genocolo Loc: Vail and Gasparilla Island

Most of us have photos, videos, albums, etc which are meaningful to us and may provide a kind of visual family history. We probably hope that at least some of our siblings, children, grandchildren and other family would like to be able to view and keep some of these, after we are gone or so disabled as not to be able to transfer or maintain them. Physical scrapbooks used to be a common way to accomplish the same thing.

So, what are you doing?

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Not my problem. : )

My son has most of the family pictures that I have, so he's covered. He also has his own online albums. Worrying about thousands of pictures of birds and cars and dogs is not on my To Do List.

Drip Dry McFleye

I, for one, am convinced that no one will much care about the images I have created EXCEPT the ones that are of family and friends. What I currently do is create albums in PS Elements and then put them on flash drives and discs as well as save the originals both in my computer and on the SD card. All of these devices are marked as to what is on them. Certain albums (like the ones with the grandchildren) are given to others on a flash drive or disc right after processing in the hope that they will be a record of our times. I know that there is no one perfect way to preserve them but this is what I have decided on.

DavidThompson Loc: Asheville, NC

My father passed away at 91 yrs in 2003. We often passed time as he flipped thru photo albums reminiscing. Each year of his youth his parents possibly had taken 4 pictures while I was shooting hundreds on my kid’s Christmas Mornings, Soccer games and horseback riding, etc. The albums of my father showed the family, a country house and focused on people vs possessions and activities. I recently looked at the boxes of my parents slides in Kodak Carousels each labeled as trips, Egypt, Europe,etc. Some 60 to 100 slides on had one slide of any of us, the rest being scenery. I don’t think I or anyone will find amateur pictures of churches, castles and farm land very interesting. A compromise between 4 pictures per year and thousands is my thought. I book for each kid with discards buy kid for them to decide keeper. All 3 of my kids are highly successful but they and their friends are minimalists and they are not burdened by possessions - pretty smart. When our parents passed, we and our kids picked desired objects with a trunk for each one. Years later, as adults, cut glass and silver objects are just not desired.

Curmudgeon Loc: SE Arizona

I don't, I have no one who will care when I'm gone

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

If you're seriously worried about your family finding and using your images, stop worrying about it and start doing something about it.

a) Have you exported all your edited images?

b) Are all your images keyworded with a rich set of search words and names of people in the images?

c) Have you created and shared your edited images on a useful physical media and / or internet-based shareshite to all members of your family?

d) Have you written a 1-page documentation and shared and discussed that written organization of your work on your computer along with sharing the images directly with your family?

e) Have you aggressively culled and curated your portfolio? Or, are you just leaving a digital episode of Hoarding: Buried Alive to your family?

f) Have you considered commercial printing and possibly framing specific images?

g) Have you considered creating photobooks around events, people or themes from your portfolio?

luvmypets Loc: Born & raised Texan living in Fayetteville NC

I don't have anyone either so mine will probably be trashed when I'm gone but I will enjoy them while I have them.

I would like to suggest to everyone that you somehow label your photos of who, what and/or where. Even though you have told the story to someone they might not be around to tell it to the next generation. I have my grandfather's photos and they have no notations leaving me to wonder. It would have been so nice to know the names and stories that went with the photo.

Dodie

Harry0 Loc: Gardena, Cal

Print them.
From 8" floppies to 128gb flash drives- some have died out.
Hard drives failed, a ransomeware attack, online service loses them, PC thefts.
I have prints and slides from the 50s that are still pretty good. A WW1 photo.
So, being low on a warranty list, I'm going to make specific albums for my remaining kids and siblings.
Which isn't as many as I'd like.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I have my family photos in LR organized by year. The year goes back to 1822 (scans of family documents from those years since photography wasn't invented yet). Names of people in the photos are keyworded onto the metadata.

A fat lot of good that will do when I am gone since nobody in my family knows the first thing about Lightroom and a lot of them have never even heard the word "metadata".

So I have duplicated the family photos in jpgs, placed them with meaningful file names onto a meaningfully named folder structure. I have let my family know that it's there.

In addition, and particularly for the aged family members who don't do computers, I prepared a PDF file with the photos and documentation. I printed it out and mailed it to those who do not compute, along with the genealogy so they can keep track of whom is who. A copy is on my website and those who know what a URL is have been sent one.

I believe there are a couple of family members who will keep it and pass it along, but there are also many who are not interested. Their loss.

I should also note that I was a member of the Historical Society in the last town I lived in (before retirement). I took a lot of photos of the town to document things (and people). I sent copies to the Historical Society for their records (they have a drawer full of photos in the Town Vault).

PS: you might be interested in my writeup Adding Documentation to Family Photos since it gives you some ideas on adding documentation to images. Documentation will be important eventually because not all the family members know what their ancestors looked like.

rook2c4 Loc: Philadelphia, PA USA

Yeah, printing is the way to go for long-term image preservation. Even decades later prints can easily be viewed by anyone interested. With technology constantly changing, the content on hard drives may be difficult to access... assuming the hard drives are still functioning and readable after so much time has passed.

tcthome Loc: NJ

I'm not. My sister takes care of this. She even steals the best 4"x6" prints out of my albums from before digital. Any digital that is seen & somebody wants a copy, gets one.

TanglewodFarmer Loc: NW.Ar.

thank you. joe

ELNikkor

Since 2006, all my photos are organized in folders by the year and month. All the family photos will be isolated in folders in that order and digital copies made for each interested relative. The copies of photos previous to 2006 will be in labeled folders.

dpullum Loc: Tampa Florida

Step 1 is the trash can as stated by my friend in England a UHH member. She said I thought they were good photos back then, now I judge them to be trashcan ready. Too many photos will be meaningless to future generations.

Formats... JPEG will be around for a long time.... same them on 8 inch or the more modern 5 inch floppy disks.. what? have they changed!!! What you save the JPEG files on is the concern, storage changes. The micro SD inserts would same storage space, but like the dropped eye contact lens, lost with a sneeze.
https://www.dataversity.net/brief-history-data-storage/

I keep telling my grandsons to save photos of their children ... 10 year later they will be meaningful full.
I have photos I took in grade school... good for a snicker... wow we were funny.

Phontography is a transient format emailed and soon forgotten because there are so many and the composition is fast and sloppy ... film was expensive and 12 per roll restricted up to compose well. At 1200 on a SD we became sloppy, and now with my camera taking video and allowing me an 8 mp single one of hundreds could be selected.

Composition, my mother decapitated more people than the french revolution.

We must be realistic our photos may well go like Kanes sled Rosebud. Peggy Lee sang what will it all matter 100 years from today.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/25/citizen-kane-rosebud
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBMJPNPoUAQ

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

Family photos or old family houses etc. (Things that have intrinsic value to others) are scanned, noted with written captions then saved as well as distributed.
As Jerry said all the other meaningless crap like sunsets, birds etc. will likely be erased, destroyed or what ever and who cares.
Even 98% of travel photos are for the photographer to remember as others generally could care less about the trip to the Galapagos or Africa to see some animal or bird or scene that they can look up any time on Google and perhaps get a better photo.
I look at some old travel photos of my grandparents of a tree and it is pretty meaningless.
But a photo of a relative traveling Germany standing by a big Nazi symbol in the 1930's is quite interesting because they are in it.