Photo Identification - Genealogy Family Crowd Source

mmayrend

Hello Tonfotos Community. I am looking to build a website where my extended family can help me identify the people in older family photos to help build our shared genealogy. It would be like a photo wiki that would also show the metadata information of a photo. It would also have a discussion/comments area where family members can debate and then come to an agreement as to who is in the photo. When the photo is downloaded, the agreed-upon photo identification would be in the metadata. Like writing on the back of the photo. Does anyone know of an application that does this? Any help will be appreciated. Thank you. Michael Mayrend

Andrey

mmayrend I am afraid, I am not aware about anything like that. Even though I think I know every photo management application out there.

mmayrend

Andrey Thank you for the follow-up. Maybe I am overthinking this. Do you know of an online service like FamilySearch.org or a photo organizing app that already exists that has most of these features? Maybe I can request a feature enhancement for their next version. If not, maybe I need to build my own photo wiki and then tie it in with an application like ExifTool.

Andrey

mmayrend Do you know of an online service like FamilySearch.org

Sure, there are few of them. However, I never heard that they would have this feature for collaborative people markup on the photo. If you happen to find it, please share information.

Redstick

I don’t know if this will help, but I have a private website for our Family Photo Album using ‘ZenPhoto’ which allows users to search the albums as well as upload new photos. There is the facility for users to comment on the photos for example to identify individuals, dates, locations etc. Their comments are sent to me (as site admin) and I use ‘IrfanView - Thumbnails’ to edit the metadate, add keywords etc before uploading the updated photo back to the website album.
This can be time consuming (but at 72 I’ve got a lot of time to spare) and it maybe that there are other faster/easier options that I don’t know about.

mmayrend

Redstick Thank you for your follow up. I will look into the software you recommend. It sounds promising. Would you mind if I reached out to ask some follow up questions in a few days?

Michael Mayrend

Redstick

mmayrend I’m always happy to help whenever I can.
By the way I’m also into genealogy using Ancestry and Family Tree Maker and with over 40k people in my tree, I have an ever increasing number of old photos to be identified.

mmayrend

Redstick Hello. Looking at ZenPhoto, it looks a little more involved than my website-building skill level. I am also surprised at the example sites provided on the ZenPhoto website - not very good. Please reach out to me through email, and maybe we can set up a zoom call where you can show me your family photo website. mmayrend@comcast.net. Family photos seem to be the one area where my extended family gets excited about participating in our genealogy/family history.