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Family Matters » Blog Archive » Going Digital - Managing Your Images
« Research Guides Update\nGoing Digital - Managing Documents »\nGoing Digital - Managing Your Images\n\nJul 29th, 2008 by Denise Olson\n\nThere's been a lot of discussion in the genealogy community about digitizing our family collections. From scanner settings to file formats to backup strategies, we've learned how to create, store and protect our precious photos, documents and other ephemera. One thing we haven't discussed much is organizing and cataloging those items so we can quickly find them when we need them.\n\nI've been doing some research on tools to help me digitize and organize our household records and now, hearing about Craig Mason's fabulous gift [logistical nightmare] of family records, I think it's time we all start thinking about managing our growing digital collections.\n\nFor years we've been organizing our digital files using the operating system's built-in file manager. This follows the old paper-based system of drawers (disk drives) and folders to organize our information. As disk drives got bigger and we collected more digital information, this system began to show its age. For my family collection, if I had a document that related to more than one person, I would save a copy in each family's folder just to simplify finding it later. Either I'm going to spend a whole lot of time organizing and reorganizing files and folders as I add to my collection or I need to look for a better way.\n\nI started looking.\n\nEven before I moved from Windows to Mac I discovered the joy of tagging. Many newer applications - especially web applications like Flickr, Diigo and del.icio.us - use tags (keywords) to organize items. Tags are saved as part of the file's metadata (embedded information describing the contents of the file) and can be used by each application's search and filtering functions. This simplified my document management because I no longer need to maintain that complex folder/sub-folder scheme and, instead of saving multiple copies of a file in multiple folders, now I just add more tags. Alth
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Family Matters » » Organize your digital files - the easy way
Organize your digital files - the easy way
Jan 7th, 2008 by Denise Olson
Sharon DeBartolo Carmack has a great article discussing systems for organizing your paper research [Battle of the Bulge, Family Tree Magazine, March 2008]. She’s also written a fabulous book on the topic - Organizing Your Family History Search [Betterway Books, 1999]. In the article, she recommends duplicating your paper filing system for your digital files. That may have been a good idea at one time, but with today’s technology it’s a waste of time and effort. Why should you spend hours building and maintaining what is essentially a manual system when your computer can do most of it for you?
Both the Mac and Windows (Vista) operating systems include sophisticated metadata and search capabilities that will easily put the information you want in your face in seconds. I have a “Family Research” folder on my hard drive, but the surname subfolders I brought over when I migrated from Windows to Mac are quickly going away. Why? Because the Mac does most of the work for me. The same concepts work in Vista, but the commands are a bit different. Even if you’re not yet using Vista or Mac OS X, you can do the “prep work” now to set yourself up for the day when you do upgrade or migrate. Here’s how . . .
Most applications - Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, etc. - have the ability to include metadata with each file you create. Metadata is information describing the contents of your file. Look for a File > Properties command (OpenOffice.org), File > File Info … command (Photoshop Elements) or something similar. These commands display a screen form where you can add information like author, description, keywords or subject. This is the metadata. The Mac/Vista search functions use this data as well as the file name and contents when is performs searches.
How does this help you? Instead of creating and maintaining complex folder structures then insuring that you save each file in the correct folder, you just include the -
Fannie Herzog - 1920 United States Federal Census - Ancestry.com
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- New York City (All Boroughs), New York, USA
- New York, U
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