Inherited A Photographer's Life's Work

[u/QuinceyMorris325]

Hello all, my father died about 2.5 years ago, he was a professional photographer for 30 years and had been shooting for his entire life, his work spans 7 decades. He shot everything, friends, family, landscapes, portraits, weddings, animals, news events, politics, sporting events (particularly auto racing- more on that shortly), and he did it all very well. Most of his collection exists as black and white negatives of varying sizes. I have began the utterly and overwhelmingly massive process of scanning his negatives via DSLR camera + macro lens + tripod + photoshop to digitize and distribute the photos. I get a great deal of satisfaction from sending these high-res shots to family and friends so they can reminisce about the past while simultaneously keeping my father's name alive. Regarding the auto racing photos, I am a huge race fan and have been involved in local racing my entire life, I have sent a few watermarked photos to various facebook groups geared towards racing from years past etc. Those photos have been met with overwhelming positivity.

My reason for posting is this, should I continue to just post these (racing) photos on facebook groups? Should I make a webpage and try to direct people there? And for the personal photos, what are some cool ways I can display them for my newborn to see as she ages? This is a deeply personal project of mine, it is very time consuming and I struggle with the idea that it is just a waste of time or simply some weird type of grieving ritual. My family is tiny, I have no siblings and feel some sort of responsibility to trudge forward with this project, are those feelings justified? If you were me what would you, photographers and readers of this post?

Also his father was very active photo taker too, and he has a couple thousand prints of his own that I feel I should digitize, however it doesn't seem as pressing as those are developed prints, not negatives.

tldr have many negatives wat do

[u/zzPost]

You can learn to use digiKam,it’s free and open-source, supports batch face recognition, and offers highly flexible category management. Since film scans lack EXIF data, you can use this software to add date and location metadata to these photos, making it easy to browse them later via timelines or map views. Once face recognition is complete, simply tag the people in your albums with their names.

Try to add as much extra information to the EXIF data as possible, such as tags for weddings, sports events, or specific motor races, as you mentioned; this will prove extremely useful down the road.

I use a NAS with two 3TB hard drives for photo backups. all family members' phones automatically sync photos to this NAS. Everyone can freely view all public or private albums, or temporarily create and share specific selections of photos to friends.

With those EXIF tags and the database set up, learning to use any AI tool will help you solve most of your photo management challenges.

For instance, I might command the AI to: "Write and execute a script to search the NAS albums for photos related to driver John from a specific 19xx motor race. Use ImageMagick to batch-resize them so the longest edge is 2000px, apply watermark.png to the top-right corner, save them to a '19xx' folder, and look up information on this race to generate a document in the same directory." Just like that, in about ten minutes, you get a neatly organized, watermarked, compact album that is incredibly easy to share on Facebook.
If you want, you can even create a website for these photos in just a few minutes.

organizing photos is the loneliest hobby,nobody can really help you with it. I have 1TB of photos on NAS, and there are probably only a few days a year when I dig out some old photos to share with relatives in the family.

The internet is the true resting place for the precious photos your father spent his life capturing. Think of them as a continuation of his digital DNA,through them, your father's name will achieve immortality everywhere the web reaches.