our grandchildren will keep trying to zoom out or into the photos by pinching the pictures... they are truly going to be laughed at.
If you want to preserve real photographs for posterity, get them laminated. Without some environment protection they will degrade over time and with handling.
Definitely make a book
Americans’ trust and faith in technology is often blind, unquestioning and highly overrated. Even if we continue to worship the technology gods, the people, organizations, systems operating them WILL fail and disappoint you.
Once your grandchildren are grown some will appreciate your effort, some won’t. I have family photos going back to the 19th century which I value, some siblings and cousins have no interest, others do. It’s history, it’s family. Put forth the effort to save them and definitely label them if you know who they are and any other details you know of the individual. Someone will appreciate it. If your family is large enough one of your descendents will be bitten by the genealogy bug and will find the treasure trove you put together invaluable.
I think that there will always be some segment of the population that will value old things - and being able to handle a photo that was taken over 100 years earlier is a big thrill. I have been doing my family genealogy for about 23 years, and I’ve collected a LOT of photos over that time. To me, the most interesting ones are a circa 1878 photo (which is a copy made in 1951 by my great grandmother) with my GG GM as a teenager, plus one of her brothers, plus their parents (people born in the late 1830s or early 1840s). I have another from 1893 (2 of my great grandparents with the 3 kids they had at the time), one from 1913 (with my grandmother as an 18-month-old with her infant brother and parents) and one from late 1938 or early 1939 (a 4-generation shot). My kids know who they are because of what I do, and I am quite sure that they will pass on the interest to the next generation.
Old photos and a love of studying the past have to be nurtured and passed on...few do that, especially in this era of “new is great and old sucks,” without being gently pushed.
Scan all the photos and add a description, then make a disc or thumb drive for each person and ask if any are interested in having the originals. That’s what I did over a few months with a few hundred family photos that were in my possession.
No one wanted the originals.
Programmer here. I suggest both getting them laminated and converting them to digital. Once converted to digital make multiple copies on both USB and DVD and distribute them out to family members living in different areas. Put one copy of each in your safety deposit box at your bank so you can assure it’ll be kept at room temperature forever.
Uploading them to Facebook might be nice, but don’t count Facebook as the eternal photo storage forever accessible by family members. It wasn’t too long ago that people would have thought that about myspace. :) So for all we know Facebook might be a faded fad within a few years.
Why have them laminated? Nothing beats holding family treasures within your own hands. Why put them to both USB and DVD? Both storage mediums have their drawbacks, including long term use. A DVD can handle temperature changes better than a USB stick. But in a normal climate a USB stick won’t degrade as fast as a DVD (give a DVD maybe 15 or 20 years). Why give multiple copies to family members living in different areas? The April 2011 tornado that hit Alabama is Exhibit A for why to do that.
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My grandchildren have been using their eyes, just like my grand parents did.
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The attention span for looking at photos is pretty low, whether holding in your hand or digital...……………………
photos used to be rare and have meaning, now they are common and artificial.
For my photos, I just digitized them, added descriptions and organized the digitized photos in folders, so I ended up with twenty or thirty folders on each thumb drive I made. And I’m sure there is a good selection of photo album software that could be found if you wanted to investigate that.
I think PRINTING for purposes of putting into a book will become more popular.
I have a lifetime of photos I just started going through, and making printouts of things I want to make into scrap books.
Color printers will become popular again.
I’ve been doing that a lot lately because of age and health and a desire to get things organized for my children and grandchildren. It’s a worthwhile endeavor that grounds you I think.
An aside, please allow me this one comment. Today is the 20th anniversary of my signing on with FR and I just couldn’t help from wanting to mark that in some way. I quit posting in April 2017 and haven’t posted since then but since my membership wasn’t cancelled I wanted to drop by and make a comment of passing. Your thread about family photos seemed appropriate. Thank you for your indulgence.
Do quality scans and do your best to organize them into a “slideshow” with photos grouped logically, then chronological within the groups. Then, put the originals somewhere that they’ll be preserved and safe. Your scanned images can be uploaded to a free photo server site, likely you have this with your current internet service provider. They can also be saved to thumb drives and kept on your computer hard drive. There are free, very easy to use websites that you could utilize to set up a web page of family photos if you want. Then, as grandchildren become interested in their family history, you’ve covered all the ways these would typically be accessed at present. If something new arises, then I’m sure the JPEG standard will either work with it or convert easily to that new media or new standard.
I took pictures of all the good pictures in my photo boxes, named the file that on my computer, and send the kids digital copies. They can do what they want with them, and mom still has the originals. I also have about ten carousels of gorgeous slides of Valdez AK that are hanging around. AND the projector!
If you are scanning photos use a system to edit the IPTC (I think) data. It allows you to date and caption every photo. It’s information embedded in the file. There is nothing worse than looking at an old photo that was important to your parents...and you don’t have a clue who they are.
Use keywords to index them. Digital Asset Management is ALL about being able to access and manage data. If you are going through this trouble, index and caption everything.
Its one of the issues with the electronic media (flash drives now and The Cloud ...), and the optical medias have a different problem
First - one good solar flare could wipe a majority of the magnetics out.
Second - optical CD/DVD - just aging/degeneration of the media (for which the ‘near best’ has no guaranteed lifespan more than 10 years) and most not more than 3 years (and the really long lasting optical media is horribly expensive).
the general advice is to systematically KEEP MULTIPLE COPIES of it on different pieces of the media, and to recopy THOSE every 3 years into a new set of MULTIPLE COPIES (and make sure to CHECK that the copy worked).
Be careful how you store it (heat is a killer) different copies in different places ...
Been going over old videotapes, editing and digitalizing them into some DVD albums - expect today’s kids will be most interested in seeing their parents, aunts and uncles playing ball, swimming, and visiting Santa at the same age then as the kids are today.....
My aunt gave me a cd of family images she scanned. She was very excited. Spent months on it.
Each was scanned at 72dpi roughly at 7”x5” and, apparently, she used a low-end scanner. Utterly useless for printing. Not really great for viewing either.
If a person doesnt know what they are doing they may end up wasting time.