The thing that makes me especially happy about this is that there is finally somewhere I can put my family photos where (1) I feel like they will be safe long-term; and (2) others who are interested in them are likely to find them.
Longevity. The first part is especially important to me. Storing photos on your hard drive just doesn't cut it, as hard drives crash, and when you die, it is likely your computer will get wiped clean eventually. Any service that requires a subscription can't work long-term because, again, once you died, you stop paying, and your photos disappear.
I was somewhat interested in 1000memories.com a couple of years ago, and they were claiming to be able to preserve your photos forever. But how can any company do that? They can't guarantee that they'll be in business 5 years from now, because it takes money to keep the doors open, and the market is fickle. I e-mailed and was given great assurances of their longevity.
A year later, Ancestry.com bought them, and I got an e-mail saying I had 30 days to start paying or my photos would all be purged. So much for long-term.
FamilySearch, on the other hand, doesn't depend on subscriptions or profitability to stay in business. It is sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which, if you ask them, will be around at least through the "millennium". And they have so many images scanned from historical documents (over a billion so far) that a few million old family photos shouldn't be a noticeable burden.
They even have people to screen the photos to make sure that only family-friendly photos end up on the site.
So although nothing is fool-proof, this seems like the best solution I have heard so far. Still, though, keep a copy for yourself, and share one with all your descendants.
Sharing. The other thing I love about putting old photos on FamilySearch.org is that it is a great place for others to find them. By linking the face of an ancestor to their entry in the free, collaborative Family Tree, anyone who is related to that person and comes across their entry in the tree will immediately notice that there is at least one photo of them. By going to the "Memories" tab of the person page, they will see all the rest of them. So those who are interested in that person will naturally come across all of the photos of them that others have shared.
Similarly, I keep finding more and more of my own relatives that someone else has linked to photos for. I have been able to see photos that I never would have otherwise have know existed.
Suggestions. There are a few things I would like to see FamilySearch do to move this further along towards an ideal solution, of course. These include the following.
- Support standard metadata. Currently you have to tag faces and enter a title and description in the UI. But if you have used any other software to enter captions, date, place, and even tag faces, it would be great if FamilySearch would recognize those, and at least give the user the option to use them.
- Similarly, if you download a photo, it would be good if the face tags, title and description would be included in the XMP data for the file, including Metadata Working Group face tagging standards (with an extension to also include Family Tree long-lived URIs for the persons involved).
- If FamilySearch were to lead out in this, perhaps other genealogical software would start taking advantage of these same standards as well. Then you could tag faces in any number of software packages and take advantage of it in others.
- Simple fixes. It would be nice to at least support rotate, and perhaps crop, contrast/auto-levels, etc.
- Face identification would let users pick a pre-calculated face box instead of having to draw them by hand, which would help speed it up a little. Face recognition would be cool, too, but might not be worth the trouble, especially since they don't necessarily encourage having large numbers of photographs for the same person, like you might for more recent digital pictures of living people.
Overall, though, I thought this set of features was really well done.
