Please recommend a program that effectively deals with duplicate photos and documents; a program to use for the many photos, sort and ID, with facial recognition software. I am the last member of my family and near 80. I need to get this underway. Thanks so much. I have followed you for many years and appreciate all you do.
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Hi Laurie,
Your question is very complex and I am happy to help because I teach a preservation of personal history class, but I need to know more so I can give you the best guidance.
You are to be commended with preserving your family history!! That is so important and will be something cherished for ever!!
It is can be overwhelming, but think of it as eating an elephant-you do it one bite at a time. So one line of family, one decade etc. Just take it slow and steady and one bite at a time you will eat the elephant (AKA complete the project!!)
What is your end game for the project? Video, a book, a combination of both?
Personally I am not a fan of cloud storage for saving photos to pass them on to the family. Perhaps because I don't have enough evidence that they will be easy to access in the future, especially if it is a password protected site like a Google drive where if you lose the password, the photos are not accessible.
Things like books and CDs and DVDs will normally have a future way to convert when whatever new technology comes out--just like we used to record on tape, then tape went to CD and then CD went to streaming...things got converted--that gives you the best chance of having future preserved and stored safely (copies in separate location for extra protection).
Let's talk about the documents? Are you are trying to compare in Microsoft Word documents but they have different names?
If so, there is a compare feature in Word were you can compare one document to another and it tells you differences between the two if there are any:
www.extendoffice.com/
If they are PDFs you will need the paid version of Adobe Acrobat to do the compare. I have not tried that to know if it is as accurate as the Word compare is.
Now for photos--are you looking for something to actually compare that a photo named ABC with Mom and Dad and you in it is the same as a photo named DEF that is Mom and Dad and You?
There is a pretty detailed article:
that talks about software that do this kind of comparison--maybe someone else will have first hand experience with them, but I am very old fashioned and have learned over the years that the human eye is preferred over a software to compare photos--yes, I understand volume, but hear me out for the why.
This is (to me) important because if you have photos in a digital format--either jpeg or png format, one you want to know what format you want them all in and have them all be consistent format if you are going to use them in a program like Shutterfly or one of the book making software and two you want to know how they were scanned and if one is a better scan quality than another.
What I mean by the latter is for example, my scanner from the early 2000s vs my photo scanner today produced totally different image qualities and if I have a dup photo---one scanned from 2000 and one from today, I want to manually look at them and know that I am picking the 2021 version because the quality is just going to be so much better.
Software may also have issues comparing photos if there are differences between the photos like photo A is really dark and photo B is really light--it may tell you you have two different photos, when it is really one with different light levels.
Back to format and end game for a moment--I am a huge fan of using a good quality photo book to preserve old photos.
They are very expensive to make, but the quality of the books from places like Shutterfly are great for preservation. They are also good for preserving documents (you can turn paper documents into jpeg or pngs and then they can become part of the book also).
As technology evolves, there maybe something better, but this is my today preference.
I am not as familiar with turning items to video, but I know there are a lot of places that do that at a fairly reasonable cost.
I know a place in Pittsburgh that is very good. Not sure where you are but I would think you would have similar services.
Let me know if you need anything else! Blessings on your project!!
You are asking about tasks that, I believe, will take a very sophisticated photography program to do. It seems you are looking for a program that will gather all of your photos/documents in one file, sort them into duplicates, sort and ID (?), then scan with facial recognition and place these in a file (photos may scan many years of each individual?).
If you have a lot of photos/pictures then I would like to suggest that you start slowly and work on one task at a time - maybe use a program that sorts for duplicates so you can decide which picture you would like to keep and then remove the duplicates.
This would narrow the number down considerably and give you an opportunity to decide which pictures to keep and maybe some you do not want and can discard.
I do not believe you can use a program that decides for you which duplicate to keep and which to delete.
This project will most likely take several months to complete but then you will have a much easier task of doing some of the other things you are asking about.
Information:
www.familytreemagazine.com/
freepicturesolutions.com/
I use es file manager. On a browser type es file manager apk download and it does all the work
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