David Popham Loc: French Creek, British Columbia

Last year my wife and I had the good fortune to be able to drive a camper van from Toronto to Vancouver at a leisurely pace. Even better, we took our golf clubs as well as all of my camera stuff. So I took lots of pictures of our trip.

Once home I processed them all. What I decided to do with them was to make an album. I only had 20 pages to use and I wanted some of the pictures close to an 8 by 10 format. That meant culling, and culling and more culling.

The album is hard covered and the pages are quite robust. That album sits on our coffee table in the living room. Our guests can look at it our their leisure.

The title of the album is, "This Is My Canada". And, yes, our guests have looked at it at their leisure.

I think this is one way of preserving the pictures. I'll be doing the same for our trip to Nevada, Arizona, and Utah that we took in late winter of this year. At the Grand Canyon we had three seasons in three days: fog, rain, and snow with clear patches of sky. Loved every moment of it! And the locals were great hosts.

Note to my fellow Canadians; I used London Drugs. The lab was very helpful when some minor glitches occurred.

gessman Loc: Colorado

I'm not looking to "get anything started," especially that will hijack this thread but you, it would seem, are hoping against hope. As long as the Mormons have a lock on all the genealogy sites on the 'net and the imperative of mandatory genealogy research for the church members is in place, your genealogy efforts will be defeated anyway because sooner or later one of your near relatives will become a member and submit their version of your genealogy to the archives and in order to be "complete" they sometimes sorta fail to be exactly thorough in their "research" while "mining the web" for their family history. In another ten years you probably won't be able to recognize your family history because fabrication will have altered it to the point it is unrecognizable and those pictures you're talking about will have a whole 'nuther set of names on them in some of those LDS archive gedcom files. Ask me how I know but in another thread of course. You worry about getting back past "The Revolution" to "the old country and Charlemagne" and soon you won't be able to accurately get out of the county you live in back to 1935 all because the Mormons want to retroactively have all their ancestors saved and moved on into heaven which, of course, increases the church membership and makes it the fastest growing church in the world, among other things.

jsharp Loc: Ballwin MO.

Not only the 5 1/4 but even the 3 1/2 still have a desktop computer to read them.

gessman Loc: Colorado

Me too! I retire my computers intact and functional before they crap out on me, put 'em in a box, and store them elevated in the basement so they can be brought out, plugged in with anticipation that they'll work which they have up to now. I run four computers on a harness with three different versions of Windows with different peripherals such as slide scanners etc., the drivers for which have not been and won't be updated for later versions of Windows, as well a unix (ubuntu) computer for going on the 'net since they're not so susceptible to virus attacks, etc.

blackest Loc: Ireland

A reputable service has a proper back up and restore strategy in place. If a company was to lose a hard drive, would they say whoops and close up shop?

blackest Loc: Ireland

wouldn't it be better to have at least one other copy safe elsewhere. If one cup of coffee spills on that coffee table would your album survive it ?

billwassmann Loc: Emerson, NJ

OK boys and girls, I am interested because for 32 years I have been town historian. My wife originally got me going but she's gone. We collected a lot of old photos at yard sales, antiques shows, etc. I've sold many because my offspring are not interested and I'm 85. I'm concerned that
digital capture will not be adequate to preserve them. All of your comments are valid. Prints can be be lost or destroyed but so can a computer file. As pointed out, a properly processed print can last indefinitely. But prints have a way of becoming a part of a collection; will someone
be collecting old CDs or hard drives of photos? For years I have been clipping articles about my town, photocopying them and keeping a file. A future historical researcher will have a record for those years. I'm trying to alert fellow photographers about the future.

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

[quote/]I think a select number of prints organized into physical photo albums have a far better chance of long-term survival than a vast collection of digital files on hard drives.[/quote]

I completely agree!!

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

Are you also giving a copy to the new historian in your town?

I have thought about the future of my pictures. That's why I make scrapbooks, plus each child has their own color. Some day they can take the books I made for them of their kids & events. They all love looking at their books.

Or...you could just put your pics & copies out on the Web & they'll be there forever like all those nude pictures of the stars! Ha!

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

That's where a wide format scanner would come in handy. Copies of the pages could be kept on a disc and/ or thumb drive, clearly marked (place, date, etc.), and stored in a fireproof box. Give the extra key to someone younger that cares about what's inside.

blackest Loc: Ireland

I forget the capacity of a 51/4 disc (single or double sided) but the common pc 3.5 floppy held 1.44 MBytes, those of you with nikon 800's would need 30 floppy disks (roughly) to hold a single image.

At one time i must have had around 3,000 floppy discs at 720k each (amiga) thats less than 4GB (a single DVD) my dads first PC had a 20 MB hard drive my quantum fireball was 52MB.

(i've probably got most of those floppy disks as DMS files (disk images) stored on a few gold cd's I don't have the hardware but UAE is an emulator that can run on a PC and open and run them. (it ran reasonably well on a 133MHZ Pentium I).

If I had the interest I could copy them to a microsd card the size of a fingernail and still have 90% of the disk free. It's kind of funny the cost of an entry level hard drive seems to have been about £50 for years thats what i paid for 50 MB in the mid 90's now 500,000 MB costs about the same.

File formats don't change that much audio uncompressed was saved as .wav (still is) your first pictures on your windows 3.1 pc were probably .Bmp files (they will open on windows 8.1). Anyone remember .rtf (rich text format), still readable. There are exceptions but thats usually been for lock in and upgrade purposes.

GrandmaG Loc: Flat Rock, MI

The idea of presenting a slide show on the TV us a good one...especially for a quiet adult crowd. The slide show takes me back to the days when my grandfather got out the slide projector & displayed all those embarrassing shots he took of us kids. BTW, I still have those slides!

However, I do have to disagree that this is better than photo albums. My family gatherings are hectic, loud, & little children with short attention spans are aplenty. Since I have many books, I just leave a few out & they get looked at in small groups and passed around to whomever is interested!

Selkii Loc: Oakland, CA & Vancouver Island

Watchcow's explanation was right on the mark. I've been in computers (building as well as working with them) since the 70's. My worry is what will happen to the digital images of the average family. I, personally, have spent a small fortune over the decades transferring data, not only images, from one recording medium to another as technology changes. Not everyone can afford to do that, yet photography is available to anyone who can afford a P&S or has a Smartphone.

As for analog, even though there are archival methods to preserve prints, not everyone has done that. I remember when "magnetic" photo albums were the "in thing" - cardboard sheets with tacky surfaces and a clear plastic overlay. I never heard anyone question the longevity of photos mounted this way. I did it as a teenager and my photos faded. My parent's and grandparent's albums that hold photos on black paper and adhesive corners are still as good as when they were placed there, except for some that have begun to crack.

As for family members willing to continue to preserve these memories after we are gone...many will. But, even if a grandchild, or niece, or third cousin promises they will, life happens, priorities change, and what was once important becomes a burden...something to do later where "later" comes too late. In my work trying to save digital images and data for clients, I've seen the latter happen too often. And, more shockingly, I have had cases where I have been told point blank by a son or daughter not to bother saving the old, digital photos of their parents, just their documents! Note - on each occasion, I refused, saved the photos (when possible), and was thanked later when they finally realized what they would have lost, but at that moment of decision, the photos held no importance to them.

For myself, I and my sister preserve our family's analog photos (both albums and scanning), backup my digital images with multiple redundancies, will leave it all to my heirs and not worry about what they will do with it as I will have no say in the matter.

watchcow Loc: Moore, Oklahoma

If the goal is to preserve history, one of the problems, for there are many, is to get someone else engaged in the process. People tend to do things not because it is the right thing to do, but because they develop a passion for doing it. It might be worth casting a net, facebook posting,s craigslist advertisements, making appeals to civic organizations or perhaps if there is a church in the area that has been around a long time it might be worth talking to the pastor to assist in finding interested parties or organizations that might result in one or two people that have an interest in local history and are willing to carry that torch. If the city or county government, or a nearby regional museum would be willing to host some of the resultant materials, i could see some of your work collected and possibly transformed along the way. People that are crazy about scrapbooking could be put to a task they love to preserve something that would end up on display elsewhere. the main thing is to make sure people are using copies of your original work and none of those originals, or very little of it gets used directly in exhibits. Newspaper clippings seem to be the most problematic since light and moisture tend to be the death cf sulfate processed paper. newspaper can be preserved much longer by neutralizing these acids, and one of those is a weird mixture of alka-seltzer and 7-up, or club soda and milk of magnesia. i am sure there are better solutions now, but there have been ways to do this for years. The photographs could be preserved using some standardized format, and saved to archival grade optical disks, CD or DVD, and those are pricey and not always easy to find. for display digital picture frames or small smart TVs can be had now and they can be fed files via flash memory, but there needs to be a well kept master record from which these things can be refreshed from time to time, and even that needs to be rolled forward onto new media every few years just to make sure it is retained and checked with a critical eye to see that the files have not been compromised. It seems odd that in a time when we have some pretty good materials and methods for preserving history, that our culture seems most fixated on preserving every other trivial thing.

David Popham Loc: French Creek, British Columbia

Hope this works as a reply. The album is really robust. And it's nature seems to evoke "respect" for it. However, I could use a damp cloth should such an event occur. Also, I ask my guests not to drink or eat when they are looking at the album. It doesn't take long to look at it, and so they are willing to do what I ask. And that includes the grandkids. Also making the album is not cheap, so I'd rather assume the risk.