TAG photos

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TAG photos

Hi
I have "thousands" of photos that need tags, is there any quick way of tagging them without going into each one for the same subject?

From what my husband tells me. He downloads and organizes most of our photos. ONE of the greatest things about "Picassa" is it's facial recognition part of the software. Makes it very easy to TAG all the peeps in your friends & family. smiley I just go find the photos by date when I want to scrap a subject that he photographed and I didn't. smiley

Tagging old photos can be a challenge. I'd suggest thinking through what you really want tagged and see if you can narrow it down to make it less overwhelming. You can probably tag whole groups of photos at a time with general things like year, occasion, and location.

Also, don't let past photos keep you from starting to tag your photos now. Better to start somewhere than leave them all untagged!

With so many photos you may want to start by organizing them with a good file system. Date the folder, Name the folder with the place or person's name or event. But if the date is available I would put that the date there also.

With all of the old pictures that I have been scanning I try to scan the album page first to help keep pictures together. Than try to label the folder for the grouping of pictures. I found this is easier to find pictures. I do not have time to tag every picture and with edits of many of the pictures this is a lot of extra work when I can spend it on scanning more, edit, or create a page.

Thanks for tips, I have old transparencies, that I keep telling myself I must transfer to disc, but the thought of all those from the 70's and 80's are just overwhelming, I did start and found that they had discoloured so much over the years, if I don't do something soon, they'll be lost for good.

Hey I may be talking myself into starting here LOL.

As for digi photos thankfully they transfer into date folders, at least there's a start there.

You have your work cut out for you. Just start a bit at a time. Set aside some time every week and try to keep up with it.

As my husband always tells me when I'm feeling overwhelmed with a task. How do you eat an elephant? I always tease (cause I know his answer & say I DON'T) LoL but his answer is ONE bite at a time! It's good your starting somewhere & like Marisa says... at lesat try to keep up with today going forward. At least you will feel that accomplishment. smiley Good Luck!

I am pretty much anal to organization. One of the things that I like to do in this digital age is rename each of my photos and ones from other family members to reflect the event, date and time and then anything else important if necessary (Family Christmas 20121208 1501 - which is 3:01 pm). If there are multiple shots taken in the minute I add an a, b, c to the time. It does take time but it will put my photos in order automatically. I then also keep a file for each event which is labeled with the date and event (20121208 Family Christmas). Then it keeps all of my files in order. I start by setting up the files and then I have a folder called "Archived" which is where I keep all of my labeled/tagged photo files. If I have miscellaneous photos I till label with such things as "Family" for "Travel." In most cases I have enough photos for each event but many older photos are just bits and pieces of things. I have over 30,000 photos and many from before the digital age so I realized how much time it it will take, I am starting with the digital and then go back. It works for me but as I said, it does take a lot of time! The bigger problem is that I scanned all of my mom's old photos (after she passed) and trying to determine the dates will be my biggest undertaking ever!

Thanks again, and Janet your sorting sounds good to me, I think I HAVE to start soon, maybe one ear of the elephant first Shawna ay? LOL

@Faith: LoL smiley

This really isn't on Tagging so much as sharing my file naming system, back BEFORE I found Picasa to tag with. The Blog post is on how I name my scanned photo files, before digital camera time.

http://laurawellinghoffstudio.blogspot.com/2013/01/working-with-lot-of-photos-scanned-or.html

There's also some helpful photos that I post there, that's why I didn't just write it all here in the forum. I'm more of a have to see it, instead of hear or read it.... illustrations! Guess that's why I like Scrapbooking. smiley

Wow Laura, that is a great help, thank you, fabulous to *see it* I have bookmarked your page for future reference, (when I get confused) LOL

@Laura Thank you so much! You have made my labeling of my photos so much easier! I was doing everything individually but now I see that I can "bulk" label and then just add the time on each of my photos! This will definitely be a timesaver for me! Thank you for taking the time to make a visual - I learn better that way too!

A point to consider is if you use your scanner's utilities to scan, it does allow you to name the picture before scanning. so if you are doing a group of pictures for a particular event and date you can date it and than put the event on it. The scanner will than add a number at the end starting with possibly 000,1 so that each scanned picture will be different. Saves time later. You can also create a new folder and name that, which will also save time from sorting later.

@Judy I do have the scanning utility to name photos and it has been a great help! Mine is an Epson Perfection 600 and I have to admit from the scanners that I have the software is the best.

Another tip, MUST use and tag, smiley thank you all so much

Janet love the Epson scanner, it came with digital ICE which does amazing on negatives.

That's a good tip about naming the file ahead of time. I think my father-in-law has a big scanning project on his plate, so I'll try and remember that one.

@Judy You are right! I had some photos in my photo albums that I was scanning and still had the negatives - I scanned the negatives vs the photos for the quality!

The negatives were probably preserved better than the photos. Which makes them a better scan than the developed pictures.

A tip for scanning albums. Many people just scan each picture. The problem is that if the album pages contained any text, special notes, plus, this is lost. So a thought when scanning album pages. Scan the page at a lower resolution to keep as a contact sheet. If it contains designs and writing I would make an extra copy of the sheet and than start labeling each picture with everything known about it. Who was in the picture, where the picture was taken, etc. The contact sheet and the pictures on the page are kept together in the same folder. If I do not know who they are, but know someone who can help I can print out a plain paper copy of the contact sheet and bring it with me or send it and do not have to worry about the print getting messy or ruined. As I collect information I enter on the digital copy.

Please note each individual picture is scanned at a high resolution to get the best quality.

You girls are SO organised, however the new digis I am downloading from my camera I am naming, it WILL make things much better. Thank you all again for your help.

if you use lightroom, you can assign a keyword to them when you import... like if you are importing beach photos, you can assign "beach' to all of them. and of course, you can batch "tag/keyword" all of your old photos too.