MAC 2008 The Useful Ten Words of the Ten Thousand: Describing Photographs in Words

Cynthia R. Miller, Curator of Photography and Prints, The Henry Ford

This session was very basic information. The most interesting thing was the contrast between the MPLP talk the day before and the very time consuming process of researching and identifying individual photographs today. Somewhere there has to be a balance between describing collections enough to provide good access and agonizing over descriptions for every image in out collections.

Main Topic should include details: Who, What, Where, When and Why?

Subject terms will depend on the needs of researchers and the mission and resources of your repository.

She recommended using a controlled vocabulary for consistent search terms. The Library of Congress has subject headings for prints and photographs. The Getty also has an online thesaurus which is better for objects.

The most important thing to keep in mind is what terms the researcher will be searching for. This is the reason that I'm not sure controlled vocabularies are the best method for cataloging. The search term one person might use could be completely different than the search term another researcher might use.

Photoshop Actions

Like most other archives we have been working on digitizing some of our collections. Last year during our university's Centennial celebration we had many requests for photographs, and we scanned over two thousand images. All our scans are saved as 600dpi, RGB color .tifs which we keep as a master archival copy.

We then resample the digital image to make a 300dpi, grayscale, .tif use copy. We resample again to make a .jpg thumbnail, which is then linked to an Access database with the metadata for each image. We use the actions in Adobe Photoshop CS2 to batch these repetitive changes and speed up the process.

Hopefully the following directions will help someone else with this process. I always try to keep the action as simple as possible, and break up the process into two or more separate steps.

1. Open an image that needs to be resized or converted to .jpg or grayscale.
2. If the action window isn't open, open it under the Window menu as shown to the right. Alt+F9 is the keystroke to do the same thing.
   
3. The action window (below) has several buttons along the bottom. Click the 'new action' button beside the trash can, name the action and click 'record.'
4. From this point every mouse click will be recorded in the action. The image size can be fixed to a certain width or height, dpi can be changed or the mode can be changed from RGB to Grayscale. If you are changing from .tif to .jpg be sure to include 'save as' and 'close' as part of the action.
   
5. After you make the desired changes click on the 'Stop Recording' button which is the square on the left.
6. You have now created the action that you will use to batch process your photos. Before I run a batch operation I always copy the photos I'm working with to a new folder and use those copies to run the batch.
7. The batch command is under the file menu: click 'automate', then click 'batch'. The window below will open up.
8. In the second box select the action you just created and select the source as folder. You can then browse for the folder you just created.
   
9. Check 'override action open commands.'
   
10. Select 'save and close' as the destination and run the batch.
    
11. If you are converting from a .tif to a .jpg it is important not to check 'override action save as commands.'

Again I try to keep the action as simple as possible and it runs flawlessly. It did take many deleted actions before I was satisfied with the results and when we upgraded to CS2 I had to figure it out all over again, but once the actions are set up to your satisfaction they will streamline the process of resizing and converting mode and file types significantly.