Newbie - Historic Local Photos Collection

GeoffAllemand · May 23, 2015

G'day All.
Newbie from Australia here.
I am keen to manage a very large collection of local historic photos, pdfs and online newspaper articles.
I am hoping Zotero will assist me in setting up a searchable directory and a way to collate all the info.
Appreciate any suggestions.

Geoff

adamsmith · May 23, 2015

I fear that's a little vague to allow for much in terms of suggestions. Ideally, describe specific goals, desired workflows or, even better, issues you've run into while starting to use Zotero.

The one thing I can say is that how well this is going to work depends on the meaning of "very large" -- once you get to the vicinity of 50k items plus attachments, things may start to get a bit slow and, at least with the current version of Zotero, sync may not work terribly well.

GeoffAllemand · May 25, 2015

Hi Adam.
Thanks for the reply. I am a novice historian and I am after a way to manage a large collection (10,000+ of historical photos and to add key words tags etc. A colleague suggested Zotero would be worth looking at. With this I would like to record weblink for info that goes with these photos. I have not started using Zotero, just downloaded the software and had a little play. I don't want to put too much time and effort into it if it won't be suitable and there may be better options.

adamsmith · May 25, 2015

really depends -- if you want to store rich, detailed bibliographic data with the photos and potentially even cite them, Zotero may work well for you.
If you're mainly interested in tagging and viewing images, there's dedicated image management software that's much better at that (things like built-in preview, ability to zoom, rotate, change contrast etc) and also has tagging functions. There are countless options here, Picasa is probably the best-known one you don't have to pay for. There are also several open source options, as well as more powerful for-pay tools like Adobe's Lightroom.

zuphilip · May 25, 2015

I am after a way to manage a large collection (10,000+ of historical photos and to add key words tags etc. [...] With this I would like to record weblink for info that goes with these photos.

That sounds for me like the photos are already in place (somewhere in the web, and you want to add annotations to them. Zotero has mainly tags, collections, and notes for annotations. Maybe that is fine for you, maybe you want more or different annotation tools. (Another interesting tool which comes in my mind is pundit from the europeana context.)