Leaving a photographic legacy

[MarkBarbieri]

Last year, I brought home a box of about 1,000 slides that my father had taken between the early 1950s and the late 1970s. I spent some time trying to make sense out of them. When was the picture taken? Who are those people in it? Where was it taken? What was the subject? Why was it taken? In a few cases, I had notes or a date on the sleeve to help me. Answering those questions was sometimes easy, sometimes fun, sometimes challenging, and sometimes hopeless. It would have been nice if my father had left that information attached to each slide, but if he taken notes in that detail, would those notes have survived?

When time passes, will viewers of your images no what they are about? I've been thinking about my pictures and how to best handle that. I'll give my thoughts, but I'd like for other people to say how they handle the same problem of gifting future generations images with context. Will you give them prints with notes written on the back? Photo books with notes includes? JPG files with metadata? A Lightroom catalog?

I'll do a little of all of those things. I have tons of prints around the house and I usually write relevant information on the back of the print before we frame them or hang them. I'm starting to work on some photo books that will tell stories and add a lot of context to the pictures. The main thing I'm doing, however, is relying on metadata. My goal is to identify a core set of "legacy" photos and make sure that every one of those photos has location data, identified people, a date/time, and information about the image. I'm started with old negatives that I'm scanning.

I've been using Lightroom to manage my metadata for years, but it isn't very good at it. I've switched back to the package I used before I switched to Lightroom (in about 2003). The package I'm using is iMatch, but I've noticed that it doesn't appear on many lists of the "best metadata" packages, so maybe I should look around some more. With iMatch, I use its facial recognition to help identify people. I use it's map integration to help apply a location to each picture. I also tag pictures by "event", which could be something like "Disney Trip in January 2001" or "Harry's 2nd Birthday Party". My goal is to have the metadata answer the questions of Who, When, Where, and What.

For additional keywording, I'm sending the photos through Google's keywording API. It uses AI to look at the picture and give descriptive terms based on what it thinks is relevant. If you've ever searched for an image on Google Photos, this is the data it is using. It's useful, but kind of insane. It includes relevant stuff and then throws in weird stuff and stuff that is just wrong. I store it's keywords with the prefix AUTO-TAGGER so that they can be distinguished from manually added keywords. It may also be useful in the future to delete all of the AUTO-TAGGER keywords and then regenerate them when the technology is better.

Another important thing I'm doing is reducing my "legacy" collection. I have about 350,000 pictures stored. Some just need to be deleted. Others are pictures I'd like to keep, but that almost no legacy value. I want to get down to a core of < 10,000 pictures that my children and their children might find interesting. My plan is to store those photos as JPGs with the metadata embedded into them.

 

[vjbhatia7782]

What an awesome project- I also have that on my radar to ask my parents on the context of all the slides.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

As an addendum, here's one of the more interesting metadata stories from going through my dad's old slides. The picture below is my father standing near a car. When I asked him about it, he couldn't recall where it was taken. He just remembered seeing a cool car when he finished a hike, so he had his friend take his picture in front of the car. Just based on the picture and some Internet sloothing, I was able to find out what the car was, who owned it then, and where it is now. In fact, I contacted the museum and let them know what color it was back when it was new because they didn't know.



I posted the car on a Lotus Seven forum (not because it was a Lotus Seven, but because that was the only auto forum I was a member of) and asked if anyone recognized it. Nobody did, but someone pointed out that the wheel had a Cadillac badge but that it didn't look like any Cadillac he'd ever heard of.

Guessing the time period was the 1950s, I started looking for pictures of Cadillac coupes of that era. I found a match made by Ghia (an Italian design and coachbuilding company). They only made two of them. One went to an NY nightclub owner. The other was sold to Prince Aly Kahn for his wife Rita Hayworth. She was divorcing him and he thought the gift of the car might help their relationship. It didn't, but she kept the car after the split.

The car was later bought by a German car collector to had it completely restored and painted black. Later it was sold to the famous Petersen Collection and completely restored again and, because they didn't know the original color, painted burgundy. That's where you can see it today. I sent them the picture so that that they would know what it originally looked like. You can read more about it here.

That's my story about how I tracked down the owner and present location of a car form just a picture of it that didn't even include a license plate.

 

[MarkBarbieri]

What an awesome project- I also have that on my radar to ask my parents on the context of all the slides.

Don't wait too long. A few years ago, I set up an audio recorder so that I could record my parent's recollections of some of our old 8mm films from the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Within minutes, it was clear that I'd waited too long. They couldn't remember where scenes were shot despite enough clues for me to work it out. They weren't sure who people were that even I could remember clearly. In short, they could recall far less about the videos than I could put together from my own memory and a little research.

I plan to do something similar with my oldest sibling this summer. Hopefully that will go better.