The village decided to celebrate the millennium by arranging an exhibition of village history.

All were asked to contribute anything about the village and the response was excellent, so good in fact that it was decided to write it up as a book.

The material was also exhibited in the village hall as an exhibition for a few weeks at the millennium. At the end of the exhibition all the material came to me to record it.

Scanning was not an option as lots if it was bigger than A4 and scanning would be too slow anyway. I built my Olympus C1400 on a rostrum stand, like copy cameras of old. I fitted high frequency daylight fluorescent tubes to light the baseboard and off we went.

In those very long ago days computer technology was in it's infancy, storage being the main problem. We either had 'Jazz' or 'zip' drives A zip stored 100 mb and we had around 1500 images to store. Even at 100kb per image this would make 150 mb. CD's could store  600mb so that way was chosen.

An even bigger problem was how to handle the necessary caption and keyword information that had to accompany each item. Exif data was in its very early stages and it was a long winded procedure to add it to files, especially with photoshop. A program appeared that seemed to solve our problems. It was called 'Portfolio' by 'Extensis'

(Exif information is the name of the data stored with each .jpg photo file)

In essence it was ideal. It could operate from a stand alone CD, you could easily add captions and keywords and you could search on keywords.

Sadly it was not a very user friendly program to be able to put it all together on a CD. This was in the days of Windows XP. I did manage to get it working but then discovered it would not run on some machines for no known reason.

We then discussed putting it all up on a website, but the opinion was that all the contributors would have to agree to it. In those days the web was generally treated with suspicion.

 

So I continued to search for suitable software to be able to present it as a 'stand alone' program.

In 2014 an answer to my prayers appeared. A photo handling program with emphasis on exif information called ZONER PHOTO STUDIO arrived. The best part was that it could make CD or DVD slide show programs that displayed the caption and keyword information with each photo. Sadly you could not search on keywords but you could sub divide all your photos into as many different folders as you wanted.

On start up you are presented with the folder list, when one is selected thumbnails of all the photos appear and on clicking on one it becomes full screen, with the caption data under it.

Sadly now (2016)  Zoner has changed to a subscription only system that stops working the moment you stop paying for it. Versions 17 ans 18 were 'one time' buys that continue to work.

The Copthorne Millennium Group duplicated the CD and sells them locally, £5 each I think.

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Since Zoner went to subscription I have moved on to ACDsee Photo Studio which is an even better handling program, sadly won't make the CDs.

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