On the way back to East Lansing today (more about that in the coming days) I started to think about how I want to scan all my mom and dad’s old pictures so we have digital copies of them.  The biggest issue I’m having trouble overcoming is how to sort them because naming them scan__#####.jpg is going to be really hard to keep track of.  I have been keeping my pictures in folders based on the date they were taken but I don’t know the date a lot of them were taken.  The best I could do is try and estimate the date they were taken based on what is going on in the picture.

I started thinking about how it would be nice to have some kind of program that helped you create a personal timeline.  It would be a lot like the journal feature on Outlook only about things that are important.  It could start out with you birth and end with the current date (or your death I suppose) and include anything of great importance.  Things like birthdays, anniversaries, and so on could be automatically calculated so you don’t have to add 100 birthday events. Then you can add pictures/scans from various sources that help document the occasion.

I’m going to start looking for something that does this and I might actually start working on this as a side project (like I need any more).  It would be nice if you could link your social graph into this as well.  I’m sure there is a Facebook app for this but I don’t know if I want to lock that kind of data into a single host.