It's a Snap!

Organising photos

Time to get down to some serious organising. Our first digital camera back in 1997 did not serve to improve our photography techniques but did indeed provide a sudden upsurge in the number of photos we took.  Suddenly we had photos on a computer and we followed some basic conventions in naming and grouping them into folders.

As the years passed with new cameras, phones and other digital devices, our world became flooded with digital imagery and in our busy lives some organisation fell by the wayside. The addition of cloud storage has resulted in photos being scattered across multiple places. Add in all those years of print photos to be scanned and this looks like a mega task, but a step by step process will get it done.

Improvements in image software combined with more sophisticated methods of digital storage and retrieval systems all provide for an improved experience once image files are well organised. A systematic review along with an approach that will better facilitate search is needed. I have some ideas to guide the process.

• The more information there is about a photo, the easier it will be to find it again by search.
• Adding metadata is the digital equivalent to writing on the back of a physical photo and the best information on the back of old photos were the dates, names, places, events and comments. Now tags can be added too.
• Backup and off site storage is crucial, no one wants to lose years of photographs in flood, fire,  or some other unexpected disaster such as a computer crash.

Review

1. Make a master list of locations of photos to be sure all are processed. 
2. Decide on file naming conventions year, month, date; event, series or person e.g. folders by year, then events in that year. Consider batch renaming functions to process folders of images about an event.
3. Right click properties on an individual photo to enter basic metadata - use the photo gallery editor in Windows to add further comments and for the facial recognition software embedded in it. Highlight all photos in one folder to add a generic comment e.g. for wedding or other event photos this is a quick method to add detail about the event to all the photos in one go
4. Consider names, date, time, places, source, photographer and other comments
5. Do some quick edits to fix lighting, focus, orientation, crop or one of a dozen other edits: use free software. 
6. Work on and complete one folder at a time. 
7. Backup each time a batch is finished.

Some useful tools

Free software

• Irfanview
• XnView
• GIMP
• Picasa

Free web apps no need to download software

• Pixlr family 
• PicMonkey
• iPiccy

Mobile metadata editors

• PhotosinfoPro - iOS app, excellent for adding metadata
• Photo editor- Android, edit images and metadata

And I'm underway, Day 2 and facial recognition of known people done. Bulk metadata added to comments field in three separate folders.  All those albums to be scanned, arrgh... to be done slowly.

Windows Photo Gallery

Windows photo gallery is part of the Windows Essentials free suite of tools

Open picture in Windows Photo gallery

  

Toolbar - simple metadata entry options, includes quick find by person after facial recognition applied.

This post first appeared on http://librarycurrants.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/its-snap.html

Search and comment

Tech Help - Search a site

Most sites and blogs have a search bar embedded which will search for content only on that site. The search bar is usually near the top of the page but on some blogs it will be found in the side bar. Some searches will highlight the search word on each page, some will just give you a list of pages where your search term can be found. Examples are provided in the slideshow at the end of this post.

Once you have located the page use Find on page, CTRL-F (Windows) or CMD-F (Mac) to pinpoint the exact information you seek. This individual page search box will list how many occurrences of your search term appear on that page and you can use the down arrow next to the search term to find the next occurrence.  In the example below, the word 'user' was located 8 times on the page searched.

Comment on a post

Most bloggers appreciate comments as it lets them know that readers are reacting to their work. There are a variety of comment forms but one usually needs to provide a name and email address or login with Google or one of many other services. This ensures that your comment is not a machine generated comment and is not spam. The writer of the blog can see your email address but it is not published on the site.

In many cases one also needs to fill in a Captcha code which is simply used to ensure that you are human. If the captcha is difficult to read, generate a new code with the refresh button provided or click the speaker icon to have it read to you.

Search and comment

This post first appeared http://librarycurrants.blogspot.com.au/2014/09/search-and-comment.html

Who served, when and where?

Military ancestors

Today I attended the fourth workshop this month provided by the Noosa Library Service for National Family History Month.
Bob, the volunteer genealogy expert ably assisted by the heritage librarian Jane, once again provided an excellent session, this time on finding one's military ancestors.

He addressed why one would expect to find some military among one's forbears, likely sources of information and then introduced the group to a wide range of sources.

How do you find out if you had military ancestors? Perhaps there are mementos, medals, family stories, photos or information on certificates and in newspapers.
Such a comprehensive topic cannot be summarised in a single post but listed below are some sources mentioned in today's session and some ideas for research.

Types of military records that exist

• lists of officers and enlisted men and naval ratings
• Regular service records and militia records
• pension records
• various published lists - such as the annual Army Lists 
• Medal rolls
• promotions and awards citations in gazettes: such as London, Belfast and Edinburgh Gazettes all free online
• honour rolls
• books - early records of battles and campaigns
• casualty lists, missing and wounded
• Muster lists
• Attestation papers 
• Biographical records eg naval biographical dictionary, specialist books on individual campaigns or battles
• POWs of WWI Red Cross records now freely available 
• regiment and unit histories 
• Australian War Memorial digitised collections 
• Courts martial

Records that are available

• Pension records: exclusion period for service and pension records in Britain - 70 years
• Not all records mentioned above have survived  - WW1 and other casualties (Britain)
• Increased digitisation, some may be available only by application/request
• Some may be available but are not indexed
• Officers records may be more difficult to obtain

Location of Records

• National Archives- Australia, United Kingdom, Canada
• Military museums and archives, including museums of individual units
• Libraries e.g. British Library holds all the records of the India Office Library so military who served in India are detailed
• Publications
• Commemorative organisations eg CWGC and Lives of the First World War
• Family documents
• Government Departments
• General internet searches for units, battles, campaigns, periods of history e.g. British battles, Prisoners of war 1914-1918
• Armed Forces and conflict in Find My Past
• Military records in Ancestry

After learning so much in this session I was delighted this afternoon to be notified that I had won a 12 month subscription to Ancestry through their sponsorship of National Family History Month. All in all it has been a good month for learning and now I have a wonderful opportunity to further my research.

Other useful lists and blogs

Military Records guide - State Library of South Australia

Military medals - Shauna Hicks

Australian Colonial Forces State Library of Victoria
Australian Light Horse Research  - covers 1899 -1920
Find a soldier's will British Armed Forces 1850 - 1986

This post first appeared on http://librarycurrants.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/who-served-when-and-where.html