Creating a Family Image Archive

[Bill Kuta]

As I've mentioned in another thread, I'm using some pandemic time to root through old slides/negatives/prints, and digitize selected images. I started off on a particular topic, but have expanded scope to try to digitize selected images from all pre-digital years. Our digital family collection starts in 2000; the old slides start about 1940, with prints going back to around 1900. I expect it will amount to a couple thousand images or perhaps a lot more. I'm curating with inclusion in mind.

 

I'm shooting the 35mm slides and negatives and 6cm slides with DSLRs, and will be scanning prints with flatbeds, and am happy with those techniques and results. I'm not looking for advice on this aspect. I'm post-processing with Lightroom, and am pretty satisfied with restoring colors, removing color casts, etc.

 

I'll be posting the results to some hosting site for family use, and will want search capabilities, so am trying to build in any metadata/keywords that will be needed. So far, I've put best-determined year-month in the keywords, added rudimentary captions, and changed the metadata capture dates.  I've decided to add to the keywords:  names of people in the image;  year;  location;  event;  maybe image source (family collection, medium). I want to avoid continually coming up with more types of keywords and repeatedly backfilling what I've already done, so any advice on keywords/metadata will be much appreciated. 

 

For a hosting site, some suggestions have been Smugmug, Adobe Portfolio, and Google Photos. I'm looking for security, good search capabilities that will use my metadata/keywords, ease of adding more images, low cost, and a record of site permanence. Any discussion and suggestions are welcome.

 

I also welcome discussion of everything I have not thought of for this project.

 

thanks

Bill Kuta

[Harry Harrison]

1 hour ago, Bill Kuta said:

For a hosting site, some suggestions have been Smugmug, Adobe Portfolio, and Google Photos

I'd add Photoshelter to that list, it's fairly unique in that it both acts as an archive that may or not be publicly available, or password protected etc, and an attractive public facing front end. 

[DDoug]

I'm in much the same situation, glad to have something to keep me busy while sequestered but somewhat daunted by the scope of the project. As well as the time to digitize the images, there is the fact that a lot of them are in cardboard mounts with rounded corners and, upon examination, raggedy edges. So I'm removing those and snapping the film into plastic mounts, marking the dates with indelible pens. Such fiddly hand work was never my thing.

 

Anyway, in the process it's being handed off to my son and between us we decided that the best solution for us is to put them on the Web server we share for our sites, since the allowable storage is gigabytes more than we actually use. For backup, images are stored on BluRay M-discs.

Cheers,

Don

[geogphotos]

Photoshelter does all that at a breeze.

 

 

 

 

[MDM]

I use Zenfolio which is very similar to Smugmug with various packages and similar prices.You can do all that you mention in these.
 

Here are a few things to think about in addition to what you mention. 

 

1. Do you need to buy a domain name and associate it with the website? These are cheap but there is a small annual additional cost. 
 

2. Do you need a private gallery or galleries facility with or without passwords (proofing galleries)? Do you want to restrict web search engines from making the images public. Given that you are using names, I suspect this might be the case? 
 

3. Do you want people to be able to order prints directly? 
 

4. Cost of storage. Zenfolio has unlimited storage of JPEGs for all packages. 

Edited September 4, 2020 by MDM

[Bill Kuta]

Thanks all, so far!   I might be trying a couple of free trials. Photoshelter is appealing--I know a lot of you use it, I'd have relative confidence in its long-term viability, and it looks like it includes a domain name. The Basic 4Gb should be ample for jpegs, for a family archive.  I used to have my own web site but let it lapse because I wasn't using it.

[Harry Harrison]

34 minutes ago, Bill Kuta said:

and it looks like it includes a domain name

You certainly get a www.yourname.photoshelter.com domain name, or you can buy your own from the normal providers and use that. I had a feeling they were going to come out with some more themes this year, maybe COVID has delayed that.

Edited September 4, 2020 by Harry Harrison

[geogphotos]

1 hour ago, Harry Harrison said:

You certainly get a www.yourname.photoshelter.com domain name, or you can buy your own from the normal providers and use that. I had a feeling they were going to come out with some more themes this year, maybe COVID has delayed that.

 

 

These improvements are imminent is suggest that any decision by Bill waits for a while.

[Panthera tigris]

I agree with Ian, the new themes and improvements therein were due in July so they should be released anytime now. As the development time given for the themes was 6 months I am expecting (hoping) that they will be something special in them.