Can't you use your photo program to add a label using the text function? I'd make the canvas size a bit larger than the photo, place the photo at the top of the canvas, the write the caption on the blank canvas below. Then it would print as part of the picture.

What am I adding a label to - directly to the photo itself? I've never heard of that nor do I think I want my master photo imprinted on.

"I'd make the canvas size a bit larger than the photo, place the photo at the top of the canvas, the write the caption on the blank canvas below. Then it would print as part of the picture."

This is all greek to me. I'm having my photos printed by ofoto.com - not doing it at home. I find home printing is too costly, nor is my printer of photo quality that I'd like to save.

Here's what it would look like. You can always crop the label to return to a picture without label.

{{!gwi}}

That's real cute, but then doesn't this mean I'd have to print my own photos (1000+ of them) & then they also won't fit in an album that accomodates 4x6 photos, which is what I've been using. Lastly I have no idea how to go about doing this. I don't THINK my Kodak Easyshare software has this feature.

Michie

There are ways to make this work (i.e., make the canvas 4x6 and the picture a little bit smaller to allow for the caption. If you like, you could even just put the caption on the picture and print through whatever service you're using.

I would presume that your photo editing program can do this - as can all the programs I've used - but if it seems like too much trouble, I'm sure you'll come up with something else.

My suggestion would be to use Ofoto for your albums and add the captions on the website. Since they began offering their photo books, I've been organizing my pictures on their site, dropping them into albums a few at a time, captioning them and having them sent to me. They are around $30 a book for 20 pages, there's a small fee for additional pages, but usually I have some sort of coupon. I find that 3-4 albums a year are sufficient and I've been getting duplicates of a few albums for my in-laws. I also like that I have no extraneous photos to store in boxes and all the albums are the same size.

Joann's idea would work nicely too, if you are committed to a particular album already.

I did ck out my Kodak Easy software & no it cannot do this, plus as I said even if it could it would not fit into my albums, but I think it's a great idea. What kind of album do you use to accomodate these canvases? Maybe it's time for me to consider something else, although I guess you print these on your own too & again I don't think the photos printed at home are of the same quality & with photo paper & ink they run so much more costly.

I do LOVE the ofoto photo books from what i can see. Not sure how easy they are to do but my biggest concern is that it many run into many albums aka too much $ since I have about 1000 photos.

Michie

I rarely print photos. I send CD's for people to watch on their computers, or we connect the camera to the television or computer and watch them.

If I do print them, I adjust the size so that it will fit on a 4x6 photo.

I haven't gotten much further in this area either although they're much better organized in my computer & I WILL use ofoto to do the albums for the current photos. I did buy one of those photo boxes with tabs so when I start printing things out I can organize them by date until they are ready to be put into albums.

I had allot of projects to tackle at the beginng of the year (paperwork - another story). Now that I'm done with most of that I can go back to concentrating on the photos.

Michie

wow, Michiei--so many updates! How neat to hear all the follow-up you've done. We don't always get to hear the second, third, and final chapters, so this is fun.

You're braver than me, w/ your photos!

I'm starting to wonder, though, if I might actually someday get to the point of trying to tackle the sorting out, etc., that I'd have to do.

Good luck!

Well someone on the entertaining post said I never come back to comment about my things afterwards & while it's probably true b/c once something is done it's out of mind & on to the next, but as you can see that while I didn't necessarily agree with everyones ideas long the way it was a good starting point & got me motivated & we've made some big head-way but as with everything there is always room for improvment.

Michie

Why not do something with your photos like this: (See link below).

Basically you down load this software on your computer and then you can put any words you want on the page with your photo. Then this place will make a book for you.

It seems expensive but when I look at the cost in terms of my time to put together pages and pages of photo albums, it just becomes extreme. It is well worth the money to me to pay for a nice book that is done.

Ginger

Here is a link that might be useful: My Publisher.

U can always copy and paste into a Word Document and add any text you want.

Not to be excessively geeky about this, but one of the biggest issues in digital photography is that of format and medium lifetime. Those photos burned on a CD -- how long will that CD remain readable? Picture formats (JPEG, TIFF, RAW, etc.), file formats, disk formats, ...

I'm not trying to scare anyone off. There are some great things about digital photography. But if you had taken digital pictures of your kids just ten years ago and saved them onto a Syquest cartridge or a Bernoulli disk (hot storage formats of the time), you'd be hurting to view them now -- the readers and the machines they worked on are hard-to-impossible to find.

If you printed the ones you really want to keep -- on good paper and either keep 'em stored or use archival inks -- you'll have something to hand your grandchildren (or great-grandchildren) that they can actually look at and appreciate. Or you can check your digitally-stored pictures every couple years or so and make sure they're still readable and transfer them to a current medium or picture format. Just don't keep pictures spinning around on your hard drive without making sure you can move them someplace else someday -- unless they're just snapshots and you don't care all that much about losing them.

I agree with Steve--there's a serious danger in format change. You can keep up with it, by transferring as you go (I had a Syquest drive AND a ZIP drive on my machine at the same time, once), but that's a lot of work!

And I know I will NOT do it.

There will also be a certain amount of emphasis for a while on formats that are widely used--we all still can get turntables, even though we don't buy NEW music that way and haven't for a while. And you can buy old 8-track players--but not new ones!

That's because of the "installed base" of LPs in people's homes, and because there aren't that many 8-track tapes still around.

So, .JPEG and CDs are likely to be around for many years, just because so MANY more people use them than used Syquest (which was REALLY expensive if I remember right, and limited to commercial use because of that)--but they WILL go out of date eventually.

But don't count on it lasting all that long.

I also have loads of pix that I need to label & would appreciate any tips on how to do this.

One tip on here is to add text in word through copy & paste. How do I do that?

I keep my scans & digital photos on a hard drive. I back them up to a USB hard drive as well as Jungle Disk (offsite storage.) For several years, I've used ACDSee Photo Manager to keep them organized. It's a bit pricey, but is a great organizer. Gives you all kinds of ways to organize them, PLUS, allows you to change the meta data (EXIF) in jpgs. The nice thing about that, is if you send the image to someone else, since the meta data is part of the jpg file, they can view the comments you've entered there. (Assuming they have software that reads meta data.)

I agree that formats don't provide long-term guarantees that they'll be around forever. (But we won't either.)

But as new formats pop up, there's always an entrepreneur out there creating things like the LP-to-CD recorder. Or home machines that let you copy sides to photos or burn to DVD.

Creating photo books from photos--I do that, but what will they look like 15, 20, 50 years down the road? None of us really know the long-term quality of the paper and inks involved, so you wonder if just putting professionally printed photos in an acid-free album is just as good.
All of these options are just cra*-shoots, aren't they!

The way I look at it...
50 years down the road there will be nobody who cares about them.

My 26 year old (and younger) photo albums still look great.... that's good enough for me!

You know, one day I was visiting some very elderly friends and they had, photos mixed in with old letters and post cards from friends in a box on their coffee table, available for anyone to peruse. Looking through them was a revelation. The loose photos were so much more interesting than when imprisoned chronologically in an album.

I went home and looked at the regiments of heavy photo albums marked by year, weighing down our bookcases that had taken me so many hours to create and tried to remember the last time I (or anyone else) looked through them. Then I took apart all the albums and labeled each photo on the back and put them IN NO ORDER WHATSOEVER in (yes!) arty shoeboxes from the Container Store. I tossed the tons of 3 ring binders and now the boxes are much more inviting.

Doesn't everyone remember their shoe boxes of treasures from childhood?
It's a little like that.

Oh, and to keep my inner file clerk happy, I kept, in an orderly, chronological fashion, two binders of negatives and CDs of photos so that my children and/or grandchildren can figure it out.