I’m thinking of getting a slide scanner to scan old photographic slides. I’ve found a few references to making observations from old photos in other topics on the forum, but none of the threads have provided all the info I’d like.
One question I have is, how to deal with the date? I know the month and year of the photos in question, but not the exact day, and certainly not the time.
I’ve come across observations by other users where the date is just a month, and there is no time - how is that even possible to do? Just guessing seems wrong, although that has been suggested in other threads.
I’ve seen observations where the user has included a note stating that the photos were scanned from slides. I would do that, too. How much info would be helpful to include in the note? Just the date I scanned them?
Has anyone done this? Advice (and links to your observations) welcome.
I have a set of old photos I got in Tanzania in 2012. They’re digital, but ungeotagged and undated. I do, however, have a journal I kept when I was doing study abroad, which does have dates and locations for every day. I’ve been able to add a lot of observations that way, and I just skip the ones where the location range seems too large to be useful.
I’ve seen a variety of takes on this but I think if you have a fairly narrow band of dates its fine to pick something in the middle as long as you make a note on the observation that it is an estimation, e.g. I think most people would think its fine if you put “November 25” for an observation that you knew you made in late November (and write in the description something about the accuracy of this guess).
If the range of possible dates is wider than that I think it gets a bit murkier. If I just knew the year I don’t think I’d include a date (unfortunately rendering it Casual). Also I guess common sense applies here. I imagine an observation of, say, a rat skeleton is gonna do a lot less harm to data if it’s off by a week or two than, say, a butterfly with a very short flight time.
It’s great you’re adding these photos to iNaturalist! The historical dimension is valuable. In your note, state that the date is approximate, giving whatever range seems appropriate (“August,” “late August,” “summer”). (I think it would be valuable for iNaturalist to add a date equivalent of the accuracy circle available for locations.) Using the fields @jokkomarat mentions seems useful. State that you scanned the photo from a slide, but the date you did that is unimportant. For the location, you may need a large accuracy circle, but keep the circle as small as is reasonable. (Lots of mine will be one mile or one whole park but sometimes larger circles are needed.) Keep in mind that your photos and those scans may be of value to a local museum or relevant university departments or libraries, too.
Thanks for all the replies and useful advice. Now I have an excuse to buy a scanner. First priority, scan all my wildflower photos from Alaska, June 1983!
It’s a big state, but I know which ones were in Denali National Park, and which ones were on Kodiak Island, etc.
If I get some of them done in a timely fashion (i.e. before this thread automatically closes) I’ll provide a link. Maybe I’ll make a small project.
I had a pile of old photos from my time in Papua New Guinea with no metadata. I posted them with the note on each, “Dates may be off by up to one month. Older photos with metadata lost. All photos taken south of Herowana village, across Wara Pio (Fio River).”
The best way is a solution with existing or new custom fields, because they are also easy to filter in the search.
There exist some hidden filters, documented in the search-wiki on the forum here, such as searching for specific fields or with specific content of a specific field or also negation filters to search without fields or content.
This makes the data very usable to one self and others too.
That’s in a way how I started on iNat. It was like finding a purpose for all my ‘old’ photos. they were sleeping un-watched for years on hard discs. … and old data is still data.
I just purchased a slide scanner, partly for this exact purpose. It’s a Plustek OpticFilm 8100. It was about $374 which seems reasonable for a high-quality unit. (The old Nikon CoolScans were several thousand dollars, even used). I’ve uploaded a few old (15-25 years ago) photos from Denali National Park and the Dalton Highway that didn’t have GPS coordinates and some didn’t have dates. I just plugged-in a date that was probably accurate to within a week. If you took the shuttle bus (or even drove yourself, as we could in the old days!) on the Denali Park road, that probably narrows your locations and a look at the park map might refresh your memories. Good luck and please do provide an update. Here is an observation where I was able to reconstruct the approximate date from field notes. (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/256859538)
Thank you for that link. I couldn’t resist reading your thoughtful profile and looking at all of your observations. Although I was only in Alaska for a month, four decades ago, the awe and wonder I felt then has never left me.
Sure hope I can find my travel journal and Alaska Wildflowers guidebook…
I’ve done only a couple. In the following case, I knew the exact location and time of day. Just month and year. But this bird hung out regularly for that month and more. I think exact date would be critical for migratory birds, plumage/molting, or insect and plant seasons. But not so much for non-migratory animals.
Yay! I got an inexpensive scanner, found my boxes of slides and the notes that accompany them, and posted my first few observations from my 1983(!) trip to Alaska.
I’ve decided not to make a project; since I have no other observations from Alaska, they will be easy for me to find. There will only be 30-40.
Although I saw and identified more than 60 species of wildflowers while there, I didn’t get photos of them all. Back in the day, you had to be mindful of how much film cost to buy and to process, and how much room it took up in your backpack, and you didn’t want to use it all up when you were out in the wilderness with nowhere to get more, so you had to ration it. We didn’t have digital cameras to carry in our pockets! https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/322450152 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/322449613 https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/322451512
I finally finished scanning a few hundred slides from Alaska,1983. From them, I was able to make 62 observations of 52 species.
If you’re interested, the observations can be found by searching my user name (same as on the forum) and filtering for Alaska.
Congratulations! I just took a quick look at these new (old) ones. It’s great to have observations from 42 years ago because they add to the historic record. With Alaska’s climate changing so fast, these may help future research in determining changes in occurrence and distribution.
I hope to do the same, soon. I got a good slide scanner last spring and will get to work on my slides this winter.
