Fremantle
· Wikimedia · scanning · genealogy ·
I've reached the end of another archive folder: filled it up progressively over the last few months of scanning and describing. Now I'm going back through, double-checking the catalogue records and making sure everything's in order and recorded correctly. It's a nice process, because the first time round, when scanning the photos and letters, I don't actually pay all that much attention to them other than to figure out a reasonable title and a few initial tags. In this second run through I pad things out where they need to be, adding extra tags and descriptions, and sometimes creating additional cropped versions of interesting parts of images.
This time I'm also taking it a step further, and adding all of the items to Wikimedia Commons. I'm not yet completely convinced that this is the best place to host them all (well… I am convinced, but am still very slightly worried that others won't agree with me) but there are have been many occasions in the past when I've been adding these items to my own websites and I've also wanted to upload them to Commons. It is much easier to first upload to Commons and then reuse on my sites. However, the biggest thing that's prompting me to do this is probably the fact that I'm scanning larger and larger resolutions, and my cheapskate hosting setup keeps running out of RAM and failing to resize them. Commons never fails me like this!
So hopefully, all of these scans are now going to be safely housed on Wikimedia Commons forevermore, and I'll be able to do things like improve.
