Making a CD-ROM or DVD Family Photo Album
Introduction
In the process of making this Family Home Page and a comprehensive CD-ROM or DVD Family Photo Album, Murphy has learned several things that could help anyone else who tries to do this.
You may want to print this frame (click anywhere in this area and then click on "Print" on the top menu).
Photo Selection
Which photos should you scan in to your digital photo album? Just a few of your favorites? Every photo you own? Somewhere in between? It depends on what you are trying to accomplish with your photo album. I wanted to preserve nearly all of the photos that I had of my children, things they did, their friends, holidays, activities, events, schools, favorite places, etc.; so that they could share their life with their children and grandchildren. I also wanted to include photos that showed their ancestors: parents, grandparents, etc., as far back as photos were available. This has amounted to over 12,000 photos going into the most recent edition of the Family Photo Album. I looked at every photo I could get my hands on (about 25,000), although I did not include them all. I'm sure the next edition of the photo album (in a few years?) will include more photos and more video. By the way, this project started out to include only a few dozen photos, but was expanded after I saw the potential for sharing and preserving this family heritage record.
Should you include several photos of the same person at a particular event? I did. One of my goals was to capture the personality of the people in the photos. Several different photos showing a person doing different things, having different expressions on their face, etc., is about the best you can do with still photos to capture personality (video is a different story).
Photo Scanning and Capture
When I started the Family Photo Album, I scanned regular-sized photo prints at 300 dpi because computers were slower. But now I routinely scan regular-sized photo prints at 600 dpi because today's computers can handle that. Photos are saved in JPG file format with medium compression (level 4 in Adobe PhotoShop). Scanning in at 600 dpi allows about two to three photos per megabyte of disk space. Wallet-sized photo prints or smaller were scanned at 600 dpi or 1200 dpi to capture detail. I ran across a few postage-stamp-sized photo prints which I scanned in at 1200 dpi (interpolated on my scanners). My general intent was that you should be able to see the twinkle in people's eyes. As computers get faster and larger, you should consider scanning at higher resolution and/or using less compression for even better quality photo representation. I used several flatbed scanners as time progressed for scanning photo prints. Initially my Visioneer PaperPort 6000 ($149 list price) and later my Visioneer One Touch 8600 ($169) did most of the work. On occasion, I also used a Hewlett-Packard Model 4C ($799 list price). It was installed via an internal SCSI card on an office computer. All of these scanners had the capability of 600 dpi optical resolution to give me exceptionally detailed scans when I needed them.
Photo prints on textured paper make for very grainy (blotchy) scans. It is the paper's fault. Because of the additional blotches, compression schemes (such as that used to create JPG format files) don't work efficiently and cause larger file sizes from textured photo paper film scans. But, if the photo is important, just live with the graininess and the larger file sizes.
When early Kodacolor film prints (circa early 1960s and earlier) faded, different colors faded at different rates. This made color correction pretty much impossible. So, resulting attempts ended up with bad colors. But, if the photo is important, just live with the bad colors.
Slides were scanned at a minimum of 1000 x 1500 pixels and saved in JPG file format with medium compression (level 4 in Adobe PhotoShop). This allowed about four to six photos per megabyte of disk. As computers get faster and larger, you should consider scanning at higher resolution and/or using less compression for even better quality photo representation. I used my Hewlett-Packard Photo Smart scanner ($299 list price) for scanning slides. It was installed via an internal SCSI card and was the easiest piece of computer equipment I ever installed, in under five minutes.
Slides need to be brushed and blown off thoroughly before scanning. Otherwise the scan will have a lot of noise (dirt) on it.
Slides that have dark shadow regions sometimes scan in showing a wavy pattern across the dark area. These patterns are not on the original image and are caused by the scanner coming very close to the "noise floor" while trying to pull detail out of the dark shadows. You can darken the shadows of the photo to get rid of the patterns, but that gets rid of some of the things you want to see. The pattern can usually be eliminated by changing the scanning resolution. For example, if the wavy pattern appears at a scan of 250 dpi equivalent, a change to 400 dpi may eliminate the pattern (it is a trial and error process). The image can then be resampled back to your desired resolution.
I looked into saving photos in lossless PNG file format, but at this time only one browser could handle PNG. PNG may be more widespread sometime in the future, but JPG file format is universal now. Every browser (and therefore everybody) can view the JPG color and black and white photos in the Family Photo Album.
High speed film (400 and higher) photos make for very grainy (blotchy) scans. It is the film's fault. Because of the additional blotches, compression schemes (such as that used to create JPG format files) don't work efficiently and cause larger file sizes from high speed film scans. But, if the photo is important, just live with the graininess and the larger file sizes.
Scanners that are attached to your PC by SCSI cards require that you open the PC to install them, and they scan photos very fast. Scanners that are attached to your PC by being plugged into a USB port are easy to install (if you have a USB port and Windows 98 or newer on your PC), and they scan photos very fast. Scanners that are attached to your PC by being plugged into a printer port (sometimes called a parallel port) are easy to install (on any PC), but they scan photos somewhat slowly.
Black and white photo scans (8-bit which is 256 shades of gray) take about one third of the time to scan as color photo scans (24-bit which is 16,700,000 colors) of the same size. Black and white photos that were more brown in color were scanned in as color photos to preserve that old-time look.
If you are using a digital still camera to take photos, I recommend that you capture the photos at the highest resolution allowed by the camera. My Sony DSC-P9 was a 4- megapixel camera with a best photo resolution of 2272 by 1704 pixels (equivalent to scanning a 4x6 inch photo at about 380 dpi). It could save photos in JPG format with superb quality by not using much compression resulting in an average file size of 1.8 MB per photo. These Sony DSC-P9 photos where of high enough quality to be printed in sizes up to 8 by 12 inches. Yes, high resolution photos take a lot of disk space and load up a little slow today ... but in one or two years they will be fast and disk space will continue to cheaply grow.
Photo Scan Editing
Many times the photos you have are not of professional quality (can you believe it). A photo may be too dark, too light, faded, too much contrast, or not enough contrast. These things and more can usually be fixed with software (programs). Sometimes, you will find that if you lighten a dark part of a photo to see it better, another part of the photo now looks too light. What should you do? This dilemma can occur no matter what kind of photo editing you are doing. The solution is simple. Decide what is the most important part of that photo (many times it is the people's faces), make that part of the photo look good, and just live with the way the rest of the photo looks.
On occasion, it is preferable to leave scratches and speckles on a photo. Every photo editing program has filters to remove these. But, the filters tend to take away photo sharpness/details. You must decide what is more important, preserving the photo's sharpness/details or making it look prettier. I wanted to preserve the sharpness/details of each photo as best I could, so you will see that for the most part I left the scratches and speckles.
Adobe Photoshop ($700 list price) is a phenomenal program for cropping and cleaning up the photos after scanning. Jasc Paint Shop Pro ($100 list price) is a good program for cropping and cleaning up the photos after scanning. My older version of Paint Shop Pro does not have the automatic color and brightness and contrast correction that makes Photoshop so phenomenal. Photoshop's automatic correction (menu: Image, Adjust, Levels, Auto) keys on white areas in a photo, adjusts the white to really be white, and then adjusts the other colors the same way. If there are no white areas in a photo, you must manually correct it (menu: Image, Adjust, Levels, move sliders under histogram). I usually adjust all of the photos from one event at one sitting. If they were taken by the same photographer with the same camera, the adjustments to all photos are usually similar. Paint Shop Pro does have a few features that allow easier vector overlays, photo compositing, and format conversion. So I used both of these programs for the photos in this photo album.
If you have scanned in a photo from a newspaper, photocopy, or other printed source, you will notice dots on the photo if you look at it closely. This is called half-screen and is a product of the printing or copying method. If left on the photo, viewers will see a moiré pattern (looks like a distracting grid overlaying the photo) that results from an aliasing effect between the monitor screen pixels and the photo half-screen. Most scanner software have a de-screening feature to remove the half-screen effect. Most de-screening software does a poor job of removing the half-screen effect. I found the most effective approach was to scan the photo at around the optical resolution of my scanner (600 dpi for my Visioneer PaperPort 6000) and then apply a blurring filter (I used Gaussian Blur in Adobe Photoshop with between one to two pixels radius). Then I resized the photo to a smaller size (50% to 80% of the scanned size). Occasionally, the photo would need to be sharpened after that.
From time to time, I needed a very specialized effect for a photo (animated gif, morphing, etc.). Where that happened, I listed (in that photo's chapter) the name of the particular graphics program used to create that effect.
Video Selection
Video is great for bringing out more of people's personalities; far better than still photos. Home video can contain some good footage. However, most home video is of throw-away quality or worse. I used the following criteria for selecting which videos or parts of videos to include in the Family Photo Album:
Video Capture
I had three sources for the videos included in the Family Photo Album:
To capture video from video tapes, I used a Premium Dell Movie Studio Bundle which included a Dazzle capture device attached to a dedicated PCI card in my PC and used MGI VideoWave 4 as the capturing software. The Dazzle accepted input from a VCR or video camera using RCA jacks and/or a S-Video jack. MGI VideoWave 4 saved the captured video in AVI format. AVI files are LARGE and take a lot of hard disk space. Each hour of AVI video takes about 11.5 GB of disk space. MGI VideoWave 4 is smart enough to realize that Windows XP (the latest PC operating system at this time) has a file size limitation of 4 GB. If the video is long, MGI VideoWave 4 automatically creates a series of 4-GB sequential videos that will edit into one seamless video that can be stored in a smaller, more disk-efficient format like MPEG.
To capture digital video, I simply plugged my digital camera to any USB port of my PC. Windows XP automatically recognized the digital camera as a removable disk. Then video could be easily cut and pasted from the camera to the PC. Most earlier versions of Windows requires you to install a software driver supplied by the camera manufacturer before the PC would be able to automatically recognize the digital camera as a removable disk.
The Internet has a significant amount of video footage for viewing and download; and some of it is pertinent to our family history. Occasionally it was easy to right click on the video link and save the video file to disk. Other times the link went to an intermediate link which had to be downloaded and edited into a separate web page in order to download the video file to disk (this required significant web site editing knowledge and skill). Some videos or photos or music downloaded from the Internet are in the public domain. However, most videos or photos or music downloaded from the Internet has a copyright that belongs to someone else. That copyright should be respected. The Fair Use doctrine provided by the laws of the United States (Title 17, U.S. Code, Section 107) allows use of copyrighted work when it is used in selected non-profit ways with limited distribution (like in the Family Photo Album).
Video Editing
The key to efficient video editing is using a PC or Mac with the fastest processor, maximum memory, and largest storage available. I did not consider doing any video capture or editing until I had a 2.4 GHz Pentium-4 PC with 500 GB (yes, half of a terabyte) of hard disk storage.
I used MGI VideoWave 4 as my video editing package. It was included with the Premium Dell Movie Studio Bundle that I bought with my PC. It is good basic software that allowed me to:
I always try to select an output resolution and frame rate equal to the original captured video. Some of the output files could be LARGE. For example, an MPEG-1 video at 320 by 240 pixels and 25 frames per second (same resolution and frame rate that my Sony DSC-P9 digital camera captures) takes about 20 MB of disk space.
I also output another copy of each edited video at TV resolution (usually MPEG-2 format) for later inclusion on a DVD (a family video compilation) that could be played and viewed on a home theater or PC. I use MyDVD software to set up and burn DVDs on my Philips D01 DVD+RW and CD-RW combination burner.
Chapter Authoring (Web Page Building)
The individual chapters in this photo album were created in web page (HTML) format using Netscape Composer version 4.xx, part of Netscape Communicator. Composer is easy to learn and is a good web page authoring tool. The entire Netscape Communicator suite can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.netscape.com. But, it is a fairly large download which will take about an hour and a half over a phone line.
The two-frame page with the general navigation menu on the left and the chapter listing on the right was created using Microsoft FrontPage ($140 list price). FrontPage is a powerful, sometimes too powerful, web authoring and management tool.
I picked web page (HTML) format to present the Family Photo Album because of the tremendous inertia of the Internet. Almost every computer has at least one web browser or other software which can read this album. This will probably be the case for many, many years to come. But, sometime in the future, web page (HTML) format will become obsolete. To preserve this Family Photo Album, someone will have to copy it to the next popular format.
I specified each photo size in each web page so that each photo and it's caption typically completely fit in the browser display area when the screen resolution was set to 1024x768 (with large fonts). For landscape photos the horizontal size was kept constant so that the vertical size was somewhere between 400 and 460 pixels. For portrait and square photos the vertical size was set at 520 pixels. I tried for a professional look with photo sizes being as constant as possible on the page. Remember that each photo has a lot more detail than you can fit on a monitor screen. That detail will be appreciated by someone wanting to get a closer look at a photo and by future generations who will certainly use larger monitor resolutions.
The Family Photo Album contains some newspaper, magazine, or book articles which document family involvement in their communities (and some deaths). Of course, any photos associated with the article were scanned in as images. I debated whether to scan the article body (words) as a image (to preserve its historical accuracy) or to include it as words in the document (to allow searches of the printed subject matter). I ended up doing some as images (where showing history was my main intent), some as words in the document (where I felt that people would want to search on the names or topics in the printed matter), and some as both (where I felt both were important).
Everything Has It's Place (Web Management)
Keeping track of and organizing thousands of photo scans and hundreds of chapters of family history is easy if you have a system. I ended up storing each chapter (web page) in its own directory (folder) along with the photos that went with that chapter. I made up a naming convention that kept short file names, and still allowed me to find things. I wasn't entirely consistent, but web pages were usually named nnn-myy.html and photos were usually named nnnyyn-x.jpg where nnn was an abbreviation of the subject, m was the first or last letter of the month, yy was the year, and x was a number (1-9) or letter (a-z) sequence. If I had been smarter (like what I did starting 1999) I would have put the year first as part of the file and folder names and then I could easily sort on the year.
You can use any organizational scheme you wish. But you should have it in place as you start your project. Renaming and relinking tens of thousands of photos within a few thousand web pages would take the rest of your life.
If you decide to use a web management program such as Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe Pagemill, the program will keep track of everything for you automatically (although I haven't check the limits of these programs).
In any case, make sure that the directories (folders) that contain the chapters and photos are themselves located within a directory (called "web" or "album" or something). Windows and other DOS-based operating systems only allow a small number of directories within the root directory, but allow an unlimited number of directories within another directory.
Storage Media
What storage medium should you store your digital photo album on? It depends. If you only have a few photos, a diskette (1.44 MB) or Zip drive (100 MB) may suffice; although in recent times these drives are less and less available. So, you need to keep in mind who will be viewing your photo album and the type of media they can read.
I built the first version of the Family Photo Album on a 2 GB partition of my hard drive, later expanded to a 7.5 GB partition, and later expanded to a 120 GB partition. Initially CD-ROM was selected as the medium on which to distribute it to the family, because during early 1999, when I started to distribute the Family Photo Album to my family, nearly everyone who owned a computer had a CD-ROM drive. A CD-ROM holds up to 700 MB. This required that the photo album (currently about 3.7 GB in size) be spread across more than one CD-ROM. I now have the ability to distribute the Family Photo Album on DVD+RW (4.7 GB). But at this time only a hand full of people have them on their computers and the DVD format is still undergoing some change.
I also put a small subset of this photo album on a (free) Internet server. For the Internet version (http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Ranch/7764), photos were resampled to poorer resolution (about 260 x 400 pixels) to keep them under 30 KB size for faster downloading over a phone line. I also removed last names (after the year 1900) and locations (after about 1960) from the photo descriptions for privacy reasons. The main advantage of the Internet photo album is in its quick availability. Just a couple of hours after an event, photos can be posted for everyone in the family to see. After the photos are posted, family members can be alerted by e-mail.
Sometime in the future, CD-ROM and DVD will become obsolete. To preserve the Family Photo Album, someone will have to copy it to the next popular digital storage medium.
Last updated September 1, 2002, by Murphy.