R&R

A pleasant breeze wafted through my balcony door as I spent the morning polishing my final three presentations for the Unlock the Past 3rd History and Genealogy Cruise. As it was another day in port I was able to sleep in and wake naturally rather than answering the call of the alarm app on my tablet (it works!).

Fellow genealogists enjoying quiet time in the library

View from my balcony

I did enjoy my breakfast of smoked salmon in the restaurant - there's nothing like being waited on at brekkie time. For lunch I wanted to put my feet under a table so, as the formal restaurant was closed, I opted for Johnny Rockets, an American hamburger joint on board, where I was waited on and had the accompaniment of singing and dancing waiters.

Dancing waiters at Johnny Rockets

It seems as though there was a bit of interest in my afternoon talk, "Flip-Pal and Picasa" as I was scheduled to talk in the main conference room again. Thanks to those stalwarts who came to hear this talk and contributed to the conversation in the session. The audience was full of Flip-Pal owners while a coouple who weren't members of the Flip_Pal brigade purchased them after the session.

Paul Milner once again educated us after dinner. His topic "Irish Land Records" gave us details of many resources that might hep us in our search for our Irish ancestors. My brain was overflowing with information by the time Paul completed his talk.

Having set sail from Noumea we now have four full days of learning ahead of us - my brain will surely burst.

Earlybirds eager to learn

You need to arrive early to grab a good seat

Digital Imaging Essentials

When I saw advertising about Geoff Rasmussen's book Digital Imaging Essentials : techniques and tips for genealogists and family historians (Australian edition) I was quite excited as I thought that this would be the book for me. I duly ordered a copy by mail from Gould Genealogy.

Having received the book I now have mixed feelings, I have not yet completely digested its contents but have read most chapters (more than once) to form an opinion on the work. I will apply my favourite PMI strategy (with my librarian's hat on as well) to review this book.

I really wanted to give a positive review of this book as it has great potential but I had to be honest.  Hopefully a Revised Edition will be published soon. I trust that the issues in the print edition will be sorted in the mooted ebook version of the title.

PLUS

• The book is a useful resource for beginners and would be a valuable addition to a library if a revised edition was published (see Minus).
• It has a Table of Contents and an Index.
• It has many illustrations.
• I realised that I did not need this book; it confirmed that I have a a reasonable knowledge in this area.

MINUS

• Diagrams in the book are not labelled.
• The book is poorly formatted with too many blank pages and too much white space. There are many instances where text wrapping could have been employed and image sizes reduced.
• The number of pages in the book could have been reduced resulting in paper not wasted, trees saved and even a few cents on the final cost.
• The book  received was supposed to be an Australian edition. Some attempt has been made to Australianise it yet American terms and examples are used  eg on page 28 the author writes "if I lost the digital image of the death certificate, I could reorder it from the vital statistics department." On page 79 an American example of Minneapolis, Minnesota could have been replaced with an Australian example eg New South Wales, Australia.
• There are formatting errors eg on page 24 the text commences with " Above are two documents...": the documents are actually at the bottom of page 23.
• The scanner section ignores sheetfeed scanners that are commonly used in business to scan large amounts of paper. These are great tool for the genealogist who has lots of loose paper and photographs to scan. 
• Chapter 5 fails to warn that not all scanners will work seamlessly with all computer operating systems or programs like Photoshop Elements or Picasa. 
• The quality of some of the images in the book is poor. All labels on the menu bar on the screenshots on pages 123 and 124 are so fuzzy that they cannot be read. There are fuzzy images on many pages eg 40, 50, 117, 136. 
• On page 117 the author stresses the importance of adding a citation to a digital image but appears to only give instructions for Photoshop Elements (apologies if I have overlooked the Picasa instructions. In this instance that referred to clipings from US newspapers it would have been good to show people how to save clippings from Trove with citations already attached - another case for Australian examples.

INTERESTING

• One should take what one reads on a vendor's site with a grain of salt http://www.gouldgenealogy.com/2012/11/digital-imaging-essentials-the-australian-edition/.
• I should have waited and perused the book at a Gould event; I would not have purchased  it after an inspection and could have saved my money. Ahh, the perils of impulsive online shopping.
• The author has based his book on a collection of 20,000 images. I had a different experience with Photoshop Elements (albeit an earlier version) when I used it with my collection of 50,000 images. I now have 90,000+ images and Picasa works well with them.
• I thought the file formats were TIFF and JPEG (not TIF and JPG as mentioned in the book) as shown in the diagram on page 25 and the file extensions attached to files were .tif and ,jpg. A small point but nonetheless important.

Family History Through the Alphabet – P is for … Images

P could be for photos or portraits but all images that genealogists collect are not photos. We collect a profusion of images that we digitise : vital records, baptismal certificates, military records of service, letters, handwritten notes, invitations, orders of service etc. Whatever you call them they create problems for people like me who are disorganised.

Are you able to retrieve an image a family member requests within a minute of being asked?

A collection of images that is not organised is like a book without an index, virtually useless if you need to retrieve something efficiently. There are evangelists around who spruik about the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of organisation; some people even part with good money to purchase books on organising ones images. You just need to find a method that suits you and stick to it.

So how do I do it? 

WARNING: this may not be the best or most efficient method but it works for me.

I treat photos and images of documents separately. There are three places where I store images:

Photos are organised using free Picasa software from Google. Stored on a portable hard drive (and backed up on another) are my 90,000+ photos. These are arranged chronologically in folders by date; earlier ones just by year, from the 1990s by year and month and from the 2000s by day. Each photo is tagged with one or more tags that describe the when, where, what and who of the image. Typical tags for a photo might be Rootstech, Salt, Lake City, 2012, Thomas MacEntee, Amy Coffin or Jill Patricia Curry, 1956, First Communion, St Vincents College Chapel, Potts Point or Restaurants, 2010, Sydney Opera House, Food and Drink (for one of my many photos of food).

When I travel the hard drive goes with me so that I can organise and tag on the go. Now that Qantas  has power outlets on planes used for international journeys I am able to use my time in the air fruitfully and arrive home with some of my stuff already organised.

Images of documents as described above are stored in folders according to my very simple Fling it in the Folder method. These are stored on the same portable hard drive as my photos (and backed up on another). Screendumps that I use in presentations are stored there in the folders I make for each presentation I prepare. Having the hard drive with me when I travel allows me to save images of new documents straight into one of  my folders once I have entered details gleaned into my Family Historian database,

Bits and Pieces found during web wandering Those images that I find interesting like genealogy cartoons I clip using the Evernote web clipper, tag them and file them away in Evernote. They may at a later date find their way into Picasa or a folder but, in the first instance, they are saved into Evernote where I can easily retrieve them.

Use whatever pleases you but if you can't put you hands on an image within a minute it's time to ponder a method that allow you to do so.

1920s images in Picasa

Tag Queen

Tina Lyons in a comment on Google+ today indicated that she was tagging her photos. I commented asking what software she used and a conversation ensued. After I had written a very long comment I thought "wow - here is something I can share in a blog post with other genies"...... 


Tina indicated that "I'm using Adobe Lightroom. I needed something that would add the metadata to all my photos. It's easy to do batches and allows me to easily compare photos and delete doubles. Picasa is great for tagging people, but I needed something more robust for the metadata." Adobe Lightroom, is a product with a $AU136.40 pricetag. Now I am a cheapie and use free apps wherever I can. 


I use the free Picasa software. I'm sure Picasa isn't as sophisticated as Lightroom but I'll share my story for other cheap amateurs like me who may be interested. One can add some metadata beyond names with Picasa, it also deals with duplicate images and allows for batch processing.


Picasa deals admirably with the 85,000+ images I have  stored on an external HDD. I had previously used Photoshop Elements for tagging but it crashed regularly. When my collection reached 30,000 I took the advice of photographer, Peter Simon, who was conducting a photography course on a Regent cruise and moved to Picasa. Eighteen months on I am pleased with that decision.

Picasa Tags attached to a Grave Marker

In Picasa I tag people, places (city, country, church, name of place), activity (dancing, swimming, etc), things (places of Worship, Museums,food, restaurants, ships, birds etc) and events by name and I add a year tag for those that are scanned images. All of this metadata appears to be available when I share photos or view them in other software. Basically I tag the who, what, where, and why for each photo. I have encouraged family members to use Picasa so that when photos are shared there is some descriptive information attached.

A word of warning - the facial recognition data doesn't seem to move with an image so I always add a tag with a person's name - these do transfer.

Picasa will also "find duplicate images". This is a very handy tool for someone with as many pics as I have.

Picasa allows "batch editing to make the same edits to multiple photos at the same time". This is a very easy process and saves a lot of time. I use the batch tag to add a couple of generic tags like "London", "Wiggles Concert" or "Rootsech 2011" when I download the photos, I then go through the photos at a later date individually to attach more specific tags.


That Picasa now integrates with Google+ has given me another reason to use this tool. 


We all have different needs, backgrounds and budgets. How do you organise your photos to fit your situation?

Comparison of Windows Live Photo Gallery with Picasa - New Version

Genealogists, are you wondering which free photo management software to use for your precious family photos?

Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration , one of my favourite blogs, compares Windows Live Photo Gallery with Picasa in this thoughtful and detailed post. I switched to Picasa this year and am happy with the tool but would give Windows Live Photo Gallery a try if I was starting afresh.

Comparison of Windows Live Photo Gallery with Picasa - New Version

Moving to Picasa

When it was first launched I downloaded and tried Picasa as a means of organising my photos it did not provide the features I wanted so I looked for another tool.

When time permits (and it doesn't too often) I use Adobe Photoshop to edit new photos and restore old ones to their former glory but I like to have a simple tool that allows me to apply Metadata, do simple fixes and search and retrieve photos easily.

Initially I used the free Adobe® Photoshop® Album Starter Edition but it just couldn't cope with the number of photos I had (around 30,000 at that time). I moved over to Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 and have been using Elements 6.0 since its debut. This program struggles with my collection of 65,000 digital images on an external hard drive. As I have read some unflattering reviews of Elements 8 I have not bothered to upgrade to version 8. As version 6 still works (albeit slowly) I have not actively looked for another product to replace it.

I was recently on a Caribbean cruise that featured photographer, Peter Simon, as a guest lecturer and workshop presenter. Peter, a gentle man who has been taking photographs for 50 years, was a willing and enthusiastic tutor. In the few hours we spent with Peter my husband and I took on board many tips that we applied to our holiday snaps and that should enhance our future photographic efforts. We and other cruisers noted that Peter was using Picasa to download and organise his photos. In the workshops as he showed us examples of his stunning work and imparted his knowledge we were able to see various features of Picasa demonstrated. Peter suggested using Picasa as a 'staging post' to initially organise and edit photos. He then suggested using Photoshop to do more complex edits.

After Downloading a few thousand holiday snaps I decided to trial Picasa. The free download was easily installed and my photos imported. I quickly found that this program is a delight to use. So pleased was I that I imported the folders containing my 65,000 photos into Picasa. This happened very quickly and y photos were imported with their tags attached.

I find this tagging facility very easy to use although I would like to be able to nest my tags into categories. I love the ability to drag and drop photos into albums and the ease with which one can move files from folder to folder. Being able to upload pictures directly to Blogger is a bonus I hadn't expected to find. See my first uploaded photo in the previous post. The quick edits functions are situated conveniently on the desktop and so easy to use. That Picasa is a free application just adds icing to the cake.

I am going to say goodbye to Photoshop Elements and use Picasa.

Genealogists, if you are looking for a simple, user friendly program to organize your photos Picasa is worth a try. Thank you Peter Simon for your suggestion.