tagging individuals in a group photo
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I have a suitcase full of family photos, but most are groups. Are there any known plans to allow an individual in a group photo to be identified. - a little like you can tag individuals in a group photo on facebook. It seems that adding old family photos to the datbase is not that much use if you can't identify the individuals in the picture and call up information about them.
If there are not plans to do this, can anyone recommend software (apart from the privacy invading facebook) that would accomodate this feature? maybe it can already be done, and if it can someone tell me how?
Alistair
If you search these forums, you'll find a couple of previous threads on this subject, as well as an RFE. The short answer is, unless you intend to be the developer or find someone else to do it, its very unlikely that this feature will be added anytime soon.
-Stephen
Thanks Stephen,
Unfortunately I'm not a developer. I am surprised however that there is not more interest in this. I can think of nothing more enticing to get extended family nembers involved in a family history project than being able to see and identify their forebears.
To be able to look at a persons record and then be able to follow links to photos where thay have been identified would be wonderful.
The technolgy exists.. must be someone who could do it!
Alistair,
Although tagging individuals in group photos might be a good idea, I see it as more work at the data entry level in PGV. The reason is that I use the IPTC metadata to add descriptions to all of my images, not just the ones I have uploaded into PGV. I then simply copy and paste this description into the note field when I add the media object to PGV. An example of this could be:
Family Group Christmas 1917. L to R Tom, Dick, Harry etc.
If you would like to, you could add a link to each persons personal entry in the media Note, by including the link after their name. For example:
John Doe http://yourwebaddress/individual.php?pid=Ixxxx&ged=yourgedcomfile.ged
I have done this in a live example for you. See here:
http://stuart.scss.dyndns.info/FamilyTree/mediaviewer.php?mid=M478
This is only an example to show you what can be done. I don't normally do this as it looks bad in the note and the links to the various people are already provided on the media entry.
Stuart
Alistair
Like Stuart, we handle media differently with each one, depending on its content, number of people and other factors. Here's an example where we included the listing in the photo and then used PGV to link to all the INDI's
http://www.myarnolds.com/mediaviewer.php?mid=M1243&ged=Arnold.ged
I think you overrate the ease to tag and need to do so in PGV. There are very few photos of our ancestors where there are a large number of participants known, where tagging might be a nice feature. PGV was never designed to be a media-handling piece of software, but more a nice add-on. We have over 3,000 media objects and most are documents, certificates and a few older photos.
-Stephen
Thanks guys..
Here's my position. I'm not currently a PGV user, so while I sort of understand what you are saying it all looks rather complicated. I started with some genealogy software some years ago but it proved rather inadequate. It was abandoned. I love the idea of PGV being a internet project that I can set up now for future generations of our family to use.
In my case my parents (now deceased) were sat down and asked about who was in the photos and their answers written on the back. There are lots of group photos with multiple family members in them.
But even in the case of certificates… they are still images and could be tagged in the same way. Take for instance your average marriage certificate. They usually contain the names of numerous ancestors - either as parents, witnesses and of course the brave couple themselves. In that same way as a photo could be tagged, the names on these certificates could be tagged and linked back to a persons entry in the db.
Imagine then going to a persons entry and being able to see links to all the photos, certificates and other scanned images where they are listed.
Further… we now live in a very digital age. Future generations will have heaps of images of themselves and relatives which will need some way of being recorded. Using the facebook example, you simply draw a box around the face (or maybe a name on a certificate) type in a name (it allows you to browse your listed friends) and then he link is automatically established.
While PGV may never have been originally designed to be a media-handling piece of software, it's hard to ignore the fact that todays' and future generations are very media driven.
when you think of the advatntages of being able to tag and link parts of ANY document, - be it a photo, certificate, award (or even a letter like the one i have written by my father to my grandfather asking for permission to marry his daughter), the possibilities for creating an interesting and more complete picture of anancestors life is enourmous.
In short, my opinion is that PGV needs to be able to handle media much better than it does at present.
Drupal would be one way to go. It has very powerful tagging capabilities, very good privacy and security controls and a wide array of options for images and galleries. I use Drupal as my CMS for albums, histories, document collections, forums and user engagement. Unfortunately PGV doesn't integrate with Drupal at all and I can only use it (PGV) as an unintegrated side application.
My preferred future direction for PGV would be to turn it into a plugin for the major CMSs which would immediately open a huge array of functionality like this which is non-core for PGV but which is attractive to the widest user-base. Such an approach would greatly lessen the demands on PGV for non-genealogy features but In return it would expose PGV to a wider community of developers and require stricter disciplines for architecture, security and testing. This sounds to me like a very good bargain.
Like Stuart I also use IPTC captions which Drupal and PGV can automatically pick up and display as descriptions. But it is not so easy to get user input without the features of a good CMS.
alistairs - You have hit one of the reasons that earlier on in the life of PGV I was looking to port the 'gedcom' handling side of things into bitweaver. Media handling and even writing up historic information is not necessarily directly related to a single individual. I wanted to be able to link up in exactly the way you describe. Documents would have a searchable electronic copy stored, something that bitweaver already handles, along with a history of changes to that electronic view. Currently I can only add searchable description of the pictures, but that is better than nothing.
Needless to say, the actual development work is still lagging behind, in part due to the rather fundamental changes at the PGV end of things, Tagging certificates in the way you describe was exactly what I was looking to do 5+ years ago … and no doubt now Facebook will be patenting it as a new idea ;)
Alistair,
I regret wasting my time trying to help you when you aren't a PGV User. I think that you should have said this at the outset and I wouldn't have wasted my time trying to help.
Stuart
There is already an open feature request for this
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2643075&group_id=55456&atid=477082
IIRC there is another one, which requests a particular package that stores the tagged info in the EXIF headers. Obviously, this is only for JPEGs.
Stuart
Sorry you feel that way. The thing is that I want to be a GPV user, The program looks great. I have in fact been looking at it on and off for the past few years, hoping that I would one day be able to get the features i am looking for.
I'm simply doing due diligence before I spend many many hours entering information. As I pointed out, I've been down that road before.
You haven't wasted your time at all. I've followed the link you provided and it has helped me enormously seeing your site and the way GPV has been used to track your family history.
The very high probability is that I will use GPV. I've already set up the software but have yet to start entering data. I just wanted to ask the question, and then maybe inspire someone to see the usefulness of a tagging capability and write it into the software.
As you can see, I'm not the only one who would like to see a feature like this.
i appreciate the help you have been.
OK I've been scanning around for suitable javascript to help actually do this. Only found TagHim and OpenEyes so far, and both of them are chargable software. Anybody have any other possible candidates?
Maybe http://www.sanisoft.com/blog/2009/01/23/img-notes-v02-a-couple-of-bug-fixes-and-some-more/ if it's ok to use jQuery ?
Thanks for that one … http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/index.php?page=Image+Tagging+Software
The djpate one looks nice as it gives a list of tags attached to the picture which you can then edit.
I've got something to play with now ;)
You can easily extract the information from "img notes" as well
$(notes).each(function(k,v) { console.log(k,v.x1, v.y1, v.height, v.width, v.note); });Alistair,
I think I had the same problem as you describe. I needed to add lots of pictures to my PGV-based web site but looked for some add on software to do it. I was close to using gallery3 since it is server based and has a very good search capability. But, in the end I used Jalbum, a client solution but one that met most of my needs.
Rob
encouraging to see that there might be some solutions to this requiremnt.
Whatever the answer, it would need to be sufficiently tied into PGV that it could be used by every user and not just the administrator. All the members need to be able to upload and tag their own photos and documents fairly seemlessly. - And have them link back to entries in the PGV database
It looks like some of you may know enough about the code that you take it on as a project :)
Alistair
Users already have difficulty simply uploading and every media item (despite hours of training) requires file renaming, title enhancement, proper filing, GEDCOM level adjustments (general or event, like BURI-TOMB or MARR photo and reassociation with the INDI-ID's pictured. I can't fathom allowing my 300+ users to upload media willy-nilly and tag them to their hearts content. Truly unmanageable in PGV and I, for one, would be vehemently opposed to such a plan.
-Stephen
<< Truly unmanageable in PGV and I, for one, would be vehemently opposed to such a plan. >>
This one of the reasons that making systems modular and only allowing access to users at the level of their competence makes a lot of sense. Bitweaver was originally forked from Tikiwiki for similar sorts of reasons. developers were adding lots of new stuff, but there was no way to 'pick and mix'. Bitweaver allows you to select which modules you want and only load those. I am still hoping to make PGV one of the modules I can load …
I now HAVE a working shell of an image tagging package working with bitweaver, but need to work out how to select-ably allow the inclusion of those images into other content. The templated structure of bw means that I CAN select a different template when displaying an image … something that is going to be difficult to manage in PGV.
A move to split display from code in PGV should probably be a higher priority, and then features like this would be easier to handle. Themeing would then also be a little easier.
I don't bother with any of that tagging stuff - I just list the group members in the Notes that can be attached to any media object.
I normally take a crop of each indivudal (often this is the only photo I have of them), and attach both the crop and the group shot to the person.
When I have a group photo, I crop out each face and associate that face with the person's PGV ID. But unlike Greg, I only associate the big group photo itself with the primary family. Say it's a Smith reunion, then the old Smith couple get the photo on their family page.
I would love to be able to use the group photo and to tag on it the individuals for their main photos. Users seem to be able to do it in Facebook, geni, MyHeritage and Picasa, so why not also on the PGV site?
I have bunches of 'new' pictures that wait to be downsized, cropped, uploaded and linked.
This feature is something I have been hoping for.
All my main photo thumbnails are 100x120 pixels. I need to be able to define the tagged thumbnail size.