Picture this

A view of Noosa river at sunset

Each day in April I posted a picture along with my short recollection for the day over on Earlier Years. Many of those pictures I had sourced throughout the year from my own files and some from Pixabay. I created the daily graphics in Canva, Pixlr, Over, WordSwag or Haiku Deck. Some of these are available as apps on both iOS and Android, some have a web interface and all require minimal skill to output an acceptable graphic.

Now as the cooler weather of winter bids me spend more time indoors, I’ve sorted many digital snaps taken on my daily walks around the local area along with some photos from trips we’ve taken. I’ve  added some generic text that may focus my thoughts on a particular area of family history.

Dead palm frond

So far I’ve uploaded 35 of these pictures to Flickr in this album Images for family history blogposts. They are in a variety of sizes and shapes and will load quickly on any page. Some of these may prove useful for my readers, so I’ve made them public and set the date on all of these as June 2017, not the original date these photos were taken. If you have suggestions for further graphics along these lines, please add your ideas in a comment.

For those who will be attending Congress 2018 in Sydney next March be sure to get along to Jill’s session on Beaut Blogs: Ideas for Tarting up your Geneablogs. She will have lots more, ideas galore, for you to explore.

Flickr the family photos to Trove

Here's another method to make those old family photos available to your siblings and cousins.

Sign up for Flickr to get 1 terabyte of free storage for your photos. Photos can be made public, viewable by anyone, or private so they are only seen by you or those to whom you send a guest pass. Usage permissions are set using Creative Commons licencing.  Upload can be automatic from mobile devices and computers or one can use the simple drag and drop interface if family photos are already organised into folders.

Once photos are added on the Choose Photos/Drag and drop screen, one can:

• edit titles
• add descriptions and tags 
• set viewing permissions
• add to an album or create an album.

Edit information on this screen before upload

Once this initial information is added to your satisfaction, photos are then uploaded and will appear in your photostream and in the album you created. Albums can contain both public and private pictures. I recommend making your uploads private until you are ready to share them. I do not advise adding to a group from this screen.

To add further details to the photos, choose Albums then Edit in Organizr. Choose an individual photo to add the date the original photo was taken. Exact dates, single years or approximate years can be added through the date tab shown on the Organizr screenshot below.

Editing options in the Organizr screen

Adding your pictures to the Trove group

Once you have added and edited all the relevant information head over to join Trove: Australia in pictures group on Flickr.

All images included in this group are also made searchable in Trove, a service hosted by the National Library of Australia but built on the collections of thousands of organisations and individuals!

Trove provides the instructions for adding your pictures. All pictures added to the group must be made public. It is worth noting the need for accurate tags and descriptions as these are used in the Trove search. To make the best use of this service, revisit titles, descriptions and tags before adding them to the group as any subsequent edits in Flickr after Trove has harvested your photos and data will only be visible in Flickr not Trove.

Here are some early photos I have added, seen here on a search result screen in Trove.

Photos searchable through Trove

I've added these records to my family lists in Trove. Here's the O'Dea list with the photos now visible.
Thanks to Flickr and Trove, my cousins now have another avenue to find their relatives.


This post first appeared on http://librarycurrants.blogspot.com/2015/12/flickr-family-photos-to-trove.html