Old Photos

[Ed Davidson]

I've been working on '20s and '30s cars pretty much full-time since 1988.  There are thousands of pictures in a semi-organized state, that I took in the course of doing my work.  Don't know if I should save them or not, if they'd be of value to anyone.  Typical pictures, of a Franklin

[28 Chrysler]

Sometimes details the details are time savers not to mention parts identification.

[1912Staver]

That would be a great archive. If you can at least group them with regards to Make, year and model and then post them in a publicly accessible place I am sure owners of those cars would be very interested { and many of us on here who may not own that particular car but are just generally interested in seeing under the skin } . Flickr is still free { for the most basic uses } and publicly accessible. You could create a basic entry here in the projects forum and then link to your Flicker account where the body of photos are stored. A bit time consuming for thousands of photos, but if you spread the project out over a few winters it won't be too tedious. 

[Ed Davidson]

Some of the pictures are before-during-after and some are from the shop of Fran Roxas, I did woodwork for him for 30 years on some really fine Pebble Beach cars.  Also for Chicago Vintage Motor Carriage and Chicago Restorations.  I can vaguely identify what most of the cars were.  There are also shots of work in progress where I haven't got a clue, those are probably useless.

[plymouthcranbrook]

There are companies that will scan photos and place them on line in a digital format. We used a company In Arizona to do our 50+ years of family photos. Not cheap for my income level but certainly easier than lugging around dozens of albums. We used a company called I Memories. Others are around as well.

[Tom Boehm]

These pictures would be of most value to the owners of the cars. Is it possible to pass them on to them? It would be documentation of the restoration work. 

[Jim Bollman]

You might ask the AACA Library if they would be of use for their archive.  If they think they are of value and scan them into their archive then they would be available to anyone that is restoring a similar car.

[John_S_in_Penna]

4 hours ago, Tom Boehm said:

These pictures would be of most value to the owners of the cars. Is it possible to pass them on to them? It would be documentation of the restoration work. 

That's what I was thinking.  If the owners of the

cars don't have those pictures, they should get them.

It will be an important record for those specific cars.

 

Any digital pictures can be easily copied and

used elsewhere.

[wayne sheldon]

I agree with check with the AACA if the current car owners do not want them first!

I would NOT trust any of the usual online photo "hosting" websites. The "Photobucket" fiasco some years back should be warning enough. I don't know how many "hosted" photos on the AACA forum alone were lost in that! I personally noticed nearly a hundred photos that I had looked at before were gone! Since I generally only look at a small portion of this forum, I suspect more than a thousand photos were lost to this site alone!

Photobucket "promised" lifetime (non-commercial) photo hosting services. Then a few years later decided to force users to pay monthly fees. After a short grace period, accounts that did not agree to the forever monthly fees were deleted, and all photos on those accounts that had been shared in good faith were deleted also.

Any similar website could do the same thing at any time for any reason. Or, they could simply go broke? The owners could die in a car crash? Or be bought out and partially deleted.

My wife is currently having a lot of trouble on two different websites she has been using for family photos and genealogy for more than ten years. She (we?) may lose years of research (I did try to tell her years ago!).

 

Photos of value to researchers or future restorers should be donated to a reputable research library where they can be cataloged, filed, and made available to those needing such information.

[dibarlaw]

 Also a concern I had with transfering family 8mm film and photos into VHS and then into DVD to preserve. Ads on the radio about preservation services. Then the digital camera came along with SD cards. Then storing them onto flash drives. Now I have corrupted flash drives and SD cards!

 

 The only things I have left are the original photos and 8mm films.

[Reynard]

8 hours ago, dibarlaw said:

 Also a concern I had with transfering family 8mm film and photos into VHS and then into DVD to preserve. Ads on the radio about preservation services. Then the digital camera came along with SD cards. Then storing them onto flash drives. Now I have corrupted flash drives and SD cards!

 

 The only things I have left are the original photos and 8mm films.

 

Welcome to the world of Hi-Tech.

[DFeeney]

100 years from now these common detail pictures will be priceless. 

[Ed Davidson]

I've begun to organize them.  Since thumb drives are so cheap, maybe I could send individuals who order them, a thumb drive.  But I don't know yet how large the collection is.  I'd guess right now between 5-10 gigabytes.  Not sure.  A gigabyte of pictures is a LOT of pictures.

[viv w]

Those pictures are better than a thousand words of explanation and will be of value to other restorers. If yo7u have any pictures of the wood inside a 25/7 Nash advanced 6 tourer, or of the front seat structure in a 25 Chrysler 70 tourer I would be very grateful. My wood work on these cars are long gone and pictures hard to find.

 Giving the photos to AACA library for them to put into the cars files will benefit future generations.

[ABear]

4 hours ago, Ed Davidson said:

Since thumb drives are so cheap

Thumb drives are nice for "distribution" as in sending files to other folks, they are not always "stable" for long term archival storage. Thumb drives and even flash drives like SD cards sometimes just fail with no warning and you lose all the files on them when that happens.

 

What that means is for your personal long term storage, you may want to employ several methods of backup for archival purposes.

 

External USB hard drives can be employed for making backup copies of your files as they tend to be more stable over long periods of time. Just be aware that sometimes the vendors use cheaper low grade drives in the enclosures, so what I like to do is buy empty enclosures and then install HDs of my choice in those enclosures.

 

In the past was often recommended to have several modes of backup, HDs (external or internal RAID array), CD or DVD.

 

Now days, everyone is jumping on the cloud backups, while convenient they are not without their pitfalls.. Depending solely on cloud backups is riskier than USB flash drives, never know when cloud vendors will go belly up, change their terms of service or lose your files.

[Ed Davidson]

I've been compiling, so far almost 3 gb of jpgs.  Once the pictures are organized, I plan to do some "introduction" text for each folder.  It's going to be to the best of my memory, hope I don't run into any liability issues.  As far as making them available,  someone suggested using my Google web address and putting them on the cloud in some form.

[ABear]

Your Google mail (GMAIL) account includes 15Gb of free online storage which you can setup a shared folder to the web. Upload your pictures to that folder then you grant sharing access rights to allow others to view with read only access (they can't delete, alter or remove).

 

The shared folder is not searchable by Internet search engines, you will have to create a web link to the folder or to individual files and then send the link to your friends and family..

 

If you get stuck, Google does have some searchable help FAQs on Google drive for sharing settings.

 

Have done that for some video that I needed to send to some relatives and didn't want to make the video available to public platforms like Youtube. Gave them the link, they viewed the video then when done I disabled the sharing and removed the video from my online Google drive account..

[Ed Davidson]

Sorry to say the liability issue has come to the fore, today I spoke with the owner of one of the cars I wanted to feature in my portfolio, and he said, "hey, don't put anything in there about my car."  The concern is that the car will lose some value if it's realized they'd been worked on, some of the "mystique" will disappear.  It will take some of the color out of the presentation if I can't mention who what and when, so everything is being rethought.

[Peter Gariepy]

If the photos are well organized by folder and/or filename you can post them in the gallery here for all to use and enjoy.

 

Alternatively, the AACA library might be able to use them.

[TTR]

6 hours ago, Ed Davidson said:

Sorry to say the liability issue has come to the fore, today I spoke with the owner of one of the cars I wanted to feature in my portfolio, and he said, "hey, don't put anything in there about my car."  The concern is that the car will lose some value if it's realized they'd been worked on, some of the "mystique" will disappear.  It will take some of the color out of the presentation if I can't mention who what and when, so everything is being rethought.

I have taken tens of thousands of photos of countless restoration projects I've done or worked on during past 4 decades, but will never post or publicly share majority of them due to concerns I have for the privacy of my clients and their cars.

I even have detail photos of some cars shown at PB & other similarly prestigious events, including a BoS's and (100 point) BiC's proving their restorations (by others) having notable or even significant authenticity errors & flaws, but I'll never share them publicly as I'm pretty sure none of the owners or their restorers know the existence of these photos and most would likely not appreciate what they would reveal if published.

 

Many of my files include thousands of before-during-after detail photos of single projects.
A few thousand are or were in film/print format and all my digital images were just unorganized in my computer, but last year my wife started/volunteered to scan all print photos and organized everything to individual "folders" (per car/job) so now finding any picture for reference is much easier. 😊

Edited May 3 by TTR (see edit history)

[30DodgePanel]

On 4/7/2024 at 9:48 AM, plymouthcranbrook said:

There are companies that will scan photos and place them on line in a digital format. We used a company In Arizona to do our 50+ years of family photos. Not cheap for my income level but certainly easier than lugging around dozens of albums. We used a company called I Memories. Others are around as well.

I did that with family stuff quite a few years back (used a local AZ company also) and my kids and other family were shocked when I popped in the DVD at Christmas one year. None of them had any idea I did it (didn't even tell my wife), but the memories and laughs it created for years to come are priceless for all of us. Same rules are applying to my automotive work as well with the use of thumb drives and what ever else comes in the future. Save everything! You never know when or who will need it.

[30DodgePanel]

On 4/7/2024 at 8:55 AM, Ed Davidson said:

 There are also shots of work in progress where I haven't got a clue, those are probably useless.

If you have a lot of them maybe consider putting them on a thumb labeled "random car work". You never know who might be interested or be looking for that one thing. You may not recognize it now but someone might later...

 

Great topic and I hope to see all of us in the hobby take these things more seriously and continue to improve on all of our organizational skills. If anything, it will help those going through our estate years later to know what to do with all the random car stuff we have in our shops and on our computers.

Edited May 5 by 30DodgePanel (see edit history)

[60FlatTop]

"Yeah, just spin this ring on the tabletop."

 

[ABear]

17 hours ago, Ed Davidson said:

Sorry to say the liability issue has come to the fore, today I spoke with the owner of one of the cars I wanted to feature in my portfolio, and he said, "hey, don't put anything in there about my car."  The concern is that the car will lose some value if it's realized they'd been worked on, some of the "mystique" will disappear.  It will take some of the color out of the presentation if I can't mention who what and when, so everything is being rethought.

Regrettably understandable and a sad commentary all wrapped up in one bundle.

 

While I understand ownership of photos and information and once they have be let out of the barn you no longer have control over them, it does however speak volumes about losing "Value" or "taking color out of the presentation".

 

When I present my story of my vehicle, I present the whole ugly truth along with the good stuff, its been well used, well loved and well worked on, it breaks down, it sometimes works great, sometimes not so much.. Sometimes much more value when the real story is presented properly..

 

But one must agree to whatever the owners wishes are.

[TTR]

I have always offered and supplied copies of my photos to clients, i.e. owners of the given cars/projects I’ve done or worked and all have been very appreciative of them, but I’ve also always requested they don’t share any publicly without my approval (you know copyright and all that), even if they’ve sold the car.
Most have expressed no interest in sharing them publicly anyway.
In most cases where they’ve disclosed of having them or shown any in the process of selling the car and new owner(s) have expressed desire to have copies, my permission has been sought & given with same copyright protection request.

 

 

Edited May 5 by TTR (see edit history)

[Ed Davidson]

 Well I got my pictures arranged in 29 separate folders totaling 3.18 GB. Each folder has a text file with an explanation of what's in it.  Now its just a question of how to put it up for viewing.  Never used the cloud before but I am willing if I can find the right app to use.  These pictures are the only thing I can ever see using the cloud for, and 3 GB is a very small amount of storage, so I'm hoping to find a free site.