Archiving photo's

Discussion in 'Ferrari Discussion (not model specific)' started by Dr. Bob, Oct 31, 2003.

  1. Dr. Bob

    Dr. Bob Formula Junior

    Apr 17, 2003
    Full Name:
    Bob Hagendijk
    I want to archive my photo's. What is the best way to do that?
    I want to save th epicture together with info like photographer, place, date, type, s/n. I would like it when I shouldn't have to ude special programs because. I'm more into usinf maps and excel documents to keep everything listed. What are your opinions?

    Thanks for any input
  2. Gilles27

    Gilles27 F1 World Champ

    Mar 16, 2002
    Full Name:
    Are talking about hard copy photos, or digitals? Something to remember is that photos and negatives will degenerate over time. I've digitized a lot of my pictures and transferred them to CD. My negatives have all been put in sleeve sheets and labeled. As for actual photos, I've put them into photo boxes and organized them as best as possible (Family, friends, racing, etc.). Hope that helps.
  3. Dr. Bob

    Dr. Bob Formula Junior

    Apr 17, 2003
    Full Name:
    Bob Hagendijk
    I mean digitals,

    Now I have a huge map with all the photos in it, renumbered them in a special way, and then have an excel file as database to look where they were made, what car it is, who took the picture and what s/n it is. Buit somehow I don't think this is the best way.
  4. Brian C. Stradale

    Brian C. Stradale F1 Rookie
    Lifetime Rossa

    Mar 17, 2002
    Dallas, TX, USA
    If that's all you need to do, and you want the most generic tool for that, then use Excel.

    If you might want more sophisticated reporting or data entry, throwing that up in a database like FileMaker would be much better (and is still wholly generic a program).

    But I keep mine in iPhoto (a specialized program for this on the Mac). It is awesome... makes it easy to organize photos into multiple albums... to adjust brightness, contrast, make touch-ups, crop, and so on, all without ever losing the original digital content. Further, you can display and print thumbnail sheets at any level of zoom. You can easily export in numerous formats, with sizing adjusted (like to max 640x640 as required by the old board). And you can even export whole HTML photo albums that can easily be put up on a website.

    There's something to be said for specialized software, if the designers truly embrace what the user is doing.

    (I love my aluminum Mac PowerBook... its like walking around with the Ferrari 360 Challenge Stradale of computers in my hand!)

    Hope that helps,

  5. tifosi12

    tifosi12 Four Time F1 World Champ
    Owner Lifetime Rossa

    Oct 3, 2002
    @ the wheel
    Full Name:
    I have just finished a several year long home project of digitizing everything. I scanned in all slides and all prints. All 20,000 or so of them. Whew! I was looking at several software etc, but have to say, that somehow I like the simple and straight forward way. So first I numbered all boxes/films/pictures (that was relatively easy as I used to number my slide trays anyway) in chronological order, transferred all that information into Excel sheet and setup a file system on my drive based on these numbers. So now when I need to look for something (e.g. the pics of the Brands Hatch 1980 GP) I do a simple text search in Excel, that gives me the number for the file structure where I look up the photos using ACDSee.

    ACDSee is some really cool software and is actually a bundle that supports all kinds of things. It also has its own database but I didn't use that (see above). But its browser and editor are first class, top notch, have cool filters to fix wrotten pictures and very fast to look things up.

    Before we go totally OT here: I have a separate collection of all the Ferrari pictures I ever took. Those are organized by production year. That wasn't too easy as different books show different years for the production, but for starters you could use the years shown on FChat (Model List above).

    Jack makes a good point about the loss of quality because the pictures deteriorate. True. Although not really too much. ACDSee is actually capable of restoring a reddish slide. Don't know how it does that, but in most cases it works. And yes once you have all on your harddisk, back it up, put the tape in a safe place (ideally different location than your drive). Nevertheless you should always keep the originals. I used the best technology avail, but the resolution is still not as good as the original. But if my house ever burns down, I won't loose all pictures, I'll still have the digitals.

    BTW: If you're looking for a slide scanner, make sure it has an automatic feeder (or you'll kill yourself somewhere down the road) and it has ICE technology, which corrects automatically for scratches and dust. Very important. Nikon makes some nice scanners that do all that.

    Lastly: Be patient. As I said, it took me years. Now that I'm done my father gave me his collection. Here we go again, another 12,000...

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