Going to give the whole blogging thing a bash....
My family alone - (parents, 4brothers,2sisters) have hundreds and hundreds of old photos stored in boxes or placed in scrapbook photoalbums of all different sizes. Now as we get older move out the photos are not duplicated to share with the next generation to pass on to...
I wanted to be able to keep a family social network and to create a digital library of the photos for all my family to be able to keep a copy for themselves.
I bought myself a Photo Scanner - HP ScanJet 5530 , this is capable of Scanning Negatives (Very useful for that box of negatives in the attic!) and an APF (Automatic Photo Feeder). The Feeder is fine on most of the standard size photos , it takes about 25 photos at a time in the holder.
There are some photos I had with pen marks scribbled on, red eyes, scratches, rips or just general ageing. I used Photoshop to clean, touch up and crop images. I may show some samples later ....
Arranging them in some kind of category can be mind boggling, do you sort them by people, places, events...
I decided to use Googles Picasa 3 for my use on my desktop http://picasa.google.com/ to organise and share my digital Photos and Videos.
Picasa 3 Allows me to Tag photos with names places descriptions, this is very helpful when searching through hundreds of images.
Google offers a Free 1GB of online storage for a web album which can easliy be uploaded from Picasa 3. http://picasaweb.google.com/ I currently have 354 Photos uploaded and only using 10% of the storage. Additional storage can be purchased at an Annual rate. You may also want to consider using Yahoos web sharing site Flickr for storing your photos online. http://www.flickr.com
One thing I really liked about Googles Web Album was the facial recognition, It scanned all images for faces and attempts to match the same person together to allow the user to easily tag the person with a name and their email address if available. It picked up all the Santa Clauses perfectly!
Just to note you can set the photos / albums to be made private or public and select who you want to be able to view them.
There is a great feature that links your web album up with several online photo printing companies , one of the best valued ones would be HP's company Snapfish http://www.snapfish.ie/ this will allow you to easily and affordably order personal photo prints/mugs/posters/tshirts/jigsaws of your choice. Prints starting cost from €0.09 per print.
GEOTAG is another feature that allows you to TAG the photo on Location. If the picture was taken in Dublin Zoo you can TAG the image with that location and view and search for images by location.
I should get about 3500 photos uploaded at no cost ready to share privately/publically with the family and friends on Picasa Web then I think I will look into sharing on Flickr.
When you have a free Flickr account, you can upload 2 videos and 100MB worth of photos each calendar month. The cost of a Professional account is resonable if you are trigger happy on the camera.
Well... I was googling while writing this and I came across an free opensource plugin to use with Picasa which allows you to upload from Picasa to Flickr! Heres the link, I'll have to test this out...
http://picasa2flickr.sourceforge.net/index.html
Hope this was useful for ya,
Peter D.
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