Managing (too many) Photos
This session is all about managing those thousands of photos many of us have on our computers.
What do we want?
That seems to be the first and most important question.
Here are some possibilities:
- a safe place to store our photos
- a place that will remain usable for a long time
- a place in which we can easily add more photos
- a way to view the photos
- a way to determine different people's rights to see the photos
- a way to easily describe what's in a photo
We will clean up the collection:
- start by collecting a big folder full of photos - beware of the mistake of moving an image that is connected to something - eg a webpage, an email message, etc....
- go through them deciding which to keep - do you need all those photos? Who is going to want to see them? How are they going to get access to them? Why would they be interested? does that help think about how to present the images?
- delete those we don't want and duplicates - there are several versions of images often. How do you decide which ones to keep out of images that appear the same on the screen?
- sort the photos - you can file them in folders according to a class (family, work, holidays, etc)
Let's assume you have done this cleaning up.
We will see what we can do if we load the photos (on to an existing webserver) so they can be seen and clicked through. How do you know how old the photos are? Where were they taken? why? and by whom? Will someone who does not have cherished memories of the context and event be able to enjoy the image?
So what next? We will enhance the photos. We might be able to remember what they show but can others guess too? We will:
- give titles, labels, dates, etc to the photos
- organise the collection so different people get access to different sets of photos
Finally, we will talk about where to put all these photos and, if necessary, how to be sure they are securly backed up etc. Perhaps this is a serious issue about which we should think carefully. If the number of ophotos we want to keep is really big, we might want to display albums on a webserver - local or remote. What is a webserver and can I provide a website of my photos securely on my personal computer?