photographs – Pete's Blog

Most of us take thousands of photos each year with our phones. It is a long way from when I was growing up and I had a very old camera that only took black and white film. Each photograph was carefully chosen and then I had to wait till the film was used up before taking it to a chemist and waiting a couple of weeks to find out if any of the pictures had come out, or if they were out of focus or had my finger in front of the lens.

I have mentioned before that I like to study family history, and one of the challenges I have found is old photographs. My cousin Pat and I have lots of old pictures of family but most of them have no names and we struggle to work out who they are. The best we can do is to try to look for matches. For instance, I think that this photograph is my great great aunt Elizabeth Capener.

But Pat has this photo about 30 years later. Is it the same person?

For a long time I have worried that the massive photo collections we now have will be even harder to collate once we are gone. Photos are no longer special to us so although they have many meta tags on things like place and time, they don’t know who the people are.

I downloaded IOS 26 on my iPhone this week, and it is full of the latest AI tools. It can turn any photograph into a 3D image. It can create panoramas by merging photos. And it has the security of really good facial recognition. So the technology for matching faces is out there. But without being a professional developer I have not found an app that does it for me. Is there one?

Either way, such tools are coming, and I think that family historians will have an easier time in future. Or maybe we will simply be redundant when a bot just does all the work for us.

Anyway, are these photos Elizabeth? What do you think?

EDIT I have just used ChatGPT and it has done an incredible job matching the photos, pointing out things like the left eyelids being slightly droopy and the deep set eyes with identical spacing. They are likely to be the same person. Hello great great aunt Elizabeth!

I was looking back at some old photos albums this week of my student days in the 1980s. The world of photography was very different in those days. Digital cameras did not exist, and instead I would take maybe 30 pictures in a year using my film camera. I did not know whether they had been any good till I used up a film, and sent it off to be processed. A week or so later, I would get my pictures back, throw away the rubbish ones and put the others in an album. Every photograph was precious.

These days I take maybe a thousand pictures a year on my phone. I often take five or six of the same thing, so that I can choose the best. Because there are so many, they are no longer special. Maybe an interesting one will pop up on a screen saver on my TV, but more often than not, they are looked at briefly and then forgotten.

For many years I tried to manage this situation by choosing my favourite pictures each year and getting them printed off to go in an album, But I realised this week that the last time I did that was 2018.

So I am faced with a conundrum. Should I get some pictures printed off as I did before? Should I find some other way of curating the large numbers into a manageable selection. Or should I just accept that photographs are no longer special, and treat them as a throwaway commodity.

What do you think?

This week I have been a genealogist. Several years ago I built up my family tree with the aid of the Genes Reunited website, stories from older relatives and lots of censuses, birth, wedding and death certificates, together with visits to graveyards and old houses.

I have not kept the tree up to date and decided to transfer it to the Ancestry.co.uk website, so there was quite a lot of work to do. I also recently received a number of old photographs – one pile from an old tin chest in my Mum’s loft, that turned out to contain all the papers left to my Dad when his parents died; one pile from my Mum’s cousin, who’s own mother recently passed away; and one pile from my wife’s aunt, who’s husband died last year.

It has been time consuming and a little bit obsessive. At one point my wife instructed me in no uncertain terms that I needed to come down for dinner, because I had been sitting in my study for over 12 hours without a break. But it has also been both rewarding and a little sad. Rewarding because I really find it exciting to find our new things and to connect with the past. If you have watched “Who Do You Think You Are?” You will know the experience. But what has been sad is finding quite a few photographs where I can’t identify the people. I have pictures that have been kept carefully for over a hundred years, but where everyone who could have identify them has now gone. Here are a few examples:

Some of my relatives – but who are they?

So this week, I have one request. If you have pictures or papers from the past, please annotate them on the back with the names of people involved. Please use real names, not things like “Grannie and my Uncle”. By doing so, future genealogists like me will be able to connect faces to names, and keep them alive in memories. Do it this weekend.

Tag: photographs

How do I find pictures of ancestors?

Do I need physical photographs?

How far back does your family tree go?