In June of 2014, we all learned that Apple had been building a whole new photo managing program called Photos for Mac OS X. Later in the same month, Apple dropped a bomb and declared they were also ceasing future development of both of their current applications — iPhoto and Aperture.
Apple did however say they would update iPhoto and Aperture to run indefinitely with Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite. So, as long as you are willing to run 10.10, you could in theory use iPhoto or Aperture for as long as your heart’s content.
For the rest of us, we were left sitting there last year, befuddled, with the assumption that Apple must intend for us to eventually move our previous photo libraries over to their new Photos application when it’s released sometime “next spring.”
This is a cool way to add captions to your scanned photos without having to rely on embedded metadata. In other words, this way would allow you to have the written caption as a part of the JPEG or TIFF file itself. The main advantage to this idea is not losing your captions over the years (possibly even centuries) should an application “accidentally” delete or write over the metadata contents.
Programs change, data conversion can get lost — this way your caption is part of the photo itself and thus your written information for your photos shouldn’t be lost (the only way this could happen would be to crop it off from the photo). So years from now, people will know who or what is in your photo, and/or any other tidbit you might want to include.
Choosing an appropriate file name for the photos in our digital photo collection is something we all have to deal with. And not being able to come up with a consistent system that we are happy with turns out to be one of the biggest reasons we put off starting the entire project.
To help you get past this hurdle, I created a 3-part post series called “What Everybody Ought to Know When Naming Your Scanned Photos” that walks you through the system I came up with and use to name my own photos.
Dan Keiper had already been working his own naming method when he came upon my 3-part series. After a bit of thought, he wrote me to see if he should make changes to what he had already been doing, and to seek answers to further questions that he had.
Maria Ricossa from Toronto, Ontario, Canada wrote to me with the following question:
“Hi Curtis, I have recently purchased a new camera and vowed to be better organized in the photo storage and processing department. A couple questions:
1) Someone told me I should not store my albums in iPhoto but should create picture files elsewhere on my computer. What would you suggest?
2) I am currently using Photoshop Elements to process my photos. Do you have any thoughts on Lightroom as opposed to PE?
Thanks. I look forward to reading your newsletters.” ~ Maria Ricossa.
Photos are the driving force behind the story told in most albums—no photo, no story. But should it be that way?
I want to help you tell a lifestory in your scrapbooks using the events and relationships of your life, not the photos you happen to have on hand, as your primary organizing element. This ordering principle, more than any other, will help you make meaningful lifestory photo albums using photos, captions, and cameo narratives.
Are you someone with a large amount of photographs you would love to scan and turn into digital files? Problem is, you just haven’t because you’re afraid it’s going to take way too long!!
If this sounds like you, I would like to introduce you to Steven Seelig who has been scanning his photos in a way that could potentially save you a lot of time!
