My mother, who's turning 70 years young in a few days, wrote recently about her habit of writing ages on the backs of photos:
"When I do have a birthday I start to think how old my parents were when I was a certain age...maybe that's why I put age of people in pictures on the back. I think that's an interesting perspective. And may we all reach old age...I'm in the turtle stage now.
I dragged my feet on getting into doing my blog but when I was ready I did it and I love it. That's why we have children so that they can keep us up to date on things."
This was standard practice for her while I was growing up, much to the admiration of my wife, who loves to see pictures of me as a kid. Up until Flickr came into our lives, we couldn't easily keep track of ages. I mean, we could use the date the photo was taken and calculate the ages ourselves, but who really wants to do that?
I think everyone should get in the habit of "writing" the ages of people in the photos they take...of course this means tag them with a simple method. I'd suggest people use "firstname_age" or something like that. In my family's case, it'll be fun to see all the photos tagged with madeline_4, madeline_8, kit_78, linnea_41, jerome_41, nicole_25, etc.
If anyone has any better ideas on how to tag photos with people's ages, please leave a comment.
I'm going to start doing that from now on, and when I get the chance I'll go back over the 5000 photos I've got on Flickr and add in the ages. Thanks for the tip Mom!
(On second thought: can someone write me a script that takes the date of a photo from flickr's API and runs it against a list of names and birthdays, compares it to existing tags that have people's names and then adds an age tag for matches?)
I'll cook breakfast on Saturday. Nothing like a home cooked meal on your birthday! Can't wait to visit!
Love,
Jerome
