloging software. Extremely powerful and feature rich for museums. Has a picture database section. A trial is avialable for download and testing. A lot of  major museums are currently using it.

I have a question about Lightroom, and Lightroom vs Photoshop Elements for organizing photographs. We are looking to hire an intern to help us set up a photo storage system. If we get Lightroom and install it on one computer for the intern to use, do we need to have multiple copies of Lightroom for others to access the photo tags? Can we move the copy of Lightroom to another computer when the intern is finished and moves on? We don't want a full-time staff member to give up his or her computer for this project, but someone will need to be able to keep the system up.

And if we are dealing with hundreds rather than thousands of photos, will the photo management part of Photoshop Elements provide the same level of organization? It seems it would be more beneficial to have several copies of PE, but I'm not sure if everyone with PE would be able to use the tags set up on one computer.

The only photo organization software I've used is Shoebox but it's only available for Mac. It does exactly what we are looking to do - tag photos for searching purposes.

Sorry if this is a threadjack, but it's a similar situation - cataloging photos, and it would be for several people to be able to locate photos. thanks

Lightroom is not designed to operate as a networked app, but it can be rigged to do so in a fairly effective manner. Licenses are per use, so you can run it and have someone set it all up, then deactivate and install on another machine. Or maybe install it on a terminal server so many folks can access it.

It's perhaps not the ideal tool for networked access for many users though. In those situations you may want to consider some of the Joomla gallery manager extensions and host it online/on your intranet, or use an online service for photo storage like Smugmug or even Flickr.