Jonathan Wilcox

In the summer of 2007 I came across a collection of six prints of Scottish royal and military men at a Value World thrift store. The paper was yellowed, speckled with dirt and grime, and the colors had faded considerably. But I liked them. I bought them, took them home and removed them from their decrepit frames and set out to restore them. Here are a couple of them in their original state:

I began my restoration project excitedly but then the Scots lay dormant for a few years. Recently I had the time to finish them and now they look like this (click to see them larger):

I got my first digital camera in 2000. It was an Olympus Camedia D-360L that had a maximum resolution of 1280 x 960 pixels (1.2 megapixels) and saved photos to a SmartMedia card. The first digital photo that I took with it (or at least the first one I kept) can be seen to the right, a photograph of some farmland on the annual drive up to Port Austin, Michigan.

I have no idea how many photos I’ve taken over the past eleven years, but I’ve kept over 11,000 of them. I’m a pretty neat and organized person, but when it comes to my digital files I am probably bordering on having OCD (dOCD?) or what we in the soft-sciences call the OC Disorder (don’t call it that). In late 2009 I got it in my head that it would be a good idea to go through all of my photos and do the best job I possibly could at keywording, geotagging, and correctly dating all of them. Suffice it to say that I did not have a real job at that time.

A couple of the hurdles were things like the time in 2006 when I transferred all of my photos from an old PC to a new PC which changed the creation dates of many of my photos to October 15, 2006 (a day I will always revile). Or there was the problem of having taken photos of random patches of desert from a moving car the first time I visited Arizona. I pressed onward.

I formulated a workflow. The strategy I ended up going with involved three main pieces of software: Picasa, Adobe Bridge, and finally iPhoto.

Date Correction

The first thing was to determine whether or not the dates of my photos were correct. Most were, but there was that block from 2006 that in reality spanned multiple years. There were also a few here and there that were offset a few hours. I compared them to other sets that I knew were before and after to get the general timeframe correct. I also looked through the photos in question for things like calendars or clocks so I could accurately set those photos to help with the others in the set (this actually worked out many times). Some I did have to guess on but it was a pretty educated guess that I feel comfortable with.

Geotagging

Why not? I like to see the map of all the places I’ve been. I used Picasa as it is free and seemed to work pretty well and hassle-free for what I was trying to do, which was to place many disperate photos in a short amount of time. Many photos, like the ones seen here, are of places I know well, or places that have addresses. But some (like the roadside Arizona photos) were a bit trickier. Here’s where the OCD thing comes in. I spent a lot of time going back and forth between Picasa, Google Maps in street view, and Google Earth. If there were buildings in the shot like in a photo I took of downtown Montreal, I turned on 3D buildings in Earth and lined up the perspective to match my photo, then tagged my photo to that location. For one photo, I even spent the time turning on the realistic sunlight and then changing the date and time to match my photo to see where the sun was lining up. If I was taking multiple shots over a period of time from a car, I mapped out the route in Google Maps and matched it up with the time of each photo from the first photo I could accurately tag. And I did, by the way, place those roadside Arizona photos precisely, like down to the foot. Of my currently 11,409 photos, 221 of them are unplaced (just below 2%). And a good number of those were shots in and from airplanes in flight.

Keywording

Keywording was also done in Picasa. The assignable buttons were helpful for doing blocks of similar photos at a time. I always started by keywording the following information: month, year, city, state (and country if other than the USA), camera make, camera model. Then I would start typing away. Travel, family, home, apartment, cat, garage, the list goes on. I tagged everyone I knew in my photos with full names (and nicknames if they go by those more often). Most of my tags were for things in the photos, but I am not averse to using a few here and there like ridiculous, gross, or beautiful. My plan here was to be as complete as possible so that I could easily search for things and set up smart folders in iPhoto.

Batch Rename and Meta Data

Once everything’s placed and tagged, it’s time to switch it over to Bridge. I used bridge for two things: batch renaming and some light meta data. The naming convention I went with was DATE – TIME which, for example, would look like 20110212 – 122530.jpg. I figure that if for any reason the creation times get altered in the files themselves again like they did in 2006, I can at least figure out the date again from the filename. I then put in a little meta data like my name, website and email, and occasionally filled out things like city, state and country.

Get ‘Em In There

iPhoto was my last stop. I get the feeling that a lot of people don’t love iPhoto and I can understand that to a point, but I’ve always enjoyed using it. And since I have a few other Apple products, it just makes sense. After importing my photos, I check to make sure dates are correct (the data gets lost for importing videos or photos from some newer iPhone apps like Instagram, a time when my date – time naming convention comes in handy). I also usually go into events and autosplit all events. I tried using events a few years ago, organizing them by events or trips or whatever, titling them and all that, but it never felt well-organized to me. Now I just always auto-split so that events are simply the date a block of photos was taken on (the default) and then I don’t really use them after that. I’ve found iPhoto’s Faces feature to be ridiculously bad, so I don’t use that either (a reason why I tag everyone by full name and nicknames). I have a good number of smart sets and some collections of sets. My collections include By Year, People (family, friends, pets, groups of friends, Erin and I together, etc.), Cameras (each camera I’ve used), Places (favorites like my childhood home, my various apartments, Kentucky, etc.), Travels Abroad (organized by locale), and Snapshots (photos from various iPhone apps like ShakeItPhoto or Instagram). Some of my one-off sets include Black & White, Panoramania (all panorama shots), Driving in Cars (shots from moving vehicles), Drunk (myself and other friends imbibing), and People Taking Photos.

That’s what works for me. And now, having that system setup, it’s easy to conform to it with each new photo I take. I figured it was better to go through this process now since presumably I’m just going to continue to take photos. But when I really think about why I wanted to undertake this project, I often think about how one day my memory will probably be so bad that it will be nice to let the computer remind me of all of the things I’ve done, the people I’ve spent time with, and the places I’ve seen. I’m just planning ahead for my mental degradation!

You can look through many photos I’ve taken on my Flickr feed.