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.)

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.