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

iphoto

[nuhonda]

I'll chime in and say that on the Mac, iPhoto is really a killer tool for organizing photos.

and the picture books that you can create with it are nothing short of impressive. handing one of those out to my cousin from the picture i took at here wedding as really impressive.

Identifying those unlabeled photos

[texchanchan]

I'd like to see a worldwide snapshot database combined with post-911-level pattern recognition routines.

Upload your grandmother's album and find out: Who is that standing there at the beach with Dad and Aunt Edna in 1952? The database project would be able to figure it out.

What a boon for genealogists.

(And, yes, a problem for people with something to hide about what they were doing in 1952 or who their ancestor was in 1876. But it's going to be a transparent society anyway, and we're going to have to get used to it.)

Re:Gallery is some good software

[sphealey]

...and as long as you have a permanent archive (burn them to CD-R), I'm not worried about "losing" them.

That's kind of the point, though. There are two questions to consider: physical longevity, and ability to read the data format.

On physical longevity, here's some info based on testing by the manufacturers:

We predict the lifetime of KODAK Photo CD, and KODAK Writable CD Media with InfoGuard Protection System, under normal storage conditions in an office or home environment, should be 100 years or more.

Well, great. Of course we have some photos in our family collection that are 120 years old, and could still make prints from the negatives. Are you sure the CDs will last that long?

File format longevity is the real killer, though. I have quite a few 5.25" floppy disks with documents that were created in industry-leading formats in the mid-1980s. I would like to retrieve some of them, but I (a) haven't seen a 5.25" floppy drive in years (b) can't find any software that will read those formats. And that is only 17 years! Do you really trust your family's history to the idea that JPEGs, for example, will still be readable in 2102?

sPh

Re:Converting to all-digital is a bad idea..

[KernelHappy]

Have you used any of the newer ink jets? I use a Epson Photo Stylus 870 with glossy inkjet paper to print snapshots from our Canon G1 and I have been quite happy with the results. If you consider that I take lots of pictures and then print out only the best ones the cost for ink and paper comes out cheaper than a roll of 35mm film and developing for the whole roll to get maybe 10-15 nice prints (smaller too).

Unless your doing fine art photography a good ink jet should be more than sufficient and quite economical. Personally I still don't feel digital photography is ready for fine art shooting. That aside I'm considering adding the new Nikon D100 body to my arsenal to compliment my N90s, N70 and 6006.

Re:Foofy Software but it works

[Lumpy]

you can...

instead of img003.jpg
summer 1965 grandpaw-timmy-danny-and the boat at frelling lake.jpg

Works great and work on any modern operating system incluging windows.
makes sorting easy, and you dont need anything special to read the tags.

Why not make a paper album from digital pics?

[bubblegoose]

I have a CD-RW (two of them actually, one in a fire proof box), when I pull pictures off the camera I create a new directory labeled for the date.

Then I use a freeware version of Ulead Photoexplorer to print a copy of every picture in that directory in a 2 by 2 format.

I print the directory name (the date) at the top of the sheet and the filename under each picture.

Then I slide the sheet into a sheet protector and put it into a three ring binder.

Works great, is very portable and if my technology illiterate grandmother wants a copy I know exactly where on the CD (kept in the back of the binder) to print a new copy.

Done it

[Simon Brooke]

We've been through and scanned every family photograph dating back to 1890 (yes, I do mean 18). Consequently I've been able to give every member of the family a CD with all the photographs, and some of the older, more faded photographs we've been able to electronically enhance.

Advantages - everyone has a copy of all the photographs, and digital images won't degrade. I'd strongly recommend it. And yes, provided oyu've got the negatives, negative scanners are better.