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Archiver > TMG > 2006-04 > 1145907313


From: Bill Taylor <>
Subject: Re: [TMG] Re: Best find for Identifying Photographs
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2006 15:35:13 -0400
References: <444B4FE4.4000300@comcast.net> <008901c667ba$080bd910$964fb245@dpc01>
In-Reply-To: <008901c667ba$080bd910$964fb245@dpc01>


This happened to me. My father-in-law dropped of a box of old photographs one
day. After it sat around for about 10 years I began the wonder just who they
were. He had indicated that they were "Just some of your ma's family." What I
didn't know at the time was that they were of his family. One of the first
things I did was to scan every photograph. This started about 15 years ago
when scanners were pricey and just passable. Computers were limited at the
time also so most scans have passed on, but all were scanned, and re-scanned
as needed. I categorized each into a general pool and if I could determine
that there were names with the photograph those names became the 'family' of
surnames for those photographs. I knew they were all of one family so in my
case they were all stored in a directory called L550. As I could determine
groups within the scans, e.g. the same individual multiple times, etc., I
grouped them into sub-directories, L550001, L550002, etc.
Once I had multiples within a sub-directory, they became the actual file;
L5500010001.jpg, L5500010002.pdf, L5500010003.txt, L5500010004.txt,
L5500010005.jpg, and L5500020001.jpg, L0050020002.jpg, etc.
One of the best features, and the reason I've always retained and used the
program is that it displays images faster than any other program when an image
is expanded to full screen. This let me display many photographs very quickly
and after a time I was able to see resemblesences and could pick out family
members (or what I thought were family members). When I knew that the
individuals were truly the right people I began to add additional material to
the photographic I had. The program that I used and still use, is ACDSee32. It
was a shareware program which you can still find on the net. There have been
several generations of the program, it's now at v8 I think, but I still use
v32. It's limited but functional and that's all I really cared about at the
time or now for that matter. ACDSee32 allows one to build a 'descript.ion'
file to support the image. Descript.ion files are text and have the following
format; filename.ext, a single space, description of the image. The
descript.ion file can be edited with any text editor, but the ACDSee32
program's ability to collect text about the image works fine for me. I came up
with the following format for the "description of the image"; date in
"YYMMDD text"
so the file really has a format of;
"filename.ext YYMMDD material about the image" (one line per image)
A real example of one descript.ion file is:
---------------------------------------------------
descript.ion WARDWELL
B4140000001.jpg 000000 Belveal "Our Children", 17 Feb 1933
B4140000007.txt 780000 Karrie Belveal-Rose, circa 1978
B4140000006.pdf 010000 BELVEAL, Oklahoma Telephone listings.PDF
B4140000005.pdf 000115 Belveal, Tulsa World Obits, 15 Jun 2000
B4140000004.pdf 520000 B414-Delbert High School-1952, circa 1952
B4140000003.jpg 140731 Family Bible "Wife's Genealogy", 31 Jul 1914
B4140000002.jpg 100118 Belveal, "Husband's Genealogy", 18 Jan 1910
--------------------------------------------------
Zeros are used in the date to fill it out if it's missing. Anything where I
didn't have a data has six zeroes inserted for padding. ACDSee32 allows me to
sort the description field so I am able to scan, create the description, sort
on the description and then display the images either from old to new or new
to old.
Using ACDSee32 this way I found that family looks began to emerge. I know
that I have scanned over a thousand images of photographs from the original
box and to date have had only one prove to be incorrect. The individuals of
whom the photographs were taken have been reviewed by very geriatric people in
the local historical society where the photographs were taken. To date, of
those who knew these individuals, only one has disagreed with interpretation
as to who they were and the individual photograph in question was of his aunt.
It was a family group where I had only two individuals I couldn't find names
and had guessed; it proved to be incorrect as to whom I had determined what
the individual, but as for the name, I had that correct. I'd just attached it
to the wrong individual of the two I didn't really know.
For this I feel very satisified that I'd saved a great many very old
photographs and those families they represented for the community.
I hope that this helps you somewhat with your collection.

Bill


On Mon, 24 Apr 2006 08:13:31 -0800, you wrote:

>Do you have a similar book to suggest re European photographs? A relative
>has a huge pile of photos from mid to late 1800s that are, on the whole,
>English, but also French and Austrian.
>
>Thanks,
>Marianne
>
>
>
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