" (yes, I scanned in some very old photos)."
Well, there you go. You have hard copies of important photos. Great!
“Not a problem…I have hard drives and those are my primary backups. (Besides, most companies give you a warning and tell you to download any pictures you have prior to disappearing).”
The problem won’t ever be YOU knowing where the back ups are (maybe)–it’s your KIDS knowing what and where to look for pix. Keep your legacy safe and easily accessible.
I give up…you can keep your paper, I’ll keep my digital format…
It’s easier to have duplicate backups, share and pass down one or two hard drives than boxes and boxes of old photos.
Guess you missed the most important point.
There will never be boxes and boxes of “need to keep” photos.
After 40 years of photo taking by myself and 100 years of ancestral photos --it’s still manageable. You only save the best for generations. Decide what you want to accomplish when copying photos.
To keep only digital back ups especially with no weeding is just a way to tell the next generation that that none of it mattered. They’ll have their own million pix to sift through. To sift through your old photos with no context is the easy way to toss out history.
To rely on present technology to pass on that legacy is foolhardy in my opinion. It’s so easy to do both.
Well, I think that’s you, Gouf. Lots of people save every picture they ever took. I use to until I went digital. I still save most of them but now they are in the cloud and not cluttering up my home. I need to some day digitize the older paper pictures. As for my kids, I don’t think they are as into pictures as I was at that age. I think they don’t put as much importance in them.
Why in the world do people not realize that hard copies of photos are just as ephemeral as digital copies?
I went through the summer we had three hurricanes in Orlando a few years back. There were people—many people—who lost everything in their houses. All of their print photos were gone, soaked through and often blown away to parts unknown in the process. All of their digital photos were gone, with the destruction of their drives. (Cloud backups weren’t really a thing yet, but they’re subject to all sorts of disasters, ranging from lightning to corporate takeovers.)
Can people stop trying to convince each other that one is inherently superior to the other in terms of long-term storage? Really, the only thing that’ll get you out of the problem is multiple copies (i.e., lots of prints scattered around the world with family or friends, or multiple digital backups stored in multiple locations and preferably with multiple providers). If you’re not doing that—well, even if you are—enjoy 'em while you’ve got 'em, and don’t pretend you’re smarter than the person who chose a different route.
@ClaremontMom – I have the Epson V700, which is many years old now, and has managed to make the transition to my third iMac. This has not been the case with random HP laser printers, where HP doesn’t seem to release print drivers for the new Mac OS. I am probably getting the technical terms incorrect here, as I am not the resident techie, but I was pleasantly surprised that my many years old Epson V700 continues to connect to each new iMac.
I back up to that Time Machine device, but distrusting it, I back up to a 4TB drive every two months or so. (Should run back-up more often.) I used to keep the drive in the safe deposit box, but the drive is now too large to fit in the box. Trade-offs between size & capacity (4TB) and speed of thunderbolt connection. My iPhoto libraries are highly disorganized and it is beyond time that I delete all the tens of thousands HS & summer club swimming photos.
I still hope to scan old negatives and old photos. It is a LONG process, especially when you realize you have loaded the negatives into the little tray backwards. A friend lost photos to water damage from house fire. For a while, that motivated me to store the back-up drive at the bank, and start the scanning process.
Used to love making albums but have gotten away from it. The process is much easier than it was when I started more than ten years ago. I am partial to the My Publisher product, and prefer the traditional leather or linen covers. I have tried Shutterfly and Snapfish, and even though I am in Costco every five days, I still have not tried their service. I LOVE their photo printing. Think the print & color quality are excellent and prices cannot be beat.
If you do not have time to make an album, a fun holiday gift for family members is a photo collage. You can print a 16 x 20 collage for $7 and it is beautiful, or 12 x 18 for $4.
@dfbdfb wrote
I think people are struggling with the fact that they’re all ephemeral, and trying to show that their way is less ephemeral than someone else’s way. It’s a metaphor for mortality.
Eventually, we all just become strangers in a picture.
I think on some level we’re trying our best to prevent that, which is why people are getting so emphatic about it.
I have photos more than 100 years old. I don’t think computer systems will be the same 100 years from now to be able to view a photo.
I’m paralyzed by the question of what to do with all the negatives. My mom was a prolific taker of family snapshots, and she left 5 decades of many hundreds of envelopes and different formats of prints and negatives. She always stressed that the negatives must be kept in order to make quality copies of prints.
Of course, many of those old prints are starting to fade; should I be finding all the negatives that go with these prints (a monumental task) and use them to get better quality hard copies made, or would the negatives have degraded also with time?
I need to go through it all, including my own decades of pre-digital photos, sort out the ones worth keeping for the future, and hopefully get it down to a manageable number. The thought of sorting, AND matching to their negatives, AND finding a way to keep the negatives so that they remain connected to their photos, is daunting. I wish I could safely toss out all the negatives and eliminate that hassle for the next generation, but I wonder if that would be a huge mistake.
As mentioned before I am a scrapbooker. Along with saving the photos you must also save the stories or they will, indeed, become “pictures of strangers” . My scrapbooks tell the history of our family and what is happening around us. You need to journal so future generations have their family history. It is a fun hobby for me. I have a lovely scrapbook room/office so it does take up space. I just finished an album from my London/Paris trip. It would be hard to share photos from a phone or tablet. I had so many photos that it was easier to design it digitally and then print the book. My next project will be a hard copy album.
@Glenaerie - I found this article
http://imageoz.com/how-long-do-film-slides-and-negatives-last/
which states that negatives last longer than prints so it would seem you should try to use the negatives (though they also degrade).
Personally, I got rid of the negatives once I scanned in everything. But that was me, I didn’t want to store them anymore.
My father is, like his father, a camera geek. They both now have digital cameras, but they still mount lenses on them. I’m not sure about Grandpa, but my dad, new to retirement, spends hours daily obsessing on photography websites. Drives my mom nuts.
Anyway, when my wife and I were married nearly a year ago, my father’s very heartfelt present to us was an old-school film camera with about five different lenses. We took the camera and a few of the lenses with us – and several film cartridges – on our Boston/Bar Harbor honeymoon. We quickly made friends with the Pentax 28-80 lens. We’re not nearly good enough to use the F2 or F4 Macro lenses. The Samyang 70-210 (?) was especially hard to focus and the big Tamron 28-200 (?) with the adjustable sun-dampers wouldn’t stay closed (contracted) and, as a result, was very large and clunky to carry. These will all have their time to shine as my wife and I improve, but for our purposes and novice ability, we stuck with that 28-80 lens mostly.
We ended up printing around 250 photos.
All of these lenses were manual, however, so some of the photos weren’t perfectly focused.
And I had an accident loading a roll of film – several photos ended up being exposed.
Still, we ended up with some beautiful photos, blowing up a few and framing them and standard-sizing (and framing) several others. Those and the rest are in our honeymoon scrapbook.
Dad since, at this past Christmas, gave us a digital body, which can focus automatically. We can still mount our lenses on it. Things will definitely be easier now, but choosing the right lens will keep some of the art in it.
Negatives also degrade. Prints degrade. digital formats change.
Or, as foreseen 2,039 years ago: *Vita summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam/i.
Now I see why Crazy Horse refused to have his picture taken.
This is so true. For the past year, whenever I’m together with my mother, I have been asking her questions about family history, and recording it. She has not only shared the details of everyone back as many generations as she knows about, but also sharing stories about these family members. Once she’s gone, the stories will be, too. I want this family history, for my own interest, but also for my Ds and my grandchildren. As for the old photos, we went through all the old family photos, some dating back a hundred years!, a while ago and all are noted with identification, names, places, etc.
“Negatives also degrade. Prints degrade. digital formats change”
Color prints and color negatives do degrade. Black white prints and negatives are very stable, especially if they are stored properly. Matthew Brady’s black and white prints of the Civil War look as fresh as they did 150 years ago, and they can still today pull beautiful prints off of his negatives. I carry in my wallet a black and white print of my late father as a young man posing for a formal portrait in his Air Force uniform that was taken and printed around 1949 - still as sharp and clear as ever. In the context of a human life span, a good quality B&W print will last you forever.
Count me as one of those who is going in both directions. I get prints made of digital pictures that I particularly like, and I scan in to create digital versions of old prints that I particularly like. The weakness of prints is that they disappear if your house burns down or you otherwise lose the photo album. The weakness of digital is they disappear if someone erases the file, or if the cloud company that promised to hold them forever goes out of business.
But I’ll never go completely digital. Digital formats just don’t hold still long enough for me to put much faith in them. Plus, I’ve seen a lot more computer files accidentally get erased and tech companies go belly-up than I have ever seen house fires or people accidentally throw out their photo albums.
We have a fire-proof safe. Inside the fire-proof safe we have a smaller fire-proof safe. That gives us 2 hours of hot fire for the first safe and another two hours for the second one. The photo albums are in the outer safe; the really important stuff is in the inner safe. None of it is “valuable” because that stuff is insured.