Old Family Photos with no dates

Use keywords.

You can simply assign keywords to the two kinds of image then a simple smart folder will find them. Using keywords like 'Family' and 'archive' for the two kinds

File -> New Smart Album

Keyword -> is -> Family

Will give you all your own photos, and another will give you the archive ones

The advantage is that with keywords you can even have albums drawing from both sources - like an Album of favourites.

Some of the possibilities of keywords:

I use Events simply as big buckets of Photos: Spring 08, July - Nov 06 are typical Events in my Library. I use keywords and Smart Albums extensively. I title the pics broadly.

I keyword on a

Who

What

Where basis (The When is in the photos's Exif metadata). I also rate the pics on a 1 - 5 star basis.

Using this system I can find pretty much find any pic in my 50k library in a couple of seconds.

So, for example, I have a batch of pics titled 'Seattle 08' and a typical keywording might include: John, Anne, Landscape, mountain, trees, snow. With a rating included it's so very easy to find the best pics we took at Mount Rainier.

File -> New Smart Album

set it to 'All"

title contains Seattle

keyword is mountain

keyword is snow

rating is 5 stars

Or, want a chronological album of John from birth to today?

New Smart Album

Keyword is John

Set the View options to Sort By Date Ascending

Want only the best pics?

add Rating is greater than 4 stars

The best thing about this system is that it's dynamic. If I add 50 more pics of John to the Library tomorrow, as I keyword and rate them they are added to the Smart Album.

In the end, organisation is about finding the pics. The point is to make locating that pic or batch of pics findable fast. This system works for me.

I am organizing my old scans with family photos based on dates, faces, and places.

• First of all, when I import the scanned photos, I change the dates of the photos using "Photos > Adjust Date and Time", to give them a date that is approximately right (Year, month), or at least correct in the sequence of the other photos. I make sure, that the option "Modify original files" is enabled, so that the EXIF date in the original files will be set correctly.
• Secondly, I try to create events based on the year and the location, where that part of the family lived at that time.
• Then I tag all known faces in the photos and assign locations, so that I can find photos based on the faces or locations. That makes it easy to create smart albums and to search for photos.

To assign the locations I do not use iPhoto but JetPhoto Studio. This way, I can write the GPS coordinates directly into the EXIF, before the file will be imported into the photo library.

The Faces view makes it easy to assign keywords with names to all known persons.

hi jimbo,

how do you name them ? I scanned a lot of pics, also, and am using them in genealogy. I like to name them starting by the first two letters of the family on the photo, followed by the year ( exact or guessed ) the photo was taken. This then automatically ( when adjusted " sort by name " ) puts the pics in order for each family.

Hi Jimbo435. I have scanned many 1000's of old photos from my family and use the following way to sort & label them. I think it works quite well. These photos would range in date from the 1860's to present day.

When I scan the photos they form a new event thumbnail. The individual photos are then cut from the new event & pasted into different events that have already been labelled according to the last names of the parents of the family. For example, my father's last name was Davies & my mom's was Hinman. So the event for all photos of my parents after they were together, all their kids photos, etc. up until my parents death would be in the Davies - Hinman Family event. When my sister got married to someone last named Sanderson I started a Sanderson - Davies event & stared putting their families photos in their own separate event. My father's parents are in a Davies - Bullock file and so on. I also have an Unidentified event for persons I can't identify. I can select items from this file & email to cousins or other relatives to see if they know who these people are.

The individual photos can then be examined and renamed to include persons names, locations and dates. For example, if the exact date is unknown you can label something like Alan, Betty & Dale - c.1952-53. I find you can usually find some detail in the photo ( an old car, license plate, style of dress, furniture, buildings, etc.) to help give an approximate date. Once you have many photos in an event you can see how the people change over the years & this all helps in dating the photos.

You could adapt this system by say creating an event for each year or decade if date was more important than personal identity.

Good luck!

SCANNING: a few " tricks of the trade ":

-never scan in "grayscale" or " black & white " ...even B&W old photos have some "hue", and you want to lose nothing of the "info" in these pix

-always include the outside border of the pic, it will help you later "link" batches of pix, and thus help you date them

-when you choose the "resolution" ( DPI ) that will be applied, aim for a resulting pic that will be at least 500 KB to 2 MB "heavy", which will allow for a very good "zooming" on the details of the pix ( and trust me, there will be a lot of zooming on these faces, cars, buildings, etc. ! ). This means the smaller the pic is, the higher the DPI applied: i've applied 1,200 dpi to a 1 square inch photo...

-here's a way to compare ( and judge by yourself ) what the dpi will do for you: drop an average sized picture in the scanner, scan it to 72 dpi , name it "72" and send it on your desktop. Then rescan it to 300 dpi, name it 300, send it again to the desktop. Now click on "Preview" in the Dock, click on the word "Preview" that's now in the bar, click "Preferences", click "Open each file in its own window". Now simply drag-drop the two pix on your desktop on the "Preview" icon of the dock. Arrange your two pix side by side...they look quite alike, don't they ? Now click five times on the zooming + of each photo, center the two on the same detail, and zoom again each pic the same number of times...By the way, this side-by-side comparison technique works with as many pix as you dare put on the screen. To have ALL the infos you might want on the pix, click "Tools" up there, then "Show inspector". The inspector will show you the infos on the pic you click on ( so in the "general info" pane you will have the "weight" of you pic, in K or MB ).

More on genealogy-scanning,and from the best ?

"ALL ABOUT DIGITAL PHOTOS " ( by Ken W. Watson )

http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/index.html

more precisely, last chapter, genealogy:

http://www.rideau-info.com/photos/genealogy-home.html

I change the dates of the photos using "Photos > Adjust Date and Time",

This may not work on scanned photos due to the lack of EXF data in scanned photos - if it does not use the Bach Change time date command insread

LN

It will probably depend on the scanner. It worked on all my scans, and also the scanned photos my father keeps sending me. But Batch Change is very useful to set all photos in an event to approximately the same time, with a constant increment.

scanned photos have an exif but no iptc, which is verifiable by opening the photo in preview, clicking "tools", then "show inspector", and in the inspector "windowlet", clicking the "more info inspector", where the "general", "exif", "jfif" and "tiff" data will be available.

i suggest meddling with the dates only at the very end of the process, when the pix are in a relatively "solid" time frame ( a lot of guessing at the beginning, leading to a lot of "redating", which will be time consuming if done photo by photo ) . By naming the pix of the Davies-Hinman ( to take 19krd54 's example ) family with a name starting with DH and followed by the "guessed" year of the pic ( e.g. DH 1935 ) it is easy and fast, if you finally determine the year is more 1925, to change the name of the pic and it will immediately "re-sort" itself at the right place,in the Davies-Hinman event, where all the pix's names start with DH. When all this is kinda "done" and you have the time...maybe you'll want to put the dates in...

By naming the pix of the Davies-Hinman ( to take 19krd54 's example ) family with a name starting with DH and followed by the "guessed" year of the pic ( e.g. DH 1935 ) it is easy and fast, if you finally determine the year is more 1925,

It will depend of the kind of photos and what you know about the photos, what will be the best workflow.

For the photos I have been scanning and collecting the photos are showing family groups - many persons at the same time, also villages and rural scenes. It would not make much sense to name the photos by the persons.

I can relatively easy find out the year and the rough location, but have a lot of research or interviews to do to identify the persons. So I sort them initially by the data that help me to find out whom to ask - I group them by the location (city, village) and the estimated date, so related photos will appear in the same events.

what works for me is an event for each family, your immediate family having its own event.

fascinating past! fascinating old photos ! and what fascinating tools in our hands: scanners, computers !!!