Creating Digital Photo Albums

6 April 2009 - One of our first challenges was deciding how to arrange the scans of Charles Foulkes’ photograph albums on Brandworkz. As every picture tells a story, each of these albums depicts an adventure to another world – from the villages of Nigeria to Paris in the wake of The Great War. We were hopeful that in digitising these collections that we could do justice to these incredible works of early photography.

The albums are named by location and time period, with some covering up to four or five years of Foulkes’ life. On each page, the images form an eye-catching display and it is clear that a great deal of time and effort has gone into the arrangement. The author has written in his own captions to give the viewer some of the story behind the pictures. They are often arranged in a particular order to depict an individual journey or as part of a collection to create a portrait of life in a particular village. Some images are even placed together to form panoramic views – a groundbreaking technique that helped develop procedures for military photographic reconnaissance.It quickly becomes clear that this is a medium where the context of an image is as significant as the individual photograph.

With this in mind, we made the decision to retain high-resolution scans of the whole pages. We also agreed to scan these in colour despite the extra time this would take to process. These were saved to the shared drive without any alterations. We then used cropping tools to extract the photographs and used image and filter tools on Photoshop to restore these images as best as possible. Each photograph was then numbered (subdivided by author’s name, section, sub-section/album, page, number) and uploaded to Brandworkz.

We also needed to upload the pages in full – if possible, giving the viewer the experience of browsing the complete album. The problem was that the file sizes of the original high resolution scans were too large to upload. In the end, we created sub-folders for cropped versions of the original scans and converted these folders to PDF files. However, some of the larger albums will most likely have to be divided in two to accommodate the file size limits.