To Digitize or Not Digitize the Family Photo Album?

animys asks: "In the last few years, we have begun to witness the inevitable shift from 35mm cameras to high resolution, cheap, consumer oriented digital cameras; with this, the move away from a tangible photo album has also ensued. This change has obviously left many families with huge amounts of developed pictures and albums. For reasons of preservation and usability, some families would like to convert their previously taken pictures to a digital medium - yet many have hundreds or even thousands of pictures. What type of tools can the DIY'er use to make this process easier? Beyond the obvious scanner and graphics package, is there any good quality software that can augment this arduous and possibly over-daunting task?" What about folks looking to do the opposite? Most people take decent care of their albums, and the pictures are always viewable regardless of the changes in technology. What options are there for those folks looking to make near-picture-quality hardcopies of their digital photos for inclusion in their albums?

Comments

Both

[dnoyeb]

I have my own photo albums hiding under the coffee table. Its easy to pull out when you want to talk about something, and its very intimate. But to say, hay lets go up to the computer room, or let me get my laptop, is not as nice.

I still have my photos in digital format on CDROMs for safe keeping and for use on my website. But that will certainly not replace the old photo album. Plus think of the pictures handing on the walls in your house with all the children and such.

Gotta have both dude.

Distributed Albums

[peterdaly]

I have recently seen a rise is "Distributed" online family albums. With things like Yahoo Groups, and whatever MSN's is (I refuse to get a passport account), families and friends are adding photo's to the same "virtual album" from all over the county. That is the "major revolution" I am seeing in the area.

What I find even more interesting is techies arn't always the ones setting them up and using them. A lot of people who can barely use a digital camera are getting in on the act.

Not sure if this helps or not, but places like Yahoo Groups work great for setting up albums with a short term storage outlook.

-Pete

The question

[benh57]

The question was: how do you make the process of scanning thousands of pictures in easier? Editor, printing is not a big deal. The original question is far more interesting - I don't really feel like individually placing 2500 photos on my flatbed scanner. Is there a hardware device to quickly scan photos?

Re:don't only convert

[SEWilco]

"the pictures are always viewable"
"archival properties of photographic processes"

Wrong. Photo prints fade. Look at family color pictures from 1970. Black and white before then. And once it has faded, it is gone.

• There are two advantages in archiving in digital form:
• The digital copy can be refreshed perfectly by making a copy. If a CD-R will fade in 10 years, you can copy it every 5 years and never lose data.
• When you get a DVD-R and CD-ROM drives start to vanish, copying your entire collection is certainly easier than making backups of your film prints. And your CD-R images will be easier to handle because they'll fit on fewer DVDs. Repeat with future technologies...

I wonder about the opposite:

[prisoner]

what digital format will still be readable in 25 years? I've had a couple digital cameras already, the first was a sony mavica - the floppy disk transfer was very appealing then. It shot everything in .jpg format. Will I still have to keep an ancient copy of photoshop running on windows98/2000/XP just to look at my circa 1996 pictures in 2025?

Re:I wonder about the opposite:

[SVDave]

what digital format will still be readable in 25 years?

For pictures, JPEG and GIF. What determines if a standard survives is how open and widespread it is. ASCII is the ultimate example. It's 35 years old, still readable on any computer that an average person is likely to use (and virtually all other computers as well), and is in no danger of going away any time soon. I have no doubt that ASCII will be readable in 2025, and in 2125 as well.

As for JPEG and GIF, they're also very widespread and open. GIF is useless for photographs, so stick with JPEG and you'll be fine. When I digitized my pictures from a trip to Europe in 1997, I made up a simple HTML "album", with pictures and descriptions; it's just as viewable now as it was five years ago. And since HTML is just annotated ASCII, I seriously doubt it will become unviewable in my lifetime. Note that web browsers will display pages that are local files (i.e. not on the net), so setting up a local web server is not really necessary.

Re:I wonder about the opposite:

[lmfr]

"what digital format will still be readable in 25 years?"

Open formats will. Here's an idea: save your pictures in an open format and along with them the description of the format and some libraries that implement reading it.

Then, when formats change too much and you have trouble using your old pictures with moderm software, implement a tiny program that converts from the old format to a new, supported, open format.

Of course, if by then open formats will be illegal, you'll still be able to convert the old format to a raw one, and hope to find an application that supports raw pictures...

What To Do With Pictures After Digitizing?

[bug506]

I just finished reading an interesting book that is somewhat related, called "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper" ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375726217/ ).

The book discusses how libraries are "archiving" old newspapers and books using microfilm and, now, digital techniques. The problem is, in most cases, they are throwing away the originals which have some nice properties (they are more tactile, look better, etc.) because they got so excited about the new technology and were happy they didn't have to set aside space for the old materials. Of course, it turns out that most of the microfilm is deteriorating now, and the original digital versions are low resolution and on obsolete platforms.

While the book deals with archiving our collective paper-based history, some of the lessons in there are relevant to archiving your own personal photographic history. The biggest lesson--don't make the mistake of throwing away the originals because you have this fancy new digital version!

What are you saving them for?

[Seanasy]

Not to sound too negative, but how important are your photos, really? Why are saving them? Who are you saving them for?

Unless you're really into it, don't worry about saving all your photos. In 100 years most of them won't be worth anything to anyone. Pick out the few that are most important or representative of your family and its history. Then, have archival prints made by a reputable service bureau and store them to archival or close to archival standards.

A family record can be an interesting thing. And, it can even be historically significant in some circumstances. But snapshots are mostly for people in them. Don't waste your time worrying about something so transient. Making moments in the here and now is more important than waxing nostalgic about the past.

Re:What are you saving them for?

[Angry Toad]

That's a perfectly fair point of view, but people like you aren't the ones I'm archiving for. I'm making a small effort now to preserve the history of our family for those few people in our lineage 100 years from now who have an active sense of history and who understand, in a similar way to my own, the importance of not losing the past. In a similar vein, I praise the efforts of like-minded family members of mine who lived 100 years ago.

This is a process, and a job, handed down from generation to generation amongst people who understand the need for it. I fully expect that the majority of people in our family tree 100 years from now will have little more than a passing interest in my efforts. That's not what's important to me.

Re:What are you saving them for?

[RembrandtX]

I used to think like that .. then in the period of one year ... I lost 3 good friends. Once to a suicide, one to a bad liver, and one to a car crash.

I have .. to date .. ZERO pictures of the 4 of us together .

There we're pleanty taken , but they got lost, or were ruined by water/snow/rain/sun/dog/cat/sister/parents fill in the blank.

The whole point of pictures is that they capture a memory for you .. they save it .. you can look at it years later and think 'god, i remember that day .. i can STILL smell the heat , it was horribly muggy out.'

There isn't a day i don't regret not having photos of my friends who are gone.

so - to answer your question, If i had to worry about what to pull out of a burning house, a box of photo albums, or my computer .. its gonna be the photo albums. Hardware can be replaced, memories can't.

[however .. i HAVE switched to 35mm slr digital media as of about 4 years ago .. its really the way to go .. every few months I burn a cd of my photos/art etc .. and make 3 additional copies of it .. one for my mom, one for my dad .. and one extra for me incase my 'working' copy dies. (they go in my safty deposit box ... so i dont fall into the saving all your data in one building rule.)]

Re:What are you saving them for?

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you have no appreciation for family pictures that are much older than you are.

Perhaps you need to grow up. Along with the people who modded you up as insightful.

Re:"this arduous and possibly over-daunting task"

[Reziac]

You may not NEED that "pic of the cute neighbour kid your granddad grew up with", but what if it turns out that kid was Albert Einstein? That's why that sort of photo is worth preserving -- it might contain data you don't YET realise is valuable.

Re:Epson Photo Paper/Printer

[Patrick13]

nice affiliate link there pete....

;/

Re:Gallery is some good software

[foobar104]

Who needs to be able to read 5.25" floppies when you can just move the files onto a CDR? At my office we did this years ago.

Yes, but I think the relevant question here is, "what if you hadn't?"

Active maintenance of a data archive is all well and good in theory, but in practice it only takes one foul-up for huge swaths of data to become unreadable. Let's say that something tragic happens, like a war or something. My family's carefully maintained data archive-- about five DVD-ROMs worth, let's say-- gets stuffed in a shoebox and hauled across an ocean. It spends the next twenty years in an attic. Because of any of a number of possible outside factors beyond our control, the archive stays untouched while DVD-ROMs fade and some new technology evolves to replace them, until one day we find that nobody's building DVD-ROM readers any more. Poof. The family data archive is effectively lost forever.

Over a long enough time span-- like a century-- the likelihood of that one foul-up happening converges to certainty.

Analog media, on the other hand, doesn't have to be actively maintained. A photo from 1902 is still useful to me today, even though it has deteriorated over the century.

It's a trade-off. A digital archive is either perfect, or it's dust. An analog archive, on the other hand, can be mostly or partially recoverable for a long time without any human involvement.