Hi folks,
Thanks a million for thinking this through on my behalf. I’ll try using the “Item” feature for my letters (about 4,000 photos or so), though my whole project has about 18,000 photos so that seems a bit daunting!
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Ok! I just tried Sylvester’s advice of creating a new List and “exploding” a big Item into smaller Items and then stacking letters together. That seems pretty efficient! The only problem now is that no matter where I set the preview zoom slider, it cuts off the top few inches that includes the letter-writer’s name(!) so I need to open each image to make sure all of my letters are grouped together. I’m not sure why this is so–there is a pretty good margin all around my letters --but I think the photo preview dimensions are more of a box than a rectangle, thus cutting off some of the picture (just like Instagram). Ah well, I think I can manage!
I see the logic of treating individual documents as Items and pegging specific tags to each Item, but I still think tagging individual photos would work well for something like a scrapbook with multiple newspaper clippings on each page. Given a hypothetical page has 4-6 newspaper clippings, one would need to duplicate the same page 4-6 times to create 4-6 different Items, thus turning a 100 page book into 400-600 pages, which might clutter the Item-level interface a bit (seeing 6 of the same image might be a bit confusing). A tiny gripe, however, given that I used to organize my documents using a very cumbersome mix of iPhoto and MS Excel!!!
In any case, thanks again(!) for your help and advice and I think, at least for my letters, I’ll be able to convert to individual items pretty easily.
Best,
John