Overview

Careful management of your photos helps preserve memories, and there are a few key things to keep in mind for the best result. The biggest point here is that ensuring dates and category tags are added to the file metadata of your photos, they will be much easier to sort and use later, and the information will be preserved.

Metadata

Bare with me here, because the metadata is boring. However, it's certainly the most important part of this. When tags and date fixes are written to the metadata, the photo files can be imported into many types of photo management programs with no compatability issues. So, what is metadata? Well, you can read all day about metadata and files, but in simple terms, a file is just a glob of zeros and ones, and metadata is information inside that blob that tells you more about the file. For photos, this metadata can be time the photo was taken, the camera model & settings, gps location, and much more. An example of information not kept in the metadata would be a file creation (or modification) date, which is data outside the blob. The file creation or modification date is managed by a computer's file system, and isn't necessarily stored in the photo file itself. Dates are important to photos, and if the dates aren't saved in the file's metadata, they may change any time the file is modified, copied or moved. This becomes problematic when working with photos that have had the metadata stripped. There a number of apps that strip a photo's metadata, such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. They do this for privacy reasons, so that the person recieving the photos can't divulge potentially harmful information. The issue arrises when this metadata is stripped, every time the file is updated (i.e. you add tags to the photos to make them searchable), the date gets updated to when the file was modified, which may be the only date you have for the photo. To remedy this, you need to use a program that allows you to check if the metadata exists before further altering the file. Exif data is a metadata standard that is found in most photos, and I typcially ensure the existence of a 'datetimeoriginal' field, which should be when the photo was taken. This is what I spend most of my energy verifying or correcting from potentially corrupted photos. The date being off may not seem like a big deal, but if you're displaying photos over a large period of time, they will likely be shown all out of order.

Digikam, Piwigo and photo management software

What works for me is using Digikam, a free and open source program, to sort and add tags to photos. You need to ensure digikam edits the files metadata:

• Digikam > Preferences > Metadata
• Under the Behaivor tab, "Write this information to the Metadata" section, check all the boxes.

This ensures that any tags, captions, or date/time fixes are written to the file, vice just being stored in the program's database. The way Digikam and a majority of photomanagment software work is by taking a collection of photos and saving the information into a database. When I say database, understand it's database that runs on locally on your computer, not hosted on some server far away. The photos can then be searched and organized by date, tags or whatever. Now, Icloud and Google Photos work in similair ways except, well your photos and the database exist on a server in a galaxy far far away... An element to managing your own photos is being able to own your files and photos and have control over how they're used.

My Process

In broad terms, these are the steps to process photos:

• First, I use ExifTool to find and seperate photos that don't have dates saved in the metadata. Digikam has an Exiftool extension, and when added, you can check for the existence of the timedateoriginal field. You do this by clicking the sidelong tab 'metadata' on the far right of the Digikam window. Then click the 'Exiftool' tab at the top. If the only information you see is under the 'File' section, and you can't find a DateTimeOriginal field, you should move those photos to another place to add the dates.
• Next, I use Digikam add tags to my photos. To add tags, you select the sidelong tab 'Captions.' Then switch to the 'Tags' tab at the top of the right pane. For the tags, I always add names of the people in the photo. I just use first name, because it's faster and some of the homies getting married changes their last name. I'll also tag whatever activity and location (such as city or region). You can visit my personal photo gallery to get an idea of how I use tags. (2). You can also adjust the date in the Captions sidelong tab. Instead of the Tags tab, switch to the 'Description' tab, and the dates are at the bottom.
• After the metadata is taken care of (dates & tags), I sort the photos between public or private. In the private folder, I just have the photos organized by year. The folders don't have to be very specific, because most photo management programs allow them to searchable by dates and tags. The public folder is where I have the photos that I want to share on my website. I sort those into folders named by the gallery topic. The sorting an organization is completely user preference, but that's what works for me.
• Lastly, I upload the photos to a personal server I host to display the galleries for my friends and family. I use Piwigo
, which is a php-based photo gallery software you can attach to your hosted website. It's also free and the source code for the install is available on their website. I might add some notes on Piwigo later, because it took me quite some time to get it working properly. The good part is, if you add tags to the metadata and ensure dates are correct, then the photos will work with whatever type of hosting plateform you decide to use.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this was helpful. If you have questions relating to these topics or need help with specefics, I'd be more than happy to assist. My contact info is in the 'About' page.