Comprehensive Photogallery of Ancestors

So almost 200 years ago, your great, great, great, grandpa had his photo taken. When he died, the photo went to his oldest child, and on and on. Now, grandpa has 30,000 descendants, and still only one photo somewhere in the world, in a dusty box.

I've been searching for photos of my ancestors and have had great luck, but there are a few left that I have never seen. I KNOW they exist, but I'm afraid they're in an old dusty box in someone's attic somewhere, and
I may never see them.

Wouldn't it be great if there was a forum for posting those photos, where each of the 30,000 descendants could have access to that one photo? It could be linked to family search results, family tree, and on and on. the applications for that one photo are boundless. Is it possible?

The hardest thing would be to advertise just where that photo is being kept. If the photo was properly identified then hopefully a search engine would pick it up and make it easier to locate.

Individuals can build their own web site for a few $$ per month. There's also Google Picasa where you can post that special photo in a public gallery for all to view.

As soon as I read your post I remembered a project I used to look at by FamilySearch Labs (http://labs.familysearch.org) called Life Browser. While this is a discontinued project, I would be surprised if the idea itself has been abandoned. I believe that this would be a worthwhile application to keep a focus on family history and not just genealogy (dates and places).

As storage becomes cheaper and cheaper, that might be explored. For now, I think there might be some nFS add-ons that may try to tackle that function. (Doing a mash-up of commercial web site photos to nFS data.) I don't know as the church would sponsor such a thing since it would cost a lot of money and it's not central to the three-fold mission of the Church. So it may be left to private enterprise to fill in.

Another issue would be to select -a- photo. Certainly if you go back far enough, all you find are professional portraits. But even in the late '20's there's amateur photography. If one does not limit the number of photos, then storage costs skyrocket.

And then there's the issue of copyright. Professional portraits are covered by copyright (with the copyright holder being the studio/photographer), and I'm not sure how long they last. I'm sure the ones shot some 30 years ago are still valid and could cause grief to any site operator.

Through the Family History Centers, we now have access to FootNote.com. After playing with it a bit, I can see how this would be a strong supplement to the (eventual) addition of the FamilyBrowser features of nFS.

One of FootNote's core focuses is dumping your personal shoebox of photographs and documents into their repository, so that the documents can be crosslinked and shared with others. With their recent addition of personalized pages, with an initial stab taken from the Social Security Death Index, it is a fairly straightforward process to go from an ancestor's social security number, and link them to life events, including military, immigration, and even census images. Adding family photographs here would allow a simple way for others to locate the same ancestor and be able to access the image.

Of course, there's all the small print about any image you post to FootNote's servers as now being public domain, and that anyone can have access to do with it as they wish, so you should make sure you have adequate rights to the photograph (or other documents) before posting.

RickParker wrote:Of course, there's all the small print about any image you post to FootNote's servers as now being public domain, and that anyone can have access to do with it as they wish

Public Domain? It was sounding good up until that. I've got no problems with others having "fair use" but PD strikes me as kinda extreme. Unless one is the actual photographer, I'm not sure how one would get the rights to put something in PD anyway. I'm not sure how copyrights might get inherited.

There are many consumer oriented services for hosting photos. Some make it possible to select who can see them and the resolutions of the images. Flickr, bubbleshare.com shutterfly, pbase.com, kodak gallery, etc.

I t would be nice if these services could correlated the images with people in the FamilySearch FamilyTree and vice-a-versa.
I am evangelising some of the concepts with Alfresco.com, Kablink, and others. A flickr plug-in would be great. So many ideas, so little time.

ericjonathansmith wrote: Now, grandpa has 30,000 descendants, and still only one photo somewhere in the world, in a dusty box.

Well, as has been discussed, there are several possible solutions to the technical aspect of sharing the photo. However, the crux of the problem really is: When the dusty box is found and opened, will the owner of the picture know who they've found?

I inherited such a box when my mom passed away. Many pictures, few marked in any way. Some were of relatives I knew, but many were strangers to me.

Lots of technical data is stored with each of the zillions of digital pictures taken in this day and age, but if you don't download them and use a descriptive filename, they will be equally useless to future generations.

JLRose wrote:Well, as has been discussed, there are several possible solutions to the technical aspect of sharing the photo. However, the crux of the problem really is: When the dusty box is found and opened, will the owner of the picture know who they've found?

I shared a similar problem with the passing of my mother a few years ago. Even though she was pretty good at putting something on the back of many photos, there was a large number that were un-identified.

Although this isn't exactly a technical response, I have a cousin on my mother's side of the family who's been bitten by Elija:) He's been doing a marvelous work going through old family photos and those that he can't identify he scans and Emails around through the family hoping someone else can help.

This has been very helpful.

JLRose wrote:However, the crux of the problem really is: When the dusty box is found and opened, will the owner of the picture know who they've found?

That's why you have to start before the prior generation passes away.

I'm hoping someone, sometime will discover a way to link people by computer analysis of facial features. It may involve a deeper understanding of DNA then we have now. But some basic research might be within the grasp of a BYU student.

I can see why the church doesn't do this at NFS (storage costs, content rights and quality isssues etc).

I went through the list of certified apps and sites. Many deal with photos -- you can upload your photo to a separate site, link it with NFS people records and print nice charts etc.

I'd like a service where it will store photos uploaded by others (with a way to verify the identity of the person who uploaded the image) and where those uploaded photos are tagged with NFS people IDs. So when family trees intersect - viola I now have photos from distant relatives I never had before.

Some sites allow you to share your photos with others. I'd be willing to share mine with the world and vice versa, but there needs to be a good way to find them.

The same problems that are mentioned about photos (who has it? where is it? how do we find it?) exist with diaries and journals. I have worked on a site that addresses that issue (the BYU Historic Journals Project at http://journals.byu.edu). The site deals primarily with diaries and journals, but the same solution would apply to photos.

The solution we used is to allow journals to be tagged, but with the new FamilySearch PersonID instead of just a textual representation of peoples' names (many people have the same name). Then when a person logs in, the FamilyTree can be automatically crawled to see who their ancesters are and compare their ancestors' PersonIDs with all of the PersonIDs used in tags. With no effort on the part of the person logging in, they have automatic access to everything that has been tagged about ANY of their ancestors, even if it was written about their ancestors by other people who weren't their ancestors.

There are some commercial companies starting to do PersonID tags with photos I think, but the key is getting all of these searchable in once place, otherwise you have to go search at hundreds of sites (that you may not know about) and that's not a whole lot better than trying to contact hundreds of your distant relatives to see if any of them have photos.

Even if the photos are hosted online in different places, there needs to be a centralized database with all the PersonID that have been tagged that point to the sources so users only have to search in one place. On the journals site, users can add tags to journal "references" even if the journal is somewhere else or not online at all. A similar idea can be applied to photos. Maybe the photo content is hosted at another site, but a reference to the photo (and where it is) should be placed in a well-known central database so users only have to search one place.

-Doug