Family Photos Classification

I just have to get this out there: I LOVE classification systems. I’ve always loved organization, and good classification systems are like the epitome of perfected organization.

When posed with the scanning and organization of a large photo collection, I was determined to come up with a numerical classification scheme, somehow based on the family tree. Friends who I told who didn’t have any background in library/information science were totally dumbfounded that I intended to give each photo a unique number that would MAKE SENSE. Friends who were information scientists were also amazed that I would take on such a task, with such high expectations of myself.

It took a couple weeks to develop, but it finally came to me, suddenly.

I figured out how to organize them based on who is in the picture. Since pictures with members of the same nuclear family are most common, I set the nuclear family as the primary arrangement. I created a family tree, and gave each nuclear family a 3-digit number (starting with 001 and increasing semi-arbitrarily). Within each family, I lettered the family members, starting with the father and mother. Thus, every person has a 4-character number. You may realize that as people get married/re-married, etc, they would have more than one individual number. I created the standard that each individual goes by the default of their first (child) number, but the other numbers are indexed, so they can be retrieved according to any of their numbers. That is the numerical scheme for photos of an individual. If there is more than one person from the same nuclear family in the photo, I replaced the letters (a/b/c/d..) with the letters W (parents), X (parents and kids), Y (kids), or Z (parents/kids/grandkids/great grandkids). Thus, each photo is labeled 001d, 060W, etc. Then, once the photos are sorted, I weeded out duplicates, keeping the best copy of each image. Then, as I scanned, I added a 3-digit number to the end, so they each were uniquely matched with their digital counterpart. Final numbers were: 001d_013, 060W_046, etc.

For photos that did not nicely match the nuclear family scheme, I created “families” (999, 998, etc) that described more obscure relationships, or non-family members. All of the photos are scanned as high-resolution TIFFs, with thumbnail JPG versions, and are fully indexed and described in an Excel spreadsheet, so with full text-searching capabilities, everything is retrievable digitally, as well as physically. The photos are saved digitally on my internal hard drive, and backed up on my external hard drive. Once photos are scanned, they are stored in archival storage boxes (naturally in the same order as the numerical scheme). The format (small print/large print/slide/negative) is specified in the description in Picasa so that physical retrievability is possible.

Photo albums were also scanned as a part of the project. I used the basic numerical structure, with an additional field inserted that identified the album. For example, 001e_1950a_p001 would be 001e's first scrapbook from 1950, page 1.