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:

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.