Putting descriptions on photos stored digitally

[rita68]

I came across some photo albums I'd made more than 25 years ago in the loft and found that luckily, I'd handwritten all the names of the people in the photos underneath the photos, because if I hadn't I would never have remembered them.

It got me thinking about all the digital photos I'm now storing, just on a series of memory cards, and I wondered if anyone knows how I can add descriptions to them, and names of the people, just like in a normal photo album?

I realise that while I think I might remember who the people are, or where they were taken, the reality is that 25 years on, I might not, and I really want to sort that out if I can.

Thank you if you have any advice.

If you are storing them just as basic files, I think the best you can do is use very short but descriptive filenames. A better bet may be to put them onto flickr or google photos which are much more like virtual photo albums, and you can add as much information as you want to each photo and search for them on the basis of that information.

Either way, I'd suggest you get them backed up somehow, memory cards do fail/degrade.

Goodness, thank you, I didn't realise that memory cards weren't safe. If I store them on Flickr or Google photos, are they still in the same format as when I took them? Not smaller, or somehow not as many pixels or something? Thank you so much for replying.

All image files have meta data. If you want to tag the photo's with information about them you should do it there. that way they will stay with the photo for ever. where ever you save them. And although google and flickr are ok places to store them they are not back up services and they state this explicitly as i have seem members account disappear over night for various reasons and a whole lot of upset happens.

If you are tech savvy then i would recommend using this tool.
www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

Its amazing i use it all the time to rename all my photo's to the date|time|second they were taken and the auto store them.

You can use this to create a metadata tag with your description.

Does that work on iPads camera roll? I know what you mean about not remembering when or who the photos are of.

Re your question about Flickr, Flickr uploads the original uncompressed version of your photo. 12thmonkey is correct when she highlights the risk of your Flickr account "disappearing", which is the risk for all cloud accounts, however, you can minimise the risk by also backing up to an external hard drive. I use both for my photos. Flickr is free and external hard drives are relatively inexpensive these days. Microsoft's free photo software called Photo Gallery allows you to add tags to your photos and you can then copy the photos to the external drive complete with tags.