PhotoFem

Be like street photographer Vivian Maier...become discovered on film.

James Slick Loc: Pittsburgh,PA

In the end the type of storage won't matter unless someone down the line saves it. Even physical prints. We know from experience that prints have the best chance of survival, But of all of the photos taken in the last 170 years, how many exist today? We talk about ancient stone carvings, but what percentage of the record do they represent of their civilizations? Who knows. Photos are kept either by knowingly passing them on, Or by accedent. I'm willing to bet MOSTLY by accedent. When I'm digging in to my city's history, the best photographic resource has been the recently digitized photos by the city's official photographer done over the last 100+ years. This position was not to record history,but to document the work of the public works departments. Ephemeral photos that just remained due to government inertia! Yep, the best and most accurate depiction of Pittsburgh, photographically, exists by accedent! This is likely true of family photos as well.

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

Properly preserving is the key here. The preservation requires action and that requires that other people (your successors) take that action.

Also, there is less maintenance required for B/W images. Color depends on organic dyes that are sensitive to light exposure (in the long term). Digital preserves the color information, but preservation of digital data requires more work than preservation of silver-based images.

kocart Loc: Illinois

Only keep the best of the best for your great grand children--I suggest publishing in books; make enough for the grandkids, and keep extra prints also. Anything else will certainly perish. Cloud and external hard drives are for current access and usage. You determine your legacy and you must publish whatever you wish to pass on.

dshirley

I'm glad you brought this up because I've been slipping on my goal to make a Shutterfly book every few years of family photos. I never forget to make one when I travel, but I need to remember to make them of family. My kids will never keep a box of photos, but they might keep a book. Thanks for reminding us of the importance of family photos, that once gone are lost forever.

boberic Loc: Quiet Corner, Connecticut. Ex long Islander

Great grandkids? My kids don't even want to see my pics. When I show them, the reaction is "Nice" and I don't know it they really ;like them or just being polite. Furthermore, I don't kmow if my prints will even last that long. The only ones that even have a chance of permanancy are my archcival B&W prints from my darkroom days

sumo Loc: Houston suburb

have over 50,000 picts stored at Smug Mug....all the kids and grands have the password....... even two of the kids have smug mug accounts .....so they may be already be taking what they want...
they all know they can get pictures now and all those pictures will be for at least a year after Im gone. ...after that time frame.... guess I will never know...

htbrown Loc: San Francisco Bay Area

The challenge is, of course, identifying your best images. I have tens of thousands of images, and can't imagine anyone wanting to go through all those.

The issue of changing media is not new. I have a number of glass plate negatives made by my grandfather. My father threw out his father's nitrate negatives, deeming them a fire hazard.

Magicman

Most homes have a library or bookcase. I have not added a new book for years since kindle arrived. So make themed photo books of everything and file those books in the bookcase.

tonybear

Fellow HHG'ers,
I too have pondered that great "unanswerable" question. I'm currently in the arduous process of scanning in all my 35mm slides from what were my best years of SLR photography (the 70's and 80's with my trusty Minolta SRT-101) to finish off the curation. I have the equivalent of over 100 carousel slide trays to go through. I was lucky enough to find a wonderful second-hand Canon 4000 semi-pro scanner to help me with the process. The Canon 4000 scanner is slow with the original USB/SCSI speeds and only 4 slides at a time, but it does give me some pretty good results with Photoshop retouching. These are scanned in at 2000dpi/TIFFformat. BTW, I had to use the older Windows XP OS just to run the Canon TWAIN software with Photoshop. With regard to the remainder of my photographic archive (prints and digital JPEGS), these have already been scanned in with my trusty Epson scanner at high res, or saved as High Res TIFFs. It remains to curate the entire collection with Lightroom into a book-like printed form to complete my Life Memoir Project. I too, like some other HHG'ers, feel the chances of my descendants in years to come having the wherewithall to retrieve anything in a then "ancient" digital format- to be relatively small. So the best way to preserve my family heirloom images is to present them on the printed page- and in a high quality book-like format.

Weddingguy Loc: British Columbia - Canada

For years now I have been having the Blurb, 7x7 photo books printed on their premium paper. Maximum number of pages is 160, so I put my best 160 images from the year of the family to create these books and give one to each one of our kids for Xmas.

Personally I have found that there are several things in the creation of these books that is very important . . .
1) the same size every year so that they are much easier to store/display on a bookshelf.
2) with the small size they are kept handy in each and every household and do not become a huge inconvenience to store.
3) Every page is a full bleed to get maximum clarity and ease of copying in the future. Printed images are all that will be around in a hundred years!

John_F Loc: Minneapolis, MN

Long term storage of image media has always been a problem. When it comes to family, the album works if the names of the people and things are clearly put and it will be in time sequence. The downside is there is only one copy and pictures do fade with time. Has digital improved and does it have shortcomings. SD cards hold lots but can't be viewed by themselves - you need a device. What makes us think next centuries technology will work with our stuff of today. There are other reasons beyond family histories. There are histories of an individuals contributions to the craft of something. So what is the answer - I suspect there is no THE history.

mas24 Loc: Southern CA

Great Grand Kids will know about your abundance of photos you cherished. But will have little interest in them. They will be interested in the next iPhone coming around. So, they can take selfies with their friends, use the apps, and concerns for their current family. Kids live for now. Not yester-years. Of course, I do realize all families are different. But, don't think your offspring are going to continually watch thousands and thousands of photos you took many decades ago. They will have better things to do than that.

Paul Buckhiester Loc: Columbus, GA USA

Great topic. I have done a few different things. I scanned in most of my parents collections of prints, slides and negatives that I had access to and distributed them to my children and siblings on thumb drives.
Secondly, I make books in LR and print them at Blurb and also send the PDF version of the books to family.
Our family also use iOS photo sharing for particularly cogent shots.
Also have started making monthly 5x5 Blurb books on my iPhone using their app. The missing part is all the information that needs to accompany each photo. How are y’all dealing with this part?

Peterff Loc: O'er The Hills and Far Away, in Themyscira.

This is an interesting topic, but unless your photographs have significant artistic merit as 'Art', then they are part of a different story arc. That may give them significant value, perhaps related to an event in history, or perhaps related to something such as a family history. Either way, they need to be, or should be, curated if they are to survive. It is the significance of the story and to whom that matters.

My mother-in-law, a good friend and my favorite party animal, is on a tear doing some of this currently. She just turned 90, has three older sibs and two younger ones. She's getting stories out of her sibs, collecting photographs and scanning them and writing up the stories of the family. It's an interesting project. I married into an interesting family, a bunch of crazy Serbs that lived through prohibition - and were bootleggers - and so much more. My Uncle-in-law was wounded at Iwo Jima. Another was a resistance fighter against the Nazis during WWII. His wife, now 95, knows that I'm interested in photography, and asked me about his cameras, possibly selling them. I did the research and they had little significant monetary value, so she just asked if I wanted them. More recently she asked if I would like the slides of their travels around the US traveling in their Jaguar XKE instead of throwing them out. I jumped on that opportunity, which I'm looking forwards to reviewing when I have time, I'm glad that I still have a slide projector / carousel. It also made her feel good about someone valuing her own memories.

Mostly the older family don't think that anyone would be interested in their stories, but we as the younger generations are very interested. Some of the relations in Serbia are trying something similar, and yet the people doing it are the men, they don't talk to the women, and the women seem to accept that their perspectives aren't worth recording. My mother-in-law is a fabulous self-sufficient and fierce woman, and yet she argued with me when I suggested that she should document the women's perspective, and she resisted on the basis that nobody would be interested. Her daughter, my wife, ripped her a new one!

Why bother to make photographs or capture images if you don't think that there is any value?