The Harvard University Band photo archive has two primary goals.
First, it provides a single place for bandies and crusties to share
their own photos of band events. Second, it provides access to
and digital archiving of the Band's own collection of historic photos
(at least those we've gotten around to scanning).
The archive
currently resides on the photo-sharing web site Flickr, in
an account called "hubarchive." In order to protect the privacy
of bandies who might not want to be identified and labeled to the
general public, you must become a "friend" of hubarchive in order
to view the photos. To do so, send your name, class year, and
Harvard email address (e.g., fas.harvard.edu or post.harvard.edu) to hubarchive@hubalums.org.
We will then email you a link to complete the "friend" process.
NOTE--All Harvard alumni
are
eligible to get a free post.harvard.edu email address (which will
simply forward messages to your own designated account) at http://post.harvard.edu.
Once you're
signed in to Flickr, you will see one or more
HUB archive photos in the "Photos From Your Contacts" area. Click
the "hubarchive" link under any of the photos to go to the HUB archive
home page. Alternately, you can go directly to http://www.flickr.com/photos/hubarchive.
Once on the HUB archive home page, click on the "Sets" link to view
various sets of photos grouped by date and/or subject.
For more
information on using your Flickr account, managing your personal
information, etc., consult the Flickr help FAQ at http://www.flickr.com/help/faq.
Adding Comments and Notes to Photos
You can help us identify the people and events pictured in the HUB
photo archives by using Flickr's built-in
collaboration tools. For example, you can describe a scene or
identify people by adding a written comment below the photo. You
can also identify specific people or things in the photo by adding a
"note." A note allows you to connect a small amount of text (such
as a name) to a box superimposed over the photo, and you can control
the position and shape of the box to highlight specific things in the
photo.
To add a
comment, click on a photo. Scroll down to the comment box and
enter your text. You can choose to preview your comment (using
the "Preview" button) or post it directly (using the "Post Comment"
button). If you need to edit a comment that you have made, click
on the photo and use the "Edit" link next to your comment. If you
can't locate the photo comment that you need to edit, you can go
to the "You" menu at the top of the page and select "Comments You've
Made".
To add a note,
click on a photo. Click the "Add Note" icon near the top of the
photo. Use the box that appears to highlight a specific person or
thing in the photo, then add text. To view your note, mouse over
the photo. To edit or delete a note, click within the note's
box. If you can't locate the note that you need to edit,
you can
go to the "You" menu at the top of the page and select "Comments You've
Made" (notes are listed along with any comments that you've made).
Uploading Your HUB Photos to the Archive
You
can share your personal photos of
band events with other bandies through the archive. Remember,
these will be available to a lot of bandies, so don't add any photos
that would keep the subject from running for public office!
Merely embarrassing and goofy photos, of course, are welcome and
expected.
The free account
that you may have created when joining Flickr as a "friend" of the HUB
archive has a limit on the number of photos that you can upload.
Therefore,to upload photos to the HUB
archive, you should log on to Flickr using the HUB archive account (which does not have
a limit). The username is "hubarchive." The password is the
first name of everybody's
favorite fictional crustie - two t's, all lower case. If you
don't know what we're talking about, e-mail hubarchive@hubalums.org and
convince us that you are/were actually connected with the band.
Flickr's
web-based uploading interface is easy to understand
and use, and you can upload a large group of photos at once with
it. To get started, log out of your persoanl Flickr account using
the "Sign Out" link in the upper right corner, then click "Sign in
again" and "Sign in as a different user". Log in using the
"hubarchive" account (see above for the password hint), click "Upload
Photos", and just highlight multiple photo files at the appropriate
screen.
Feel free to upload photos at as high of a resolution as possible, as
long as each photo is 10 MB or less. There are no other upload or
file size limits with this Flickr account.
Once a group of photos
is uploaded, you can add tags (word descriptions) and group photos into
sets. Please add whatever tags you feel are appropriate.
Finally, please put your photos into one or more new sets and name the
sets appropriately - a set can be more than one event, meaning that
something like "2005 Football Season" is fine as a title. You can
also add a description of the set, and you can use this space to
identify yourself as the photographer. Check out the existing
sets for some examples of set names and descriptions.
NOTE
ON PRINT SCANNING--If your photos are
from more than
about five years ago, they are probably not in digital form. Most
modern flatbed scanners will create very good digital images of
prints. We suggest scanning at 600 dpi (dots/pixels per inch),
with as much color depth as your scanner can do. For standard 3x5
or 4x6 prints, this will create jpeg images of around 1 MB or less, and
will still capture most of the detail in the print. If the
program asks you an additional question about what "quality" you want,
choose something from the higher end of whatever range they give you
(this will affect the level of compression that goes into creating the
jpeg file). Many software programs that come with scanners also
do other useful tricks, such as automatically naming the scanned photos
in sequence: PIC001, PIC002, etc. If you have only
negatives or slides, you will need a backlight attachment or other
specialized scanner, and will want to scan at much higher than 600 dpi.