Tech Forum

I can see why the church doesn't do this at NFS (storage costs, content rights and quality isssues etc).

I went through the list of certified apps and sites. Many deal with photos -- you can upload your photo to a separate site, link it with NFS people records and print nice charts etc.

I'd like a service where it will store photos uploaded by others (with a way to verify the identity of the person who uploaded the image) and where those uploaded photos are tagged with NFS people IDs. So when family trees intersect - viola I now have photos from distant relatives I never had before.

Some sites allow you to share your photos with others. I'd be willing to share mine with the world and vice versa, but there needs to be a good way to find them.

The same problems that are mentioned about photos (who has it? where is it? how do we find it?) exist with diaries and journals. I have worked on a site that addresses that issue (the BYU Historic Journals Project at http://journals.byu.edu). The site deals primarily with diaries and journals, but the same solution would apply to photos.

The solution we used is to allow journals to be tagged, but with the new FamilySearch PersonID instead of just a textual representation of peoples' names (many people have the same name). Then when a person logs in, the FamilyTree can be automatically crawled to see who their ancesters are and compare their ancestors' PersonIDs with all of the PersonIDs used in tags. With no effort on the part of the person logging in, they have automatic access to everything that has been tagged about ANY of their ancestors, even if it was written about their ancestors by other people who weren't their ancestors.

There are some commercial companies starting to do PersonID tags with photos I think, but the key is getting all of these searchable in once place, otherwise you have to go search at hundreds of sites (that you may not know about) and that's not a whole lot better than trying to contact hundreds of your distant relatives to see if any of them have photos.

Even if the photos are hosted online in different places, there needs to be a centralized database with all the PersonID that have been tagged that point to the sources so users only have to search in one place. On the journals site, users can add tags to journal "references" even if the journal is somewhere else or not online at all. A similar idea can be applied to photos. Maybe the photo content is hosted at another site, but a reference to the photo (and where it is) should be placed in a well-known central database so users only have to search one place.

-Doug