It’s a no-brainer to add descriptions and set dates within the image itself when you’re archiving old family photo scans. Luckily I did a quick experiment with saving meta-data into a TIF image. I opened the TIF in Gwenview, the default KDE image viewer, and re-saved the image as a JPEG file. The meta-data I’d added was not preserved in the new file. Opening the TIF file in showFoto and saving it as a JPEG did preserve the original’s meta-data. In digiKam, the meta-data was preserved, but it was prepended with the locale of the meta-data which looked ugly. In other words, lang=x-default; actual meta-data here. This may have just been shown this way because of how Gwenview works, I don’t know, but it looks like my workflow will be:
- Scan photo at 600 dpi as a TIF
- Embed date and description meta-data
- Store original scan backup
- Crop and adjust image
- Store adjusted scan backup
- Post adjusted scan to shareable online storage (TBD)
- Export to JPEG in showFoto for use in posts online