I love to add photos to my RM tree whenever possible. For some of my distant ancestors the act of identifying people or places in the photo can be as simple as reading the back of the photo or asking a relative. In some cases it takes some serious detective work. This identification is the ‘proofing’ that connects a real person with an image.
In many cases my photos are attached to the person while some are attached to a custom fact called ‘GroupPhoto’.
My question is how and where are you documenting the ‘proofing’ of that image to the person?
Is it different for a photo attached to the person versus a photo attached to a fact?
Not exactly understanding and this may not answer your question – Family or group photo can be linked to multiple people. As for Proofing not sure of your meaning in this context
What I mean is, how do you validate that the person in the photo is who you say it is. For example, is it personal knowledge, identified by another person, or note on back of photo. And then where do you document this information
In RM, I really don’t. I do add it to the photo tags so the info is stored in the picture file. Just be aware that sometimes this metadata gets stripped out, for example, loading the picture to places like Facebook.
I downloaded photos of an ancestor, his home, and businesses from a public library collection. Family photos had been added as well. (He was the town’s founder.) I added a “photo” fact and entered all the information from the collection regarding each photo.
I note that the people were identified by the names on the back of photo. If you know who wrote the names, I’d add them too (they may not be in pic but maybe took it)
I have a newspaper clipping photo of 50th anniversary of a couple with their nine children. Everyone was named in the photo. I had to edit with numbers so faces matched names.
This is my pet peeve.
For every photo attached to a person, I add a custom Photo fact.
The fact’s date is the date the photo was taken, the fact place is where the photo was taken.
I attach the photo to the photo fact.
I attach a source citation to the photo fact. The source citation also has the photo attached, both the original and any derivative versions- cropped, enhanced, labeled.
The source may be an identity document, government ID, obituary, or a reference to a person who provided the identification (proofing info) and photo origination information. That may be a link to a public tree where I downloaded the photo (this would be a secondary source, at best).
I’d love to participate in a discussion regarding the proofing issue.
OK, so you are little more advanced than me. I do have some photo facts but I also have photos just attached to the person (ie. different profile pictures). I can see that adding a source for the photo facts is a piece I am missing and that makes a lot of sense. I’m not sure I want to create photo facts for all the profile pictures. What I would like to see is some more fields in the edit media screen that allows us to enter details such as where the photo came from and what evidence confirms the subjects of the photo. If this info was attached to the photo it would be available wherever we wanted to attach it without having to create a fact.
I very much disagree with this. This is a genealogy program, not an image editor. There are a number of editors, some free, that are designed for editing/entering metadata, whatever the flavor…such as EXIF etc.
What Rootsmagic should reasonably do is read said data if it exists and display that data accordingly. I believe there is a competing package that does have that ability baked in so other than time constraints development wise, there really isn’t a reason not to be able to do it in RM. I also think it would be useful if RM could use the included metadata to generate captions.
I would agree that RM using the EXIF metadata if it exists would be preferable. The only thing I’d like RM to do is update the Caption portion of the metadata if it’s updated in media. You could use any number of tools to “proof” the photos outside RM and update the Caption, then RM could refresh the caption in the database while regenerating thumbnails or similar activity.
Personally I draw outlines of those photos on a piece of paper and enter numbers where the outline heads are. Then add a ‘key’ showing “#1 = Fred Bloggs” etc. Then scan that and save it as the same name as the photo plus “_key”. Then just upload that. Bit 20th century but works for me. You could of course add information from ‘Freda Bloggs’, or whoever.
All people I have online are family photos that have been confirmed by my family and my relatives. I also add to the front of the photo in a blank area the name and birth and death dates. There are some that I have obtained online that I have checked out from further online persons but I have used few of them. It can also give a bad credibility to a photo if I see it being used many times by others who when you look at their tree and have added little more details of the person who was photographed. The rest is chance and in those cases best left alone