The Family Photo History Project

The Family Photo History Project was created by Joe Borsche of Borsche Digital, LLC as a way to sorganize, save, share and protect/preserve the family photo albums.

This project was started in 2003 when one of my aunts passed away. After the funeral I saw this great photo album she had given to her daughter that included pictures of my parents and my other aunts and uncles. At this point I realized that I wanted a copy of many of the pictures and that my other cousins might also want copies of some of the pictures. This was the start of what would become the Family Photo History Project today.

With my background in computer programming and web application development I decided to create a password protected family web site to host these pictures and the many more that I was able to get. There is a database of information that goes with the pictures. For each picture there is a full set of information fields that can be entered. This information is stored in the database and will display with each picture on the web site.

These fields include:

• Date the picture was taken.
• Names of the people in the picture.
• Notes that were written on the picture.
• Other information: Location, Occasion, Event or Story about the picture.
• Type of original picture: print, slide or digital.
• The name of the family member that has or had the original.
• Additional keywords or keyword phrases to help locate picture with the search function.

The decision was made to organize the pictures by family. I started with an album of my grandparents. The family album (my grandparents) contained all the pictures I could find of them and their children. To keep albums from getting too big a new family album was started for each of their children when they got married and/or started their own households. As a result family albums were defined as parents and their children living at home. This worked great for a long time and is still my preferred way to define a family album.

I have encountered several photo albums over the years that contain a specific subject, such as the pictures from my father during World War II, or the pictures from my time spend in the US Army. There were enough pictures in these albums to justify creating separate albums for these topics. As a result the term “Family Album” now can mean any logical collection of pictures.

Because pictures of any given person could be in several different family albums, I created a search function to help locate pictures. The search function can locate all of the pictures that contain the keywords or names requested. This is why it is important to enter as much information as possible about each picture.

Having gone through thousands of pictures over the years my biggest complaints have been:

• No names or dates with the pictures
• If there was a name it was “grandma”, who’s grandma? which generation?
• Just a first name “Mike”, Mike who?

Because of this I strongly encourage everyone I talk with to always put the full name of each person in the picture with any picture they have. I also like to see the names be each persons name at the time the picture was taken, so for a woman you will know if it was before or after they were married (and maybe which husband).

When I started adding my wife’s family I realized that they did not need access to update information about the pictures of my parents and other family members. This lead to the creation of different levels of access to the family albums. Each person that is given login access can be set up with one of three access levels for each album, None, View, or Update. This allows the Family Administrator to control who can see and update the pictures in the Family Albums.

Over the years of working on this I have given access to many other family members to add the pictures that they have and to help by adding information about the pictures already loaded. They have been very helpful in getting the correct names and dates on the picture I have found and uploaded.

Over the years this family project has grown and I realized that there was a need to make this into a product for others to save, protect and share their family photographic history. During 2011 I spend a lot of time turning this family project into the Family Photo History Project.

I hope the Family Photo History Project can be as valuable to you as it has been to me.

Creating a Family Photo History can seem like an overwhelming project and the longer you wait the bigger it will become. I always ask people the question: “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer: “One bite at a time”. For this project like any other larger project start small. I suggest setting a goal of five to ten photo album pages a week. Before long the project will not seem so big.

Since you may was to create a collection of pictures that are contained in several family albums I created the Personal or Virtual Album. Each user can create one or more of these albums by selecting picture to include from any of the Family Albums that they have access to.

Since two of the goals of the Family Photo History Project is to "share" and "protect" the pictures each family member will be able to download individual pictures or complete albums to their computer. Once downloaded the pictures can be printed, made into a slide show or just copied to CD as a backup. So now all members of the family can have copies of the pictures they want.

Future goals include the ability to get printed photo albums based on the personal albums created by family members. I am looking to have two types of printed photo albums available. A hard cover bound photo album the looks like a book and a spiral bound album.

If you have any questions about the Family Photo History Project please contact us by phone or email.

Joe Borsche
Borsche Digital, LLC
630-310-8612