Recently, I’ve taken it upon myself to archive some of my grandmother’s pictures of our family. Archiving photos is a daunting task for anyone who does it correctly. Hundreds of images, (many of them with important information on the back such as names and dates) need to be scanned (matching both front and back image), and cataloged in some way. I am not a person with a lot of time on my hands, so I came up with a more automated solution to archiving by modifying some GIMP plug-ins to help me with most of the tedious parts. This is the first part of a series dealing with archiving and genealogy.
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Installing Archiving Software, Scripts, and Plugins
For archiving scanned images of family photographs, I modified some scripts to use with Gimp to speed the process along. This post will explain how to install these scripts to the correct folders in order for them to work.
First, You need to install Gimp photo manipulation software. This is similar to photoshop, but it is free and open source. Gimp is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Since I run Linux on my computer, I can’t easily install photoshop, and Gimp does just as well once you learn to use it. Instructions for downloading and installing Gimp can be found on their downloads page.
If you want the script to automatically attempt to straighten your individual images automatically before saving them to file, you will need to install the ‘deSkew’ plug-in. You can find which folder to install it in GIMP in a similar fashion to above “Edit–> Preferences–> Folders–> Plug-ins.” Note that this is different from the scripts path! For some reason the original host of this plug-in has disappeared, but the files are available in links in the comments of the ‘deSkew’ page of the GIMP Registry.
Windows:precompiled executable available here.
Linux: Download this project by clicking the “Zip” button on the GITHub page. Unzip the folder and read the install instructions from the README file. You have to make the project, but it isn’t complicated. You will need to give the resulting program executable permissions, and then copy it to your /…/gimp-2.0/plug-ins folder.
UPDATE: As of 2023, The links I marked out above do not work. deskew is no longer maintained from what I can tell. I did find this github site with a copy of the plugin.
You can download the archiving scripts I modified from our GitHub Code site. You will need both of the scripts shown on the webpage. If there are multiple version, be sure to get the ones with the latest dates. Simply install these into the “scripts” folder in the gimp installation directory as shown in the video.
This video explains where and how to install all of these files: