An Interesting Summer Project

This summer I have been going through old photographs and negatives and scanning them into digital files. Anyone who has looked at old photos from their parents and grandparents eras has seen how colors fade and I figured that now that digital memory is priced so reasonably, it would be a good time to preserve as many of my pictures as I could.

Part of this that has been interesting has been putting the pictures into some semblance of order. Part of the metadata that is attached to each photo when it gets digitized is the date and time it was scanned (when you import photos from a digital camera, this data comes from the camera's internal clock, so you know when a picture was taken). Software like Photoshop reads this data as the date and time the photo was shot, and since this is obviously not true, I have been changing this date for each and every photo in my collection. Since I have scanned in something over 1,500 photos, this seems like something of a small mountain to overcome.

Anyway, what I find interesting about this is looking at a picture and trying to remember when it was taken. Most of my pictures start in 1995 when I moved to Japan, so things are broken down into '95-'96 in Toyama, '96-'99 in Gifu, '99-'01 in Kochi, '01-'03 in Syracuse, '03-'06 in Tokyo, and '06-Present in Syracuse again. Mixed in there are trips and vacations that I took to firtually every corner of Japan, Southeast Asia, Hawaii, California, Cleveland, and various other locales and trying to place month and year has been an interesting exercise. Obviously, it has also brought back a ton of memories.

Let's see if I can post a year by year account of my photos here.