Paspartu - preserve the stories behind your old photos

Motivation

Few month ago I started to digitize by old family photo albums. Those old photos have been glued to the album pages and when I pilled them off, I noticed that a lot of pictures had a handwritten massage on the back.

Of course, I've seen those before, but this time I understood for the first time how immensely valuable they are.

If you think about it, what is the most important component of the photo? Its quality? Rarity? Form? Significance of the person or event captured? Story behind the photo?

Possibly each of those is important in its own way. But it seems to be that the most powerful virtue is the story behind the photograph. Who made a shot? When? Where? Who are those people on the photo? What were the circumstances of its creation? Where are those people now? Those are the things we ask when we look through old photo albums. And old photos without context have little value, especially if we are talking about family pictures, which rarely depict anything of historical significance.

Besides messages on the back of the photographs, the most important "photo metadata" is stored in the form of memories of your elder relatives. But memory is fragile thing, as well as human life. It is lost if it is not preserved in time.

I came to me that it's really important to preserve old photos' stories for my ancestors (or other relatives interested in our family history). And I wanted to do it as soon as possible, while people who can tell these stories are still alive.

This led to the creation of this tool. I wanted it to be simple, fast and offline. So in case its functionality seems limited to you, it is so by design.

Tool

This tool allows you to save text annotations to your photos in the form of plain text files or passe-partout-like captioned framing.

Functionality:

Key or shortcut	Function
Ctrl+= shortcut or + button	increase scale
Ctrl+- shortcut or - button	decrease scale
Alt+Left shortcut or < button	move to left image
Alt+Right shortcut or > button	move to right image
Open folder button	open folder with images for annotation
Save text button	save image annotation as a text file in annotation folder
Save image button	save image with a frame and a caption in target folder

Workflow

0. Prerequisites:

   python >= 3.7
   pip >= 19.2.3
   

1. Install required packages

   pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Launch tool:

   python paspartu.py

3. Open folder with your images.
4. Go through images, adding notes, dates, etc.
5. Save photo metadata by clicking Save text or Save photo (Images with saved text are being greyed out).

2 folders are created in chosen directory: target and annotations. Former for captioned images and later for text annotation files.

Contribution

Feel free to contribute to this project if you like it. Any suggestions, comments or bug reports are appreciated.