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Re: What software should I use to catalog photos? (Long Response)
Subject:Re: What software should I use to catalog photos? (Long Response) From:John Posada <jposada01 -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 7 Nov 2001 08:25:06 -0800 (PST)
--- "Peter Shea (USF)" <pshea2 -at- luna -dot- cas -dot- usf -dot- edu> wrote:
> My department has a great many photos taken over the years that
> were
> stored in boxes. They need to be scanned and cataloged so they can
> be accessed by keywords.
>
> Can anyone suggest software for this? What about Extensis?
Peter...I used to be in the biz of scanning/storage of material
(microfilm, optical disk, etc.) Did it for 18 years and have 10 years
of experience of storing photos for entities such as PA Historical
Society, Columbia University, and others.
How may photos are you looking at? 1,000? 10,000? a million or more?
There is much more to this subject than meets the eye and defintely
more than what software...the SW is a cakewalk.
Things to consider:
1) Scanning of grayscale media is very slow.
2) Scannned grayscale images are very big
3) preparation of the material and indexing is usualy more time
consuming (or more so) than the process of scanning. Are the photos
mounted? In envelopes? Staples, paper clips, or postit notes?
4) Flatbed or drum scanning? (drum is faster, required greater
preparation while flatbed is slower, but preparation is less.)
5) No matter what speed yout think this will happen, it will be
slower...much slower if you listen to vendors, but at the same time,
vendors are invaluable to gather knowledge.
Why are you scanning?
- Reduction of storage space
- Historical/archival purposes
- Online access and distribution.
Indexing:
There are a few ways to approach this. The two primary concerns are
uniformity of indexing (two photos using the same term instead of
different words for the same thing) and whether to index prior to
scanning or after scanning (before scanning allows you to break up
the indexing to as many people as you want and after scanning you are
limited to number of viewing stations.)
What I would do is:
- Contact one or two major media companies (newspaper, magazine, etc)
and ask for a tour. They are in the business of storing media.
- Get involved in an organization called AIIM (Association for
Information and Image Management / http://www.aiim.org Through this
organization, you can make contact to many who have done this before.
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