Photo tagging solves these problems. It takes some up-front work to tag all of your photos, but once you discover the power of tagging, you will wonder how you ever survived without it!

What is Photo Tagging?

Photo tagging is the modern equivalent of hand-writing names, places, years, and events on the back of old photos or around the borders of slides. Basically, tagging lets you store this type of information within the file that contains the digital photo.

You can tag any information you want, but standard tags typically include:

• Location (GPS): Where the photo was taken
• Time: When the photo was taken
• Keywords: Anything you want to record about the photo (e.g., people, event, year, place, etc.)
• Caption or Title: Tagline to go along with the photo

Nearly all photo viewing applications will allow some form of basic keyword and caption tagging. The more advanced photo library applications such as Picasa (Google), IPhoto (Apple), Live Photo Gallery (Windows), and Photoshop Elements (Adobe) greatly simplify the process of tagging people by using complex facial recognition technology to scan all the photos in your library and collect together all the faces it believes are of the same person. You just have to accept/reject its suggestions, and it will do the keyword tagging for you. Newer digital cameras and mobile devices will automatically tag location and time into each captured photo.

Why Tag your Digital Photos?

There are two main benefits to tagging:

• Storing key information with the photo: Most photo preview applications let you see the tagged information alongside the photo being viewed. What’s also nice is that when you share the photo with family and friends, they will also see the tagged information. For example, my mother had some great print photos of ancestors going back more than a century, but only she knew who these people were. It was great to preserve this family history by scanning them, tagging the names and family relationships into the photo file, and sharing with my siblings.

• Photo organization and search: Storing your photos in named folders on your computer disk quickly becomes limiting. For example, do you store your family 2010 vacation photos in a vacation folder, in a family folder, or in a year folder? What makes sense today may not make sense a year from now when you are trying to find the photos again.

Once your photos are tagged, you can use powerful computer search tools to find exactly the photos you want, irrespective of where or how they are stored on your computer. For example you can easily create searches such as “Find all the photos from our vacation in Italy” or “Find all the birthday party photos” or “Find just the photos of Susan and David when they were young”. With families now storing thousands or even tens of thousands of digital photos, automatic search becomes essential.

A few last comments about tagging. It takes some up-front work to tag all of your photos so before you embark on tagging your entire photo collection, it pays to do your research and decide what features are most important to you. The features offered by photo library applications vary dramatically in regard to the effort required to create the tags, the quality of automatic facial recognition, whether the tagged information is stored in the application’s database or in each photo file, and the power of their search capabilities. However once you discover the power of tagging, you will wonder how you ever survived without it!

If you only need to scan a small number of photos, then you can do this yourself or use scanning services provided by most local photo print retail outlets. For all other situations, I would recommend using a professional scanning company. They typically scan at higher resolutions (600 dots-per-inch for photos), handle other formats such as slides or negatives, and provide additional services such as image enhancement, photo restoration, and image tagging. The improvement in final image quality is noticeable!

Why Scan?

Scanning your photo and slide collection offers several valuable benefits. Once scanned, you can:

• Protect your photo prints and slides: We all worry that photo prints or slides can be misplaced, damaged beyond repair, or destroyed in a catastrophic event. By having a digital archive of your originals, you have the comfort of knowing your scanned images can be reprinted at any time.

• Restore them back to their former beauty: All color photo prints fade over time and images get washed out. Slides and negatives decay. Loose photos get scratched, bent, or ripped through years of mishandling. Have a close look at some of your older photo prints and you will notice these changes. Professional tools such as Photoshop™ can reverse the years of decay and damage in your originals and make them look as clear and vibrant as the day they were taken.

• Share them with friends and family: If you own a digital camera, you can make your pictures readily accessible through you phones, computers, and televisions. You can also email pictures to friends and family, post them to internet websites, make presents in the form of personalized photo albums, and much, much more. Now you can do the same with your scanned collection!

Scanning Options

Once you decide to scan your photo prints and slides, the next question is “How do I go about scanning them?” You have several options:

• Do it yourself: If you have a scanner or an all-in-one printer, then you can scan your photos yourself. If you do not, then most retail photo print outlets offer basic photo scanning services. Typically, only photos are accepted and no image enhancement or repair services are offered. I’d only suggest this option if you have less than 100 photos, your photos are in good condition, and final scan quality is not that important.

• Use an internet scanning company: If you search the internet, you will find a number of professional scanning companies. They can handle a large number of photos, and most handle non-standard originals such as slides, negatives, or albums. Scan quality is usually good. Most offer image enhancement and restoration services. Some offer image tagging. Prices vary greatly based on website and on services selected. These companies require you to ship your photos and slides to their location, which is often across the country, or across the world to places like India. Turnaround time can be two to four weeks.

• Use Aberscan Imaging: We can handle any number of photos or slides. We also offer great scan quality, image enhancement, restoration, image tagging, and support for non-standard originals. In fact, if it fits on a scanner, we can scan it: letters, scrapbooks, old documents, newspaper clippings, and much, much more. Since we are a local business, you get the comfort of knowing that your precious photos and slides stay close to home. Turnaround time is usually less than two days.