There’s an account called Troop.351.Photos@gmail.com that has many photos of Scouts, Leaders, and parents over the years.
Google Photos does a lot of automatic matching in the background, including locations, objects, activities, and faces. This means that once a person is identified by a name, Google tries to find all other photos that match that person. This information is not public, meaning that even if you know that there’s pictures of Bob H. and have access to an album, you can’t find them without going through the photos one at a time.
This is good for privacy reasons. However, if we have pictures of Bob H. over the years, wouldn’t it be nice to share those with Bob H. and his parents?
The way to do that is to create an album of pictures of Bob H. Usually, the album is called Bob H. which is not very exciting but hopefully clear. The URL for this album can be shared with Bob H. and his parents and they can look at the pictures whenever they want. They can share them from the Troop.351.Photos Google Photos account to their own Google Photos or download them.
The process of sharing is not hard but also not very fun. Whoever runs the account needs to create an album for Bob H., copy the link, then email it to Bob H. and his parents. They record this information in a Google Spreadsheet like this:
Right now, there seem to be 6 types of photos:
There might be 7, for Alumni Parents. We would expect Scouts and Leaders to be in a lot of photos when they’re active, then more rarely or not at all.
Another option would be to have a WordPress page for each type instead of a Google Spreadsheet. That could be more easily shared, which has its good points and bad points.
Google is trying to match faces. If we label people as A, B, and C, it means that Google won’t be trying to match C to A or B, even though C is not active in the troop anymore. Google worries about the photos that aren’t tagged. So it’s good to tag faces even if the person is not active in the troop and isn’t expected to be.
People under 18 are “Firstname Last Initial.” People over 18 are “Firstname Lastname”.
Events are of the format “MM-YYYY Event name”. The album name needs to be shared with the Webmaster so that they can pick a cover photo for the event and put the address of the album in a post on the website.
Location sharing is off by default for albums. This makes sense for private photos, where people may not want locations disclosed. It doesn’t seem to make sense for summer camps or hikes on Mt. Hood. It makes the pictures less useful for people who might want to search for pictures of the troop at Pearl Harbor or Nanitch Lodge over the years. So location sharing should be turned on for everything on this account.
None of the photos should be embarrassing or hurtful. That hasn’t been an issue so far and hopefully won’t be in the future.
There’s an album called “Uploads” that will let people upload to it. Ideally people will navigate to the proper album via the troop website and put their pictures there. But we would like to get as many pictures as possible. We can let Google process faces in the background.
Unfortunately uploading photos takes a Google account. People who don’t have one and may be able to share photos via AirDrop, flash drive, email, etc. with somebody who does.
Recommendations
Troop.351.Photos (aka Troop351Photos) is intended to belong to the troop instead of somebody’s personal account. The current owner can pass the torch to the next person by giving them the password and having them change it. In this way the work belongs to the troop.
Troop.351.Photos is partnered with PDX.Troop.351 which is used as the contact address for the website. That way PDX.Troop.351 automatically has a copy of all of the pictures should something happen to the Troop.351.Photos account. In addition, it would be good if there were other backup procedures such as downloading all of the photos to a flash drive.
100GB of space for Google Photos costs $19.99/year. It would be easy to buy more space as needed. The goal is to encourage people to upload photos.
BSA says the historian “gathers photos and facts about troop activities and keeps them in a historical file or scrapbook” and so it would be nice to have a Scout adding names and faces of new Scouts, maintaining albums, and communicating with the Webmaster so that new event albums can be published on the troop website.