Using another picture as a picture caption

[pH]

Not directly related to railways, but I thought I'd ask here. I have a collection of family photographs to scan. They have details written on the back. I would like to associate, in some way, an image of what is written on the back of a picture with the image of the front - for example as a caption. I'd like to do this for two reasons - 1) to preserve the handwriting of the people who wrote the information and 2) to reduce the chance of introducing errors while interpreting the writing and keying the information as a text-only caption.

 

Is there any photo-editing software that would let me do this? I've had a look at Picasa and Photoshop, but don't see any obvious ways to do it. 

 

Thanks in advance for all replies.

[Stubby47]

Depending on the 'shape' of the text on the reverse, you could use an image editing program to increase the size of the canvas to provide white space along one edge of the main image, then paste an image of the text in this area.

Stu

[eastwestdivide]

Yes, most foolproof way is to have a single image with both front and back on the same image. That way you can't forget to copy the "associated" file. Stubby47's way seems as good as any.

Alternatively, your scanner might have a setting for multi-page scans - the first page scans, then the computer tells you to manually insert/flip over/change to the second page and press a button on the scanner when ready, then it scans the second, and the computer tells you to change to the third or press escape (or something) to complete the job. It then assembles the two (or however many) scans into a multi-page document.

[pH]

Thanks for the replies.

 

I had thought about using something like Paint to create space below the picture and copying the image of the back into that. In some cases, where there's a lot of writing on the back, I could see possible problems with size/aspect. But it remains a possibilty.

 

The scanning software I have (it came with the scanner - an Epson) does have multi-page functionality, but it appears to work for documents only, not for images. The manual isn't great, but I'm pretty sure about that.

 

What I have done as a trial is to copy one of the biggest photos I have, then insert the images of front and back into a Word document. With some adjustment of margins, It fitted onto a single page with reasonable detail visible on the image. I think I might go with this - if anyone wants a bigger copy, I can always do that separately.

 

And I will also have a look at some other scanning software.

[eastwestdivide]

I'd hesitate to use Word as a container for images. In my experience, as Word files get larger and more complex, they have a tendency to get corrupted.

[Kenton]

Could consider the two images as layers - it is possible to then have these layers visibility controlled through a "hotspot" on the image. The caption image the appears to the viewer on mouse over a specific area of the 'photo' image. Technically a little bit more challenging but very effective. The program Fireworks enabled this in the dim distant days of 1990's I still am using v2 !!