Link Pictures to Everyone Shown

I always try to link photos to every person shown (assuming they're related by blood or marriage, the criteria I use for adding people in my tree). I do this when saving the image the first time. This helps avoid duplicate photos in my media gallery, and keeps the size of my offline database manageable.

I've noticed a trend in user photos where it's often linked to just one person. Sometimes the description includes other names. Often I'm able to reasonably discern someone in a photo based on other images I've saved. I look carefully at eyes, ears, nose, mouth and face shape to help me figure out who each person is likely to be. Even accessories such as glasses can help me make a determination.

Sometimes, I simply don't know who the others shown are and I typically annotate "others unknown" in the photo description to indicate this. If I think they may be family members I haven't added to my tree yet, I wait to attach the photo until I've found who the subjects are. Only when I feel I'm out of possibilities do I list someone as unknown. I make it a point to attempt to identify as many of the subjects in a photo as possible. Many times, the only photo I have of a person is because they were in an image with someone else. 

Photos really help bring people to life (especially with the many photo editing tools available today.) While Ancestry.com lets you colorize and crop, which serve most of my basic needs, for those who want to do more advanced or interesting techniques MyHeritage.com is the way to go. They offer colorizing, enhancing, animating (sorry, it's more than a little creepy to me), DeepStory and AI Time Machine™.  If you're a photo aficionado, a subscription to MyHeritage.com may be well be worth the cost. I'd be surprised if they don't continue to roll out more new photo features in the coming years as they seem to be at the forefront in this respect.

Recently, I found a photo of a tiny child in a casket in a family photo album. It was labelled as being the son of my great-uncle. Until I found the photo, I had no idea he had any children. The child passed at just a year old, and was never enumerated in any census or shown in any other records I've found. As soon as I entered his name the FindAGrave.com memorial hint popped right up. I doubt I'd ever known he existed were it not for the one single heartbreaking photo after his death.

I'll be putting my identification skills to the test in coming months. While cleaning out my childhood home, I recently acquired quite a few totes and boxes full of albums and loose photos. Some have names or descriptive information, some don't. Sometimes I can look at one and go "Oh! That's my cousin so-and-so". Other faces I'm seeing for the first time. I'm very excited to start making my way through the veritable treasure trove I've inherited!

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay