cdayton

That’s my thought although I’ve created a few books that future generations might leaf through and laugh at our dress. Now, my Jag is a different matter.

delder Loc: Maryland

I agree!

I actually save family photos in folders per which part of our family etc. IN ADDITION to camera roll files. With External hard drives, I don't have to worry about file space.
ALL files in JPEG for interchangeably and "portability".

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

"Roll Files" - I noticed that's a new thing in Win 11???
What the heck is that?
Another place for things to get lost?
I hate it when the computer tries to "organize" crap for me.....
Like "Downloads" shows up in what, four places in the Explorer directory list?

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

There are several different topics here which I will try to address:
(1) Triage and preservation of important non-family photos
(2) Preservation of family photos
(3) Identification of family photos

(1) Which photos to preserve?
I have something like 35,000 photos in my LR catalog. My hand-waving estimate is that 2% of them will be of interest to someone after I am gone. About 1.5% of those are family photos.

While I am alive, the rest of those photos have value. A friend from High School died a few days ago. I was able to dig into the pile and extract a half-dozen photos that showed him, so I could contribute to the memorial service. This has happened several times in the past few years. Even though those photos are not what I would call great photos, they present a memory to someone. This constitutes a useful resource, although not an essential resource, so that will disappear with me.

(2) The 1.5% making up the family photos are things I feel should be preserved. There are photos, copies of slides, and scans of documents dating back to the early 1800s. They are all in my Lightroom catalog and exist as a mixture of jpg and raw files on the disk. The digital copies WILL NOT SURVIVE. To be sure, they have a chance of survival, but it is slim. They could be extracted and placed on a disk but that will not be enough. The photos from the mid-1800s show that the BEST way to preserve an image is silver on paper. The negatives (if they ever existed, depending on the process used) are long gone. The prints have survived more than a century even though they were not stored in ideal conditions. That is probably more luck than survival ability.

I believe that the best way to preserve images is in the form of prints. Of course careful storage is an essential part of that. Prints can be damaged by light, heat and humidity. Digital images do not degrade, but the media they are stored on will. And technology changes, so a given medium may not be usable in the future. And the pace of change is increasing, so the half-life of digital media gets shorter with time.

(3) Identification of people. Like many others I have a box of old photos and a few albums of photos. Probably 90% of them are not labelled in any way. I have a couple hundred photos from the 1800s of people who are most likely in my family but nobody alive knows who they are. For this reason, documentation should be combined with the remaining photos in a way that will survive the test of time.

The only sure way to document a photo is to place text ON THE IMAGE. Sure, it detracts from the artistry of the image, but it will not get lost if someone makes a copy. What is the most important part of a photo of an ancient relative? The face. The clothing may be of interest, but it is not essential. The background is probably a little less important than the clothing. So add text to the background near the subject. Do this on the digital image so both digital and print copies will have the information.

Secondary methods of documentation involve adding white space to the border and placing text there. While this may preserve the artistry of the image, it allows someone to crop off the non-artistic text.

Group shots are a special case. I have a couple examples of group shots with associated text giving names by row. In some cases the number of heads and the number of names in a row do not match. In other cases the rows are not well defined because some people are tall and some short. To avoid that sort of thing, I try to create an outline of the people, and blank out the faces and replace them with numbers. I can then make a numbered list of names. This makes it easier to associate the name with the person in the group. I then place all three of these elements (image, outline, list) onto a single digital image, then print it. Of course this makes it possible for someone to take a pair of scissors and cut off the unsightly outline and list, leaving only the undocumented image. The only way around that is to plaThce names onto the image. The problem there is that the text gets pretty small when there are a lot of people in the group.

Documentation should address Who, What, Where, When, Why (or as many of those as can be determined).

Some suggested CDs for storage. I do not agree. CDs do not store enough to be useful, and although archival quality disks can be purchased I do not trust them to last. There's a difference between home-burnt CDs and commercially pressed CDs. The commercially produced CD will last longer. BUT, the CD is an obsolete medium. You would not store your data on 8-track tape, wire, or wax cylinders, would you? How would you extract the data 50 years from now?

How to pass the family photos on

The larger question is how do you pass important information to your successors? What life insurance policies do you have? What bank and/or investments accounts to you have? Deeds? Properties? Other valuable stuff? What is your antique car worth? Your collection of fish flies? Whatever.

You should have a file with the important stuff enclosed in it. The file should be located where it can be accessed by your successors. It should include prints of all your important images, on archival material. It should also include a disk with digital copies of all the important items. (If this is a large pile of stuff it should be in a box stored somewhere accessible and information on how to find the box included in the file with other important stuff).

This is my take on passing stuff to posterity. YMMV.

PS: I have a couple of user pages describing how to place documentation on digital photos. The printing is up to you (but use archival media).
Start with Adding documentation to family photos

huntmj

Good question. I have two set of pictures, family ones and photo club material.
I make a family calendar and year book at Christmas. My plan, if i ever get round to it is to copy the family ones to HDDs and offer the kids a copy each if they want it. The other photos are only of interest to me i think

RodeoMan Loc: St Joseph, Missouri

what is the best thing, you've heard this week that you find so true? There is no way from your reply to know who you are responding too.

RodeoMan Loc: St Joseph, Missouri

Amen to that, me too.

RodeoMan Loc: St Joseph, Missouri

Sad isn't it. You don't have to squint very hard to read between the lines.

goldenyears Loc: Lake Osewgo

Same goes for software and websites... I hate it when anything changes without warning or explanation. There may or may not be release notes, and when there are, they're often useless. I spent an entire career working with end users of technology and very quickly learned to anticipate and avoid their wrath by making change as easy as possible for them. I also learned how difficult it was to communicate change to them. Now I'm the end user, suffering myself from the same thing. If you have a favorite dish and expect it to taste the same every time, but it doesn't, are you happy with the cook?

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Hmmm...
But the "cook" didn't make the dish more cumbersome/complicated like they made the Explorer directory list.
I wonder how duplicating folder locations/list structure made it easier for them.

MDI Mainer

I'm with Louis XV on this, "Après nous, le déluge."

RodeoMan Loc: St Joseph, Missouri

This is a thoughtful entry. There are so many factors involved in this matter including even the generational differences between the youth and the members of the geezer class. We tend to play more importance on stuff; we collect souvenir and momentos and save the talismen's not only of our younger years anything that we have developed an interest in, but also in representations of previous generations of our lineage. Thus where we like old cabinet cards and solid oak, for many of the young a digital image and pressed wood is sufficient. It is is difficult to bequeath the treasures of our lives to a generation of folks who aren't particularly interested in them. It is, at least for me, difficult to accept this.
Many of us for our personal photographs have sort of way of ordering these. For instance, I have family pictures, photographs of friends, photographs of our house and yard including various projects, images of our animal friends through the years, pictures of various subjects in St Joseph where I live including all the old schools, churches and movie theatres and images made during travel and just day trips around the area. There are other categories such as when I got a bug to shoot black & white film and archived each roll one right after the other in separate albums.
The images of places in St Joseph, I could offer to the local historical society. This would include images of my house which is one of the older ones in town, predating the Civil War. I could give various friends pictures I have taken of them over the decades. The family images would be more diifficult. I could keep the photographs and not pass them on and they would die along with me; or I could pass them on to someone else and more likely than not they would die with that recipient.
This has got me started with an inkling of an idea which would be the creation of a genealogical family repository where folks could leave their family images for future retrival. There would need to be some basic requirements: all images would have to identified, none for illegal or illicit purposes, the repository would have complete control once received. Thus, if for example, the same basic image of the same person appeared a number of times, the duplicates or near duplicates could be eliminated. There would all sorts of bugs to be worked out, but this would a possibility for those who do not have immediate family interested in the family, but who want to leave a photographic record for that distant family member in the future to use.

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

Some historical societies will maintain a genealogical record of local families. I suspect they would welcome photos or other documents related to those families. That sort of thing will be highly variable, and with the current level of family mobility it may not be really viable for your current family. Similarly, some states maintain genealogical records of families that have some impact on the state.

There are a number of genealogical websites. Some of them accept photos to go with a genealogy. The problem is picking the right genealogical website. Websites in general are ephemeral. Somebody has a great idea to start a website addressing a need so they do it. After a few years or decades, the original guy is gone and the website loses steam and dies. The Mormon Church maintains a genealogical website as part of their faith. You don't have to be a member of their religion to use the website, but since it's a matter of faith to them it should be a long term project. There may be other similar websites, but that one seems to me to be one of the best choices. I am not a member of that religion so you might want to do your homework to determine how they use your data.

A website I have used occasionally is findagrave.com. It presents photos of gravestones and sometimes has photos of the people. It's useful for genealogical research but I have no clue as to how permanent it is.

While it is true that some youth are not concerned with genealogy (I wasn't when I was a kid), you are not limited to dealing with your immediate family. Most people have cousins and second and third cousins. That will expand the pool of people who could possibly be interested in the family data and photos. Put something together, generate a PDF and send it around to all the people you can identify as being family. If they are interested they might ask for more.