My father, an early adopter of nearly everything, took on a project to digitize a collection of historical family photos that had accumulated over many generations and that were now in his possession.  It was the early years of digital photography when scanning technology was barely up to the task, and computer image file formats were crude by today’s standards.

Nevertheless, he forged ahead and built a repository of over 700 scanned photographs dating back to the 1800s.  He recognized a weakness in the collection—there was no context, no annotations, no identifications of the people portrayed.  Old photographs lose their value when this information, originally held in the memories of those who were around at the time, is not recorded. 

My father knew this and wanted to somehow attach the information about the photo, in the scan of the photo.  I know this, because he asked me (an imaging scientist) about how to do it.  Unfortunately, at the time, there was no standardized way to embed such “metadata” within existing image file formats.  He was a man ahead of his time.