Suggest photography era threshold when posting, 1850 professional, 1888 home use ??
Example: FamilySearch sent me a picture of 4th great grandma Susanna Miller. It could not be her because she died in 1842. Photography only became available to professionals about 1850. Home cameras from Kodak, 1888. (So maybe this is a later relative. If there is a label on back it could have been an older guess. . . )
Please help educate the populace. Photos of people who died before 1850 are very misleading and are probably not possible.
Lou M., digitization specialist, graphic designer, photographer
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Agreed! I have an ancestor who died in the early 1850s as an old man, but people keep attaching a portrait of a young man, apparently gotten from Ancestry or FindAGrave. It happens so often I finally created an alert note warning of the impossibility of this photograph being accurate.
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I suppose some sort of informational message about the chronology of photography might be good, but it would have to be very carefully worded to avoid angering users who are trying to post an image of a painting.
And whatever you propose, don't expect the computer to tell photographs and paintings apart. (See for example the mouseover text in the bird-photography xkcd panel.)
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