Ancestry Magazine

As unpleasant as air travel is today, I still do a fair bit of it. My wont is to sit by the window, either well back of or well forward of the wing, and snap pictures of clouds, lakes, cities, towns, mountains, rivers, and anything else I find interesting—when I’m not napping, that is.

Later, when time and energy avail, I use the satellite images in Google Maps and Google Earth to figure out what the heck I was looking at. Last January, looking over photos from a trip to San Antonio, I was surprised to find that I had taken pictures of Lubbock and Sweetwater, Texas. But that’s not important.

Family history researchers use original records often without reflecting on the basic nature of records—that records describe events. Birth records describe birth events. Death records describe death events. Land records describe real estate events. Census records describe residence events. And photos depict “photo ops,” which are also events.

Photos have been with us for 150 years, recording great and trivial moments of life. Photos show empty landscapes and crowds. They show buildings and babies. And when we find an old shoebox of them, photos are, as often as not, frustratingly and absolutely undocumented as to what event they record. What is the place and time of the photograph? What are the roles of the people in it? Who was the photographer?

While we’re bemoaning the fact that Grandma wasn’t thorough in labeling her photos, we should take a moment to think about the digital photos we are creating by the gigabyte today. How are we doing a better job than she did of logging them?

Tag—You’re It

It’s nice to know who took a photo and who’s in the photo. It’s also good to know where and when each photo was taken.

There will come a day when every camera has a GPS (global positioning system) in it and all photos are tagged with the date and time they were taken as well as location details. While GPS resolution varies, generally between five and 10 meters, that would get you into the right house, maybe even into the right room. It would not get you to the right grave, but you would be in the right cemetery.

Today, only a few cameras contain GPS, and most of them are too expensive to be practical for personal recording. So how do you get all of this detailed data into a photo right now?

You have some choices. First, you can do what I’ve done: take the photos and use Google Maps or Google Earth to try to find the same location and write it down. At Smugmug.com, a commercial photo storage site, you can choose to Edit Geography and automatically use Google Maps to input or edit the location of your uploaded photos. You can key the latitude and longitude directly, if you know it.

Photo files formatted as JPEGs and TIFFs include something called Exif—Exchangeable Image File Format—that records information pertaining to the camera, its settings, and date and time, among other things associated with each photo. I never change the time on my camera so I’m always taking pictures in Mountain Time, even if I’m in Hawaii or New York. Wrong time zone or not, Exif is important and useful because it’s the digital equivalent of writing on the back of a print—information that won’t get separated from the photo and that gives your photo context.

Using a GPS receiver set up to log your trek at specified intervals and a camera set to the right date and time, you could take photos and capture a GPS log simultaneously. You can then use a software program designed to match up the two and drop the information into your photo’s Exif.

Whether you go high-tech with the GPS camera or a GPS receiver used in combination with your camera or lower-tech by eyeballing the photos you took, the important part is that you get location and time information into your photos. I’m not thinking about just any photos—I’m thinking about gravestone photos. If you can map photos, why can’t you map photos of the sites of the earthly remains of your ancestors? You can. And it’s not that difficult or expensive.

Viewing Them on a Map

To prove this, I took a few gravestone photos and put them online at http://sharbrough.smugmug.com/gallery/1090897. SmugMug has a button in the upper right-hand corner labeled “Map This.” If you click it, you’ll see the photos in the current gallery, provided they’ve been coded, displayed on a map. In this case, there are four of them, located in East Texas and Oklahoma. You can play the sequence of photos, and you can get directions to or from any point on the map. Finding a cemetery that contains one of these gravestones is easier than ever, although you might still have to look around to find the marker.

Viewing Them with Google Earth

As cool as it is to map the images, viewing them as a satellite image is even cooler. Google Earth is a downloadable application that uses an annual subscription to get data from satellite image servers. You can save lists of places, like your house and your children’s houses and the houses where you used to live, and fly around to them. You can fly around buildings and mountains. And you can view your tagged photos as thumbnails on a satellite image—right where they were made. To do this, choose the Google Earth icon at the bottom, right corner of the page and use your own subscription to Google Earth (you can get a free version at http://earth.google.com). You can also view a satellite image by selecting the “Satellite” option at the top right corner of the page, but you won’t get all the bells and whistles of Google Earth.

Picasa, Google Web Albums, and Google Earth

This is not a commercial for Google, but the organization is clearly working to integrate photos and space as well as anyone else is today. There is a beta version of Picasa, the free photo-editing program from Google, with a Google Earth link built into it. Using this feature, you can tag your photos before you upload them. As if that weren’t enough, this version of Picasa allows an easy upload to Google Web Albums, which sounds a lot like a Google version of SmugMug and Flickr. The beta version only allows 250MB of storage, and I take photos with a 512MB card, so it doesn’t seem like much space. But the idea that you might soon have the search power of Google integrated with the ease of use of Picasa, the community features of services like SmugMug, and the unequalled mapping features of Google Earth, gives us a glimpse of a future wherein we might easily find the right time and place for each photo we make and share.

Beau Sharbrough is a noted speaker and writer on genealogy and technology. He can be reached via www.rootsworks.com.