Best Program for Archiving Old Photos

Since my Dad began scanning photos six years ago, I have done a lot of research into the best programs to use. The short version is that Picasa is our program of choice.

At first we used the HP software that came with his scanner, but this was absolutely terrible. It became unusable once he had more than a few hundred photos. We've used HP, Epson, and Cannon scanners on this project. I can say that all scanner software is terrible. Use it only as much as you need to perform the actual scans, and a different program for organizing them.

The only real contenders where Picasa by Google, iPhoto by Apple and Windows Live Photo Gallery by Microsoft.

Picasa stands out in two main ways. First, it is platform independent. It doesn't matter that I work on a Mac and my Dad is on Windows. If he wants to move to Mac in the future, or I to Windows, we don't have to worry about changing programs.

This leads to the second point. Picasa stores almost all of it's information in industry-standard formats (EXIF and IPTC). iPhoto uses proprietary formats that cannot be used by other programs. This is not a good idea if you want your photo files to be readable in a hundred years, or to convert your work to a different program in the future. Microsoft uses a standardized format as well (XMP). There is no standard for face tagging, but Picasa again wins. They store face tagging information in a file that can be read and potentially used by other programs. (I plan to write some scripts around face data in the future.) My Dad has spend hundreds of hours tagging faces in Picasa. If we were using iPhoto, all that work would keep us eternally locked into iPhoto.

In other regards, these programs are about the same. All are free, so cost was no consideration. All of them allow basic operations like rotating pictures, moving them into galleries, and tagging. iPhoto was the first to have face tagging, which was almost enough to make us switch, but now all three programs have this feature. Microsoft's online solution gives more free space than Google or Microsoft, but $20/year for Picasa is not too bad.

So in summary again, Picasa is the program of choice for managing old photos.

Problem with old dates in Picasaweb

This is a problem we run into again and again: photo management software can't handle photos from the past. In this case, I was trying to use Picasa Web albums to share photos of my Uncle from 1921-1942. The infuriating thing is that there is no way around this. Picasa only allows you to sort albums by "Album Date" or "Upload Date". There is no changing the date that you upload, and for old photos, it's impossible to set the correct album date.

The only workaround I can think of is to set all old albums to 1970, and then use an arbitrary mapping to get things in the right order. For example, use the month to indicate the first digit of the year, and the day to indicate the second. This would mean that 1921 would be represented as "February 1, 1970". February=2nd month, 1=day, together they mean "21". This will work, but what a pain!

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Vern explains how he starting scanning old photos

Several years ago my Dad told me how he found a scanner that could scan slides. (Not PowerPoint, the old fashioned photo variety!) He wanted to be able see those pictures again. And more importantly, he realized that if future generations were to see them, they needed to be "in the computer." Well, here he is explaining in his own words.



I'm starting this blog to record how we did it. So many people have seen what my Dad has done and asked "How can I?".