Naming people in Photographs

[GillW]

he had an amazing photograph album with names below them.

On the topic of naming people in family group photos – can anyone recommend a method or software that can be used to identify individuals in a group when they are NOT arranged in straight lines – such as a set of wedding guests?
Possibly - a graphic copy of the photo where the heads are replaced by ‘numbered circles’?

 

[Bryman]

One simple possibility, although not as elegant as you suggest, would be to use any suitable software to crop the original photo once for each person and to save each resulting image as a separate named photo. However, that could be rather tedious to identify all participants of a panoramic school photo.

 

[AndyMick]

Does Family Historian have some facility for this? I don't have the programme but seem to recall a demo at a FH fair some years ago.

 

[Heather]

On the topic of naming people in family group photos – can anyone recommend a method or software that can be used to identify individuals in a group when they are NOT arranged in straight lines – such as a set of wedding guests?

I have seen the sort of thing that you are after on sites such as my old school site and recently on Facebook, where as your mouse pointer scans over the photo, little boxes appear with the name of the person you are "pointing " at. Have you tried doing a Google search for "how do I attach names to people in photos" or something similar. I'm not very tech minded but I did a search with similar wording yesterday, when somone asked me to send a "screen shot " to them!! I'd never heard of a screenshot before so I felt very clever when I managed to do that, hopefully you will have similar success with your efforts.

 

[Alexander Bisset]

On Facebook its built in that you can click on a photo and TAG the people in the photo. I've not seen a program to do white outlines from photos but there should be plenty that allow you to "tag" people in photos and have those tags popup with the person's name when you hover over that person in the picture. That way you get to see the picture normally but get the extra info when you hover over someone.

Doing a quick search this feature is apparently available in Windows Photo Gallery which is part of Windows 7 and above features, although you usually have to turn on the feature. There is an article on how to use it here and that site also contains info on how to download it if the latest version isn't on your PC. The example given in the tutorial tags historical photos of American Presidents so clearly it isn't just a "social media" (boo hiss from some less enlightened forum readers ) feature. It can clearly be used for exactly what you are after with historic photos.

 

[GillW]

It can clearly be used for exactly what you are after with historic photos.

Thank you very much Alexander.

 

[peter]

Picasa also allows you to identify people in photos. But what I did when faced with this problem was to load the photo into Irfanview and turn up the brightness, so that the black & white original faded. I then wrote the names of the individuals by hand on a printout of this faded version.

 

[MelG]

Hi GillW, I take a copy of the photo and open it as a layer in GIMP (similar features to Photoshop but free and downloadable) and change the opacity to about 50%. Then, using another layer, I add numbers to the people with a description at the bottom using the text tool. I then flatten the layers and save the result as a jpeg file.