Organizing family history images

Have you ever had a pile of digital or physical documents/pictures relating to family history that you were struggling to organize?

In my experience there are a number of specific difficulties you are likely to encounter:

1. How to organize them. A single item likely has quite a few people in it in the case of pictures or is related to many people in the case of documents. Organizing with folders generally results in either duplicating the images by making a folder for each individual with all their associated images, or using complex names for the images to indicate who they relate to. Neither of those methods seem to yield good results.
2. How to record "other" information about the images. While scanning or organizing Grandma will likely tell you where/when a picture was taken or give background on a document. There also may be information written on the back of a picture or scrap of paper that is worth preserving. Keeping track of these in a separate document is generally asking for trouble/data loss and using the file name is also not rally an option. The most promising option up to this point has generally been to upload the images to a website like Ancestry or Family Search where recoring information about an image is easy
3. What to do with pictures when you don't know all/any of the people in them. The research part of family history often entails working with images you don't completely understand yet. Putting all the "unknown" pictures together in a folder is a great start, but really breaks downn when you want to start recording theories/guesses about who the people in the picture are.
4. How to label the people in an image. Once again, Grandma may generously help you by identifying people in pictures that you never met or don't recognize. Putting the names in the file name for the image may work for some cases, but certainly breaks down in the case of the classic case of a family reunion picture.
5. What to do with pictures you can't upload to a website. Maybe there is some touchy history surrounding some relationships, or maybe some living people in some pictures are not likely to want pictures of them shared. Maybe you don't even know who is in the picture. Most sites don't really have a way of handling pictures where you don't know who they relate to yet.

When you find yourself running up against these issues, [Tropy]{https://tropy.org} may be a program worth considering. It is an open-source program for organizing and managing research involving images and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Tropy is not specifically intended for family history work and is not widely used for this as far as I can tell, but it works well for it in my experience. The graphical interface is also really nicely done, which makes working with Tropy smooth and pleasant.

Features

• Organize images using tags

• Attach notes to entire images or sections of images

• Filter images by tags

• Does not manipulate or mess with the images in any way. No need to worry about loosing data

• Allows viewing metadata for images

• Group multiple images into a single "item"

• Describe my process for scanning in images

  • Use a tag for each batch
  • Use a tag for unlabeled/untagged images
  • Use a tag for "unknowns"
  • Use image notes for recording details ("back of image", memories, dates...)
  • Use notes on selections to label individuals in the image
  • Group front/back or multiple images of a single item into a single object

• Describe weaknesses and extensions

  • Difficult to transfer from one computer to another
  • Not easy to directly share with people or to collaborate
  • Can pulish as a library-like website using Omeka S