One problem I’ve noted with digital photos in general is the lack of a simple and widely used standard for embedding identification information in the digital file so anyone opening it can easily find it. We need the equivalent of the information written or pasted on the back of a printed photo. This is not just for family photos; it’s for publication as well. When I was on a magazine staff, printed press releases used to come with a caption, identification of the people, objects shown, and organizations involved, and copyright information taped or printed on the back. I know some digital standards exist, but in practice they get lost easily in processing the digitized images.
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There’s some excellent opinion and comment in here about digital preservation. Perhaps @ace could move it to its own thread.
Perhaps some of this is covered by @joe in the just-published second edition of Take Control of
Your Digital Legacy
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“One problem I’ve noted with digital photos in general is the lack of a simple and widely used standard for embedding identification information in the digital file so anyone opening it can easily find it.”
Metadata is intrinsically fragile. Even filenames aren’t necessarily the same from one flavor of OS to another because the allowed character sets differ. Metadata stored inside the file (e.g. mp3 tags) are more robust than metadata stored outside (file dates, Mac file tags and comments), but it can still get mangled or lost if it passes through software that doesn’t know what to do with it, or if preferences are set to strip it.
EXIF (camera data) and IPTC (cataloguing data) are -the- standard image metadata sets and are platform agnostic. Even though IPTC lacks a few things, it’s complete enough and well enough supported that it isn’t going to be supplanted for a long time. Both are embedded inside the file. Vast amounts of photo/image software can deal with at least the major subsets, and there are lots of utilities to do the same (exiftool, GUIs built on exiftool, and some utilities doing their own algorithms).
Apple Photos attaches its metadata such as captions and keywords as IPTC on export. I don’t know off hand remember any good free image metadata utilities for mac other than exiftool (command line), but Graphic Converter and A Better File Attributes are both pretty good for adding/changing both EXIF and IPTC.
Photoshop Elements is a popular consumer photo app on both windows and mac, and it certainly does at least the basic EXIF and IPTC. I don’t know if Google Photos on android does any metadata, but I’d hope that they’d have at least the tiny subset that Apple supports.
I haven’t scanned any photos for several years, but I don’t remember scansnap or vuescan letting me enter metadata per photo, and if that hasn’t changed, it’s an unfortunate lack.
I think the bigger problem is a combination of lack of awareness that the metadata features exist, the common perception of “but I’d never forget that!”, and even realizing that memory is fragile, a lack of time or toit to add the data. (Me? Procrastinate? I’ll get back to you on that…)
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I have been scanning photos recently, and neither VueScan nor Epson Scan have any point in their work flow to enter metadata. I also have Graphic Converter, and searching the Manual reveals 255 entries under “metadata” including a description of how to remove unwanted types of metadata, which reveals another problem. Several types of metadata exist, and they do not seem to be compatible. Add to that the generally poor documentation (Graphic Converter is an exception), and our own laziness and unawareness.
Graphic Converter provides an interface to edit captions and descriptions in the IPTC/XMP photo header. It is only available if you are in the Browse mode for dealing with a collection of photos in a folder. The edit function is available from the top menu (not the window menu via the clipboard icon next to the camera icon (at least in GC12). There are also many other tools for dealing with metadata, but this seems the best one for adding and modifying extended narrative information for photos.
I’m having trouble figuring out how to separate it out, so I think I’ll just leave it here for now.
With tons of thanks for all the insights shared above, I’ve come full circle and decided to throw $33 to Quicken Inc for an annual subscription. It easily handles all the cases that are likely to come up, such as assets and liabilities; it is portable for reference on iOS if I need that; and I have known how to use it since the mid 1990s.
Thanks to @glennf for the original article, and to all of you for your tips and tricks!
Matt, it’s a complete rewrite so what you knew with the prior Quicken is no longer applicable.
Diane
I’m not sure what you mean by “no longer applicable.”
It took me less than 30 minutes to set up my master register. All the main functions (especially auto fills of payees and categories) work exactly as I expected. I was able to set up asset and liability registers, enter items into them, and pay them in the master check register using a transfer category to zero them out of the liability registers.
Since I was doing this on a Sunday, I was not able to set up online banking with my new estate checking account, but I can handle that this week with a call to the bank. But my spouse set up (in a separate set of registers, of course!) our household finances—our bank and credit card information populated the registers without fuss.
In short, it took about 3 hours for us to put Quicken back to work, and especially with the estate I now know exactly where I stand and I’m confident that I have the tools I need for the milestones that await.
On second thought, @dianed143 Diane, I think what’s no longer applicable is all the Intuit cruft and crud that stemmed from their ambivalence about truly supporting Macs. It truly looks like Quicken Inc is doing their level best to purge the application of all the pain points and make that little sucker a pleasure to use—like it was when I first purchased it on a couple of 3.5” DS-HD discs so long ago.
Sounds like you’re up and running! What I meant is all the shortcuts, keystrokes, the way the reports work - nothing was even close to the same when I was testing it a few years ago. It was too mouse-oriented for me. Figured if I had to relearn a program I may as well see what else was out there (and I’m against subscription services as well).
Diane
Ahh…I see what you mean. Some of that is not an issue because of the long hiatus…for a long time my spouse has been doing our household books so I did not wear the yoke of keeping Quicken 2007 operating over the past decade and a half. Thus, little muscle memory to overcome. As I saw from another thread you ended up adopting SEE Finance, which I trialed last week. The interfaces (QD and SEE) look quite similar.
It appears that Quicken Deluxe is building helps into the program through autocompletes and macros. For instance, when I tab into a Check Number filed, a little pop up shows “NEXT check number” (like that, with NEXT bolded). I can type the letter “n” and tab to the next field. I’ll see the word “Next” in the field before I tab, and once I do it’s replaced with (of course) the next sequential check number.
Things are different for sure, but stuff like that is in the deep DNA of the application—I knew right away how to handle that pop up and even after just a few hours working with it, I already take it for granted because it did not get in my way and that’s “how it’s supposed to work.”
I’ll deal with reports as they come up, though I don’t see any trouble ahead there. Again, they do not look like they used to, but as far as I can tell it’s because Intuit was trying their level best to make it a non-Maclike program. (Full disclosure: I used both Quicken and MacInTax through the 90s and into 2002. I steadily grew to loathe Intuit as a developer and as a company, and have nothing good to say about them now.)
I know the subscription service thing is a non-starter for a number of us. I’m justifying it this way: if you recall @glennf ’s article and the very long thread that followed, one big takeaway is that nothing stays still in the financial sphere. Someone put it well when they said something like “banks and Quicken see each other as moving targets.” That means constant support and constant development.
I got out of Adobe software when they decided they wanted a revenue stream rather than a periodic license fee, and set their subscription price so high that only pro users and corporations can pay it. The howls from users were justified IMO, and not just because I was one of the ones who took the vow to squeeze every last drop of utility out of CS6 and never pay them one cent again. 
Which I am still doing to this day on my mid-2012 iMac…
The unfortunate backwash from that enormous move on Adobe’s part was the battle cry “I’ll never subscribe to software. Ever!” But I’ve mellowed on that score. I decided, for example, that an Office 365 subscription wasn’t so bad, because it came with stuff I would never get from the standalone version.
As for Quicken, seeing how Intuit could never justify maintaining the application properly unless Apple drove a six-colored bulldozer onto their campus, I think paying anywhere from $3 to $5 a month for use of the software on any platform, any device, is just fine. And unlike dealing with the robber barons at Adobe, when I decide to freeze my platform in place (I’ve just retired from my day job, but I’m just getting started with the tools!), I’ll still have the application locally on my computers, and it will still work; no updates and no Quicken in the cloud, but it will still function just fine.
To my way of thinking, there’s no comparison between the Adobe model and the Quicken model.
That makes sense! I was using Quicken 2007 until the change to SEE early last year. Of course SEE’s keystrokes are different as well but they are for the most part keystrokes. When I last trialed Quicken I had to mouse to each new entry in the register (which I’m sure they’ve fixed by now). It sounds like they’ve done a lot of work on the program in the past 5 or so years. I am not at all thrilled with the SEE report functionality but it’s not as important as the more frequently entries and bank recs.
I was also using Quicken and MacInTax in the 90 (really getting fed up with TurboTax at this point). And Quickbooks which I still use for clients (many people are looking at alternatives after Intuit’s latest price changes, even with Desktop)
I also have CS6 - Illustrator and Lightroom. My workflow is a little convoluted for photos now that I started playing in RAW but it is working so I’m happy to stay where I am without the subscription. Really wish Apple had kept Aperture but that ship really sailed didn’t it.
FWIW I do have a couple of year subscriptions but I swear this year the “update” on one of them was simply a font change in the interface. 
And as one who still works with Quickbooks daily, for the large Intuit fees broken features as just as common as actual enhancements - and that is a company that has the resources to really make a good program if they put their mind to it. IMO. So I’m a little jaded on the subscription thing!
I kind of miss the 90s when software innovations were pretty innovative! :)
Diane
Having held more than a few hands (metaphorically) as church folks struggled to get Quickbooks to do what they wanted in the past decade, I really get that. Intuit, despite their company name, seems to have a way of making almost any task in their software harder than it needs to be.
I agree that in general subscriptions are a crapshoot, especially for products that have matured. That’s why we seldom see the kind of leapfrog innovations that you and I both remember so mistily. I think it’s also why I’m so on board with the Arc browser, where every Thursday brings a new release, and most of those releases have involved substantial feature additions or useful tweaks.
The thing you mentioned upthread, though—that Quicken Inc had essentially released a new code base for Quicken—is a good argument for the subscription model. I’ve also noticed it in Path Finder, which had a wretched v.8 and middling v.9 release under its old licensing model, but seems to be back on track with regular and improving releases under subscription.
And why, oh why, did Apple ditch Aperture? Photos is still not half the app that Aperture was.
I suspect Quicken works well for Matt because he (and his spouse) are starting from scratch, not trying to import data files going back for nearly two decades, as I did. That’s a huge difference because Quicken made some major changes that broke things in old Quicken, like how I split payments. Once I got through that, and gave up all hope of trying to recover my old investment data, the main problems come from interactions between Quicken and the banking system, which continue to break things from time to time.
Yes, that is a very good point. We do not hold equities, as we allowed our wider church partners to invest them on our behalf. When I relinquished bill-paying duties to my spouse 12 years ago, we were just married; she preferred to use our bank’s online facilities for bill-paying and a rough idea of our cash position. It all worked very well until recently, when our regional bank was swallowed by a larger regional bank.
If we had tried to recover and use the files from 2001, they would have reflected a very different time in my life.
The plus side is that my spouse is now intensively focused on learning Quicken, and has a clear idea of how she wants to set up her books. Similarly, the estate position is young and every transaction is at my fingerprints. Thus I can use my general knowledge of Quicken to leverage its capabilities from the start instead of trying to figure out how to classify every transaction, asset, and liability.
I started a new Topic about archiving digital photos:
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I’ll also recommend Quicken for managing the financial estates of others.
My father’s Alzheimer’s led to me needing to manage my parents’ finances, along with my maternal grandmother’s (a task my father was handling). It was useful to have separate files for my personal accounts, my parents, and my grandmother. I could monitor my parents’ credit card spending and make sure bills were getting paid on time.
Quicken could even download “e-bills” so I knew the amount to expect when the auto-payments went through. I could set up recurring transactions for social security and pension payments, and for automatic billing to credit cards and checking accounts. And at the end of the year, I had organized information for the different CPAs preparing their taxes.
Another recommendation – order a credit report so you can identify all credit cards in the person’s name. There may be cards you didn’t know about when you assumed responsibility for their finances. If you’re handling a decedent’s estate, the cards might be canceled automatically (that happened with the only credit card in my grandmother’s name), but you’ll still want to pay off outstanding balances.
Finally, with my parents (both of whom have dementia now), I’ve established a credit freeze with the three major reporting agencies so they can’t open new credit cards. My father obtained an Apple Card last year without realizing what he’d done.
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Thanks for those tips @tomlogic ! I’m finding that Quicken is more like the old friend I first met 25 years ago than the monstrosity it became when Intuit owned it.
I have created liability accounts and asset accounts for the estate I’m currently administering, which is helpful as creditors make court mandated debt claims. I also know what I owe myself in expenses as I take multiple trips to the north country.
I won’t pay the bank $10 a month for Quicken Direct Connect, but quicken can take my online login information for my estate account and match it to what it finds in the check register. It’s basically the same, just for free.
Final reporting is going to be much easier because I’ve kept my books this way.
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