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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?
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.
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.
(pretend there's something witty here)
Somewhat related, once you get all of those pictures digitized, the best tool for keeping track of them is:
http://gallery.sourceforge.net/
Apache+PHP and you're ready to go. Gallery is the best photo gallery/organizer package I've seen.
digital copies are great, but the archival properties of photographic processes ensure that they will make your pictures last far longer than whatever current technology you will need to convert from in 3 years.
A colour laser print will look decent, and should last if you laminate it. These services will be fairly cheap, and should be available at the local large photocopy shop.
For a nicer picture, if I recall correctly, sublimation printing produces an image that looks a lot like a photograph, but I haven't seen the output from a sublimation printer in years, so my memory could be off.
Lastly, you could just make a printout at fantastically high resolution and re-photograph with an ordinary camera to get a photo that will last decades or longer with minimum fuss. Be sure to use a tripod for this, as small movements will blur the image.
Lastly, the most practical solution for the future is probably just to carry both digital and analog cameras. Use the digital camera for most things, and take a handful of old-fashioned pictures for the images you want to be there for your great-grandkids to see.
As mentioned above, I haven't followed the higher-end printing options for a while. Does anyone have more up-to-date information on this?
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
Soccer Goal Plans
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.)
There are several ways to do this, beyond the color inkjet/dye sub solutions. I've seen a number of photo shops that offer instant printing from disk/flas memeory/CDs. The results are satisfactory - it looks like a regular print, and cost competitive with color printers. I personally use a CF card and transfer the prints from my PC to it via a USB cardreader. A card and reader can be had for less than $50. I like it over CDRs because transfer times are faster, and with a $10 PCCard adpater, I can use it with my notebook as well.
There are online services that let you upload images and then order prints, I've used OFTO and liked the results, but its just as cheap and faster to run to my nearest chain camera shop.
Finally, Kinkos can make poster size copies on various media, including foamboard and canvas. They tend to be expensive, but offer some interesting printing options.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
VueScan is a really great scanning package for Linux GTK, MacOS, or Win32. Cheap, too.
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?
Photos fade, tear, warp, discolor and get soggy. I have personally begun building an archive of family photos by scanning them. I am using a HP 5300C scanner, not complete crap but its definately not a professional scanner but it gets the job done. I figure something is better than nothing.
I tend to save two copies of each image, one exactly as it is scanned, the other corrected and repaired if necessary.
I have found one piece of software that is fairly nifty, the Canon Zoom Browser EX that came with my Canon G1 digital camera. It lacks some of the features I wish it had and sure it has a very foofy interface but it works well for previewing a couple thousand images and organizing them.
I personally wish that there was a standard and widely used way of tagging each picture for archive and retrieval purposes. It would be nice to tag each picture with the date and names of people or scenes depicted in them. The ability to pull up every picture with great great great grandpappy in it would very handy. As it is now I have to name every picture with the date and the people depicted, then sort them into some arbitrary folder that more directly relates to me than to the overall family tree.
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing
Skip over the Scanning of the actual photo, and get a negative scanner.
They work faster, better, and have some automation to them. Unfortunately, most 35mm negatives are chopped into blocks of four, but that will at least 1/4 your time spent monitoring the machine.
If you switched to the newer APS film, the negative scanner can run through the whole row.
Here is one that does both 35mm and APS. There are also other reviews on that site of different models.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
I recently started scanning pictures with the intent of creating an HTML-based gallery on a CD that could be passed around.
The best gallery creator I found was Curator. It takes directories of pictures and creates static HTML from arbitrarily-customizable templates. You can create description files for each picture and have them incorporated into the pages. The templates are written in a combination of HTML and Python.
Creating the templates takes some doing, but after that, everything's dead simple.
On physical longevity, here's some info based on testing by the manufacturers:
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
What we need is a cheap device in to which photos or negatives can be fed en masse. I think negatives would be better as I'm sure there will be fewer problems with colour reproduction. Scanning photos with a flatbed is slow, time consuming and annoying. Does anybody know of a solution?
Personally, I'm not ready to give up physical photos. I think they're the best presentation medium. Certainly the most universal. Most of the suggestions that people make for moving digital pictures in to the physical world don't result in the same quality of production.
What does it take to print a digital picture on photographic quality paper/card with a matte or gloss finish and comparable picture quality to tradition photos? How much does it cost?
When digitizing my photos, I've found Gimp to be really helpful. Especially the image->colors->curves (although this takes practice and patience) and image->color->levels. The levels auto button does an excellent job, although sometimes I still have to manually tweak it. The clone tool has also proven useful. And gimp is open-source, free, and available for windoze users too.
Also helpful are some of the scanner tutorials out on the web. My scans improved considerably after reading just one. I wish I had read it before I bought my scanner. I would have bought a different scanner if I had.
I think that's a very good point. You'll have to continue to copy everything to new mediums until either the mediums are no longer compatible or until TCPA/Palladium rules our entire computer. However, I don't think the standards of eyesight will ever go out of style. I'd mod you up if I could.
I guess the best thing you can do is *always* keep actual pictures, whether they are printed or developed. They don't have to always be organized. You can fit over a hundred pictures in a shoebox easily.
I have an Epson 785EXP, complete with internal compactflash reader and LCD screen. (not bad for $300!)
I prints photolab quality photos on Epson paper, with a advertised lifespan of 25 years. I have figured I can print digital photo's for much lower cost than at the local mall, although I don't know if it can compete with online printing.
I can print photo's directly from my compactflash cards, with previews of the photo on the LCD screen without intervention on a PC...pc doesn't even have to be hooked up. The LCD is a $99 addon. Amazon has the Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX Inkjet Printer
for about $190. I have been absolutely astounded by the quality of the output.
May be worth looking into.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
sPh
One otehr thought - get a high quality dedicated slide/negative scanner if you plan to digitize a lot of images. The advantages include:
1. You get more of the information from the original medium - printing invariably loses some of the details, especially those done by instant photo places. Prints also fade in the light.
2. You get all of your images digitized - even ones for which you've lost prints.
3. You can continue to shoot slides, which offer better quality images that negatives. (Ultimately, its the eye behind the viewfinder that counts, not the equipment.)
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Since I'm a slave to the English language and American monetary system, could you approximate how much it costs per pic (in any currency - I can translate that). I always wondered if these services existed.
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.
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing
Let me tell you.... If you do go the scanner/graphics software route, it's a lot of work.
My wife an I have a Family History Project online: The Arbutus Project (very slashdot susceptable! please go easy!). Try going here to get to the picture index. We've collected genealogical data, as well as choice scanned photos from our own photo albums and that of family members. Audio interviews are just starting, and video is a few years away (my computer's too wimpy)
On of the really cool things is if you do have an indexing system for your whole family (something that comes with a genealogy project, but is a lot of baggage with just a photo project) is that all your families photos become seamless. You can see a photo album for yourself, or for your wife, or for your kids, or for your grandfather, with just a few mouse clicks.
Today's pictures aren't much better than 300dpi, and I've got an old Microtek E6 scanner (bought new, just before the prices dropped). I scan at 300dpi for new, higher for old (when pictures were much better resolution, try looking at them with a magnifying glass.) Try not to cringe if you happen to get those awful square early colour photos with the bumps or hexagonal cells from the 70's. Save 'em all as PNGs, store those to CD for later, then batch them all to a good web size for online viewing.
It is a LOT of work, and I'd suggest that you focus on only the select shots from your albums, perhaps just the best 10%. Most photos are junk anyways. You don't really really need that pic of the cute neighbour kid your grandad grew up with.
Expect it to take several months of work just to get the photos scanned and organized in any fashion.
Good point..
But I think the problem of being unable to read certain formats is minimal. For example, i'm in the process of converting a lot of my old VCR tapes over to DVD.
It's just a matter of maintenance. Really the only time you'd have an issue is if someone lost it, and it wasn't found for 100 years.
-brain
How exactly does a digital photo "fade"? If you mean a ragged-ass inkjet print, then sure I can see that. But I send my digtals to Kodak and get them back on photo paper just like you'd get giving film to the Walmart processor. See my post above in the "iPhoto" thread.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
i have alot of stuff on cdr. when it looks like cdr's are no longer an option i plan on migrating my stuff over to the next best thing. what that thing might be, i dont know, but it'll be there. it might take a couple weeks worth of evenings, but if the data is worth it to you you'll do it.
-- john
My local photo shop which is also the best one in the city can print from any digital source. They have the technilogy to do it. You can also have photos printed from the web. Upload your images and have them mailed to you.
In fact, they've switched to digital in the lab. If you develop a 35mm roll, thye will scan it and print from the scanned images using their digital enlarger. The result, using a good 3.1 megapixel camera is indiscernible from traditionnal pictures for sizes up to 8x10.
Have a great 3 day week-end for the other fols up there. And the store is LLLozeau in Montreal, QC.
JP
--- Worst tagline ever.
Many geeks (who are not also photo geeks) don't realize that color print film and color slide film don't have the longest life unless you take very good care of them. Black and white film and prints that are washed to archival standards will last longer than you, but color film and prints can degrade quickly. Acid (in non acid-free papers, UV, light and heat are the enemy of photos. If you want your negatives to last, store them sealed in plastic (like ziplock) in a freezer.
If you're looking to make prints on an inkjet printer, be aware that MOST of the inks sold for inkjets will fade VERY quickly. Accidently leave them in the car on the passenger seat and they'll be totally washed out when you leave work. Several printers are starting to have archival inks, which when combined with archival paper will last as long as color prints and some will last longer.
Prints from digital are decent from places like ezprints.com, ofoto.com, adorama.com (my favorite), snapfish.com and others.
For people who normally would shoot 35mm or APS and get nothing but 4x6's and an occasional 5x7, the consumer digital cameras are a replacement. Not because 3 megapixel is equivalent to 35mm, but because most consumers don't take advantage of even the resolution that 35mm uses, much less medium or large format film.
I consider the storage and organization of a photo archive a sort of separate problem from web and print albums and photo sharing. An archiving solution will let you find a file or negative easily and make a decision based on some sort of thumbnail or contact sheet. From an archive, photos can be pulled to be shared in albums, sent in email, posted to a website, printed for framing etc.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Actually I have noticed it, but outside of the Canon ZoomBrowser not many applications use it, I'm not sure many programs even leave it intact if you resave the image.
-- Button up, your ignorance is showing
Damn, I think you solved a problem I've been worrying over. I said I would set up a site for my family, especially to help coordinate our family reunion. What are the other options besides Yahoo Groups? Are there any more focused options?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
For digital images, whether scanned from film or pure digital, there are two good options for making prints.
Epson Photo printers like the 1280 or 2000p give photo-quality output with longevity comparable to most color prints. I know a number of pro photographers (including me) that sell images output from these. A few people have had problems with color-shift due to ozone, but properly framed and cared for (e.g., not left hanging in the sun, same as with a regular photographic print) they will last.
For really important digital images, get a LightJet print. Starting with a digital image (whether scanned or pure digital), it uses lasers to expose the image on normal photographic paper like Fuji Crystal Archive. At that point it is a regular photographic print, with the same longevity. The process isn't cheap, though, but the quality is unbeatable. Some big-name pros sell their images only in this format.
One thing to consider though is that no color images have the longevity of those old B&W prints. For current photo albums, having digital copies of important images made *before* the images degrade is important -- they aren't going to last.
What you'll also want to make sure of is the paper - it should be a PH-neutral archival-quality paper.
On top of that, not all dye sub printing is archival - check into what museums use.
Museums are in the business of making things last - they will be your best resource for this type of work.
As for digitally-stored files, don't trust any one medium. If you insist on putting irreplacable images on a twenty-cent CDRom, do yourself a favor and burn a couple - then also copy them to a hard disk. Personally, I'd love to see a good system for printing the images out as machine-readable codes onto archival-quality paper in something like IBM's glyph format - I've seen 500 year old paper that was showed absolutely no signs of degradation - any longer than that and I think I've fulfilled my responsibility to posterity. (Not that my photos are any good.)
One word of warning, a lesson learned the hard way: Do not use Zip disks for stuff you care about - I recently lost all of the pictures I took from a helecopter of the World Trade Center two years ago to a Zip disk that died the "click of death".
As for old family albums, I have been working on scanning my girlfriend's family albums and it's amazing how much detail we've been able to get out of these pictures that were often the size of a couple of postage stamps. We've been making a slide show and putting it on video tape for family members to watch on their TVs as well - great for older members of the family. An online gallery that allows comments (I have one at http://mmdc.net) is a good tool for gathering "Who's that guy on the left?" type of information.
The next stage is to remove the originals from the dangerous albums that they are in (the so-called "Magic" type albums with the sticky sheet and the plastic over them - they are probably the most damaging.) and place them in albums that won't accellerate their demise.
Search on Google for dealers in archival supplies, like Light Impressions. You'll find a lot of information and resources online.
Also, when dealing with really old black and white photos such as albumen prints and sometimes incorrectly-developed silver prints, if the image has faded away, it can often be brought back through chemical means - talk to a restorer, or at least, don't throw them away.
Hope this helps -
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
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?
It to avoid any commercial software solution.
If your digital family album is not based on open standards (jpeg for example) it will be useless and completely lost in a much shorter time. There are plenty of "special" family album packages out there, that REQUIRE their viewer to see them.. nice now, but worthless in 95 years when that windows/intel X86 based software package is inserted in a Linux based Quantium computer (Yes linux will be around then... that's the beauty of having the blueprints!)
Me? I store everything as TIFF files. there is no encoding, no compression and a moron with a rock can figure out how to read/display that format.... That is for archival.. distruibution to family is Jpeg + simple HTML templates.. anyone can view them no matter what they own for a PC.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Is that you are scanning the film itself, rather than than a print made by some clueless photolab worker. It's always best to go from film rather than a print when scanning, if possible.
Best bet for color accuracy and widest range of potential use is to scan the neg twice, once with as little adjustment in the scanner software as possible to keep and modify as needed later, then again, adjusting it to get the output you want right now.
As for organization software, I thought Canon Zoom Ex Browser was nice. Then I upgraded to OS X and iPhoto. Amazing.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Nope, you have to commit to converting your pictures every 10 years or so, and reburning them perhaps every 5 years or so.
I wonder what all that JPG > PNG > JP2 > RSD > PP5 > O99 > QLQ conversion would do after 50 years of conversions... Better to go for lossless compression and not worry about it.
(and if file extensions are still 3 chars after 50 years, yes we can all collectively scream)
The http://cat-photo.com/ project aims to:
1) Provide tools for increasing productivity in archiving digital photos, both scanned and those taken by digital cameras, together with descriptions and other information about the photo (-> use as little time per photo as possible).
2) Provides a well defined and easy readable file format that makes it easy to preserve photos (like family photos) for many decades (and still be compatible with future computer equipment).
3) Provides tools to publish photos (and associated textual information).
Today, there are Win32 tools, php tools, Linux commandline tools and java-based tools available from this project.
Currently, we seek java developers that are willing to help our java-based GUI productivity tool to reach a state where it can be released for the average end-user.
Dybdahl.
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!
Sure, why not? The source-code for jpegs is readily obtainable.
Even given that you store source code for libjpeg and libpng, do you really trust your family's history to the idea that C, for example, will still be readable in 2102? What about the Compact Disc format itself?
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you get your precious actually pressed as a CD it will last over 100 years in proper storage, a CDR will last near that with ideal storage. as for reading them.. no problem. CDROM is the biggest single standard to ever hit the computer cince using a monitor and keyboard. you will see drives capable of reading CDROM's for at least another 10 years being manufacturered and shipped as a standard. and Until they get DVD-R blanks down to $0.12 each like CDR's are now you will see people buying CD rom drives and CD burners for a really really long time. The 3.5 inch floppy drive is HORRIBLY OUTDATED. yet every computer still comes with one... only now are they starting to phase them out and attempting to ship PC's without them.
I dont care what "the next big thing" is. it will be a really really long time before you see CDROM drives or drive capable of reading them disappear from store shelves and from common use. DVD isnt even out of it's infancy yet... when you see people commonly burning DVD's to move 4-5 meg files then it will be a mature technology... until then it's still just a toy for the rich.
burn to CD, and stop worrying for the next 15 years.... as long as you use standard file formats and filesystems.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
sPh
Digital is really taking off in the world of fine art photography. (At least at my school--which I consider somewhat technologically backwards). With a quality printer (We use epson 2000P) we can print real nice, large color prints. They're also archival.
Having just completed a course in (excruitiatingly difficult) Color Printmaking (the real/not digital stuff) and seeing full 11x14 prints coming off our G4 lab left me quite interested.
I'll probably never be able to get into a color printmaking lab, but spening $1500 for a good scanner and printer could allow me to keep myself in color photography.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
With the new continuous inking systems and the archival ink and high quailty paper, they're starting to be great for fine art as well.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Er....maybe. Most color prints unless sealed under glass don't age well. Maybe ten to twenty years. Better then most inkjet prints, but still not great. The negitaves last longer...normally.
Some negitaves, like the non-C41 color that Seattle Filmworks either sells, or use to sell dies very very quickly. Like in 3 years or so unless you put them in the freazer and are careful not to lot them get too humid.
Even good negitaves, like the thought to be archival Fuji slides from the 70's are starting to suck. Bad.
Quoting from some Apple propaganda:
Be careful of how archival you think reguar photos are. Sure you see a lot of old photos, but those are mostly silver haldide black and white which has much better archival properties then the dye baised C-41 and E-6 that almost all color stuff is these days.
The only arcival color process is Kodachrome...and Kodachrome is rapidly vanishing. I think all pro speeds have been discontinued, and the mature speeds are going. Either that, or at least all pro speeds below ISO 100 are gone. No more Kodachrome 25. Of corse that's because not many people have a taste for that color palette anymore, perfering Fuji's Velvia or Provia, or Kodak's E100SW. Plus Fuji is stealing basically the entire slide market from Kodak...and pro slide shooters are slowly converting to digital SLRs anyway.
Now that doesn't mean JPGs on a CD are going to automagically last 100 years either...but it is not as hard to think that if you recopy them every 5 years or so they will last...and if you stick the source code of something that converts JPG to a bitmap, and some documentation on the current C language...and JPG...maybe in 100 years it can be reconstructed even :-)
(Ok, given the current popularity of JPG, it is hard to imagine you won't be able to open JPGs in a specilty program in 100 years! Still, help the historians out...include file format documents!)
The propriatary RAW formats will be hard to open in just a few years though I think. So convert them to PNG...and make at least two CD's, on differnet dye types! Keep 'em out of the sun. Heck, keep one at home, one at work, and one at your parents house. A family alblum is the kind of thing relitaves love to be off site back up for.
If you have film...keep it in a cool dry palce. Inspect it yearly. Think about getting a high quality scanner and spending time on the best shots. Just remeber though, film brings out more detail then any print...and a scanner can capture more detail then prints, but affordable scanners won't capture as much as the film has (I wouldn't print anything a Nikon 4000 has scanned at much more then 8x10...but you can print a very good 35mm picture *much* *much* *much* larger then that). After you scan, take care of the print, there will be a better scanner in a few years.
Medimum and large format film folks? Your on your own...but you knew that already, didn't you?
It does, with an optional adapter... cool! :)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
One problem I have with moving towards digital photography and email and the like is that we are moving into mediums where storage is most often measured over the terms of years, not centuries. We can analyze history by reading letters and seeing photographs of previous eras. Will citizens of the future be able to do the same for our age?
slashdot!=valid HTML
Gallery can read EXIF information. EXIF is very handy for caption information, dates, exposure, etc... My Sony DSC-85 stores the information. It eliminates the need for me to have to figure out when I took a photo. If I put my images in Gallery without retouching them, the EXIF information is saved. If I use Photoshop 7 to edit then it is lost for some reason. I have been unable to figure out how to retain them.
I have found gallery to be very flexible, easy to use and easily upgraded. My siblings and their families use it regularly for our family site but it still has not passed the "Mom" test. Not that any other stage of the digital photo process has passed such a test either. So we have one touch scanning for her scanner and it e-mails the photos to me and we edit, and post for her.
We maintain a copy of the photos on our local server on our home LAN with a RAID array. We keep an untouched scanned version and an edited version. And our family site server is in a secure co-lo facility in Utah somewhere. I use rsync for mirroring the data.
Considering that our family is spread accross the world and in many different states, it is wonderful to have online images available. "Hey, look at our recent pictures from Hawaii." We get to see what everyone else is doing as well. There is no way we can all get together and pull out the photo albums anymore.
http://gallery.jacko.com
I waited years to buy a digital camera. I wanted a digital camera that took pictures as good quality (or better) as 35mm. The Canon D30 is the first digital camera that has received critical acclaim for its ability to take photos which surpass the quality of 35mm cameras. So I bought one of these cameras and a nice 28-135mm lens and entered the digital realm. I also bought a 1GB IBM microdrive for the camera which holds about 800 photos. This camera takes absolutely fantastic photos. I use a very inexpensive inkjet printer, the Canon BJC-8200 to print photos on glossy photo paper and visitors to my home are astounded when I tell them that all the photos hung around my home were taken with a digital camera and printed on an inkjet printer. They look at least as good as traditional photos.
There are several advantages to digital photos over 35mm:
1. Since my microdrive holds 800 photos and each digital photo has no real cost to me (besides a small amount of battery power), I will often take several photos of the same subject / scene whereas with a 35mm I might only take one photo because of the cost of film.
2. Before printing a digital photo, you have the opportunity to crop, enhance and edit it. While you can certainly crop, enhance and even edit 35mm photos, it takes far less time and money to do so with digital. I use Adobe Photoshop for this purpose. Besides providing tools to do simple enhancements, Photoshop also has many built-in filters (and more available third-party) which are a lot of fun to play with.
3. Digitial albums are extremely easy to organize. I use directories to create albums. I create a new folder under the "My Photos" folder for each new event. I use the naming convention "YYYY-MM-DD Event Name" for each subfolder, so it's easy to browse the albums in chronological order.
4. Digital photos are far more permanent than prints. Formats may change over time, but you'll always be able to convert to the new formats. The key is to keep copies of both the original photos AND the ones you've spent the time editing. I backup all my photos onto CD. While you only have one copy of a 35mm negative, you can easily create as many copis of your photos CDs as you like and share these with friends and family members or just store them for safekeeping.
5. Digital photos are much easier to share. I live a great distance from the rest of my family and use my photos to help stay in touch. When I first got my digital camera, I kept my online photos at zing.com. Unfortunately, they went the way of the dodo about a year ago. They made a deal with ophoto.com before unplugging and all my albums were transferred, but I didn't like ophoto's interface all that much and eventually found a new home for my photos at ImageStation. It's a free service and it's owned by Sony, so hopefully it will prove to have some staying power. If you're interested, please visit my photos. I have over a hundred albums online - I think this one is the best.
I also started digitizing my older 35mm and APS photos using a film scanner. A film scanner produces far better quality digital photos than a flatbed scanner does, so consider investing in one if you want to digitize / preserve your old photos. I can recommend the Canon CanoScan FS 2710 that I bought. It was inexpensive and besides producing much higher quality photos than a flatbed scanner, it's also a lot faster!
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.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
TWAIN? TWAIN is not SANE....
If your scanner is SANE-compliant, use a small shell/perl script with scanimage to do the trick.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Gallery works seamlessly as a PostNuke module as well - Themes and user authentication carry over from the parent PostNuke site right into the gallery.
It works well in standalone mode, but I recommend taking an extra 10 minutes and setting up Postnuke first.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
Feel free to poke around my own PostNuke/Gallery site (Gallery link on the left):
-- My Weblog.
If you do archive your pictures, take some time and write a description of each picture. Your children will thank you.
I had to go through my mother's estate a while back, and she had pictures from her mother. My maternal grandmother was born in 1900 - many of these pictures had no detail as to WHO these people were, or WHY they were important enough to photograph. It was really heartbreaking to look at these pictures and not know it they were important to anybody else in the family.
No matter how you archive your photos, do those who come after a favor - write date, place, and a description on the pictures. Be that in magic marker on the back of the print, laserprint in the album, an HTML file on the CDR, or a comment tag embedded in the PNG, do something to capture that context!
Personnally, I wish that my cameras could embed the GPS location on the print, in addition to the date and time as they do now - even better would be to have a flux-gate compass to get bearing data.
OK, so I may be a bit obsessive (I've spent over $300 in film and developing costs for a 2 day trip!).
And I concur with others - if you are serious, get a film scanner. I use a Minolta Dimage Scan Dual II, which is a USB device and is supported by Vuescan under Linux. Then I Gimp the pics to clean them up, and save them as 3600x2400 24bpp PNGs.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Pretty much the same way "analog" photos do. The sun, exposure to "bad crap" in the air, crap from people's fingers. Oh, and not being in the stop bath long enough. Not being in rinse long enough. Print one of your digital photos, wait 10 years, and do it again, you will see a big difference. Wait 30 years, and you won't even need to print a new one, the old one will be very visabably faded.
That is for color. Black and white lasts a lot longer.
I've been working on this over the past couple of years. I bought a Minolta Dimage scan dual II film scanner(they're pretty cheap on ebay these days) which can scan whole roll of crappy APS film (I had about 50 rolls) in one shot. For 35mm it will do 6 negatives at a time. The resolution is pretty good, but you have to do some color correction still (like they do when they make prints). I've archived almost 3000 pictures this way so far.
I've got a lot of prints without negatives, for those I scan with a flatbed.
I always scan at the highest resolution, then I batch convert everything down to different resolutions, and archive everything with dates/keyword/etc. to a database using a PHP image gallery I wrote.
It's very time consuming, but nice to be able to find images so easily.
For scanning 35mm negatives, the Nikon Coolscan IV (LS-40) can auto-feed the entire negative strip. The Windoze driver software can auto-scan the entire strip, auto-save each scan, and auto-name the files with incremented numbers in the name. The driver can also remember numbers between strips so when you scan the next strip, the filenames take up where the last one left off. It makes scanning negatives as painless as possible. Unfortunately, if you're scanning slides, you have to hand-feed each one, but the driver software can still handle the auto-saving and auto-naming of each scan file.
For Windoze software, it's actually very impressive. Nikon's scanner was expensive, but unlike some slide scanners I've had (*cough* Minolta *cough*) the Coolscan lives up to my expectations.
--Jim
For speed, there are very good digital cameras out there that cost a bit more than the 'equivelant' 35mm ones in which there is no noticable difference on speed. The trade off is one of mechanics however. You must have an enourmous amount of storage that can quickly and easily be switched out for the digital camera. (which I was told is not a big deal, but analog cameras have had the techniques of that problem brought down to a science)
About the quality, the answer was this: If you only view desktop (not computer) sized photos and smaller then you will never see a problem with the mid to high end digital cameras out on the market currently. However, while you can blow up the negative (from a good quality film/camera) to make very large pictures you are stuck with a rather low end for magnification on digital film. His solution was to take his best shots and store them on very high (and thus very large) resolution files and store those on any number of mediums.
Yeah, I know its not that helpful really but I hope it is a jumping off point for more information.
I seek not only to follow in the footsteps of the men of old, I seek the things they sought.
"Hey, come to my room to see my family album!"
These services burn your digital image on to ordinary film paper - the same stuff they use to make your prints from negatives in the lab. How do they do this? Instead of exposing the print paper to a darkroom enlarger with your negative in it, they scan the paper with a cathode ray tube (yea same technology as your monitor) and the results are actually better than a negative transfer because there isn't a second lens in the darkroom to distort and soften your image from the negative, the image goes from colored electrons to the paper directly.
as for reccomendations, I've had good service with all three, Ofoto and Shutterfly use Kodak professional and/or Kodak digital imaging paper (ofoto is owned by Kodak) and Photoaccess uses Fuji Crystal Archive paper, and also offers a beautiful matte finish paper that I use when I'm selling prints.
As for online photo display for the web, I would heartily reccomend Gallery, which is a set of PHP scripts. I have modified this software to allow print sales of my photographs. Photoaccess and all the other companies have online sharing of albums themselves, but their interfaces are mostly terrible and the preview images are way too small and lossy. (they have to go small to handle the traffic, I don't blame them) so I have my own web galleries, but I print through them.
---Mike
About a year ago a relative of mine was diagnosed with terminal cancer so for her birthday I decided to go through the task of converting all the family photos from 3x5 to digital. We still use the prints in the family rooms but the CD-ROM was great for sharing because you can just send one out to everyone for very little expense. When all was said and done, I was able to send out a full CD-ROM of high-res family photos to 20 relatives for under $30 and a days worth of work. Most of whom would never have seen any of the pictures otherwise.
Stop there. PNG is already lossless up to 16 bits per channel. If you store source code for libpng on the same CD as your images, then as long as CD-ROM drives and C compilers are still readily available (neither of which I can guarantee), you can recover your data.
Not a bad idea. Hell, while you're at it, while not include a copy of the C spec, the GCC source code and a copy of K&R and some other texts?
I may be late on this but dotphoto.com does 4x6 prints for 19 cents VS. 39-49 cents from everyone else.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Picture CD gives you 1.5 megabinary pixels of resolution, while a Photo CD gives you multiple resolutions on a single CD ranging from 24 kilobinary pixels to 6 megabinary pixels. Pro Photo CD has a maximum resolution of 24 megabinary pixels! And keep in mind that this is electronically scanned from the original negative or slide. One couldn't possibly hope to duplicate this at home.
Now, if you have existing prints for which you have no negatives or slides, then you need to scan at the highest resolution you can and store it in a non-lossy format, high bit-depth format. Note that this is for poor man's "archiving". If you just want to store a representation of the picture to use for printing or something, then you could use a low end compression algorithm like JPEG.
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
I bought this printer (including the LCD monitor) for my father a few weeks ago (Father's Day gift), and he loves it. Not only you can do use glossy papers, you can get those strip papers (looks like those cashiers). Fry's Electronics had it cheaper than other stores in Los Angeles area. Just a note: It is hard to find the LCD monitor part because it is always sold out, even online.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
In the US, OPhoto and ShutterFly are a couple.
There is also some Linux software to manage your own photo albums, if you have a web site available:
I also have a HP PhotoSmart 100 printer, so my as far as photos go, I have reached nerdvana. :)
Should a fire, hurricane, etc. strike, they're gone
Absolutely. Digital format is less user-friendly for now, no doubt about it, but the point you raise is the single most important factor in why people should make digital backups of at least the most important photos.
Personally I'm currently digitizing some 500+ family photos going right back to the 1880s, all at 600 dpi (greater, for the small ones) in RGB format (then converted to LAB then grayscale for the B&W photos). Once the job is done I'll be burning them all onto sets of those Kodak archive-quality CDRs and distributing them to various cousins and other relatives spread all across North America. I anticipate having to switch the set over to new media about every ten years or so. With so many (say, four or five) extra copies of the complete set it shouldn't be a problem to reconstruct the archive even if a CD goes bad here and there. Call me paranoid, but I've even considered creating some kind of parity-CD system for recovery purposes (ala PAR files).
At the end of the day, I think making this kind of thing work requires that someone in your family commit to being a data archivist, and that this job does in fact get switched over to new individuals as the decades go by.
gallery [apt-get install gallery] is a fantastic tool for organizing digital photos. Check it out.
Nobody can guarantee that any format will be readable in 25 years. Preserving the information requires that somebody does the job of format conversion every say, 10 years or so.
Preservation of historical data, particularly digital data, is an active process.
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.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I keep them with the name the camera gave them, unaltered, in year\yyyymmdd folders. The camera will wrap at 10k pictures, but I haven't taken that many in a single day, yet.
I used to try to give them good names, but it falls apart rapidly, and there are better tools available, such as ThumbsPlus from Cerious Software. It uses an Access97/ODBC compatible database, allows for the tagging of multiple keywords per photo. The slideshow mode is VERY handy.
For editing the photos, use Paint Shop Pro from JASC, it's good, cheap, and has a good thumbnail system as well.
I made two sets of geographically dispersed backups to guard against system failure, with CDs as low as $0.23 each (a sale at Target), it seems silly not to.
All of this works very well for me, as before your milage may vary.
--Mike--
what digital format will still be readable in 25 years?
I would argue that all of them will. My argument is based on the fact that almost every image format known to man, including those that were invented 20 years ago, are still readable by some form of shareware.
Take the program Graphic Converter, for example. It imports about 160 different image formats. I don't think I can name more than 20 formats off the top of my head.
The reason this is the case is that image data is very, very simple. It's a regularly-spaced rectangular array of color values. The most complicated part of the data model is the fact that color can be represented in different ways. It's nowhere near as complicated to write a reader for an old image format as it is for, say, scientific data.
I think that we're going to be able to read JPGs for many decades to come.
Good grief - how did you manage 100 per night? I do maybe 20 on average, and even then with work/kids/other stuff I find it difficult to keep at it regularly. Then again I have a pretty slow scanner...
Would be a display screen dedicated to showing a photo. Could be anything from credit card size to [ real ] window size. Would hold a set of photos you could change at a touch, e.g. iPod does with music. The movie Minority Report had many of these.
I believe Bill gates already has some plasmatrons about his mansion that does this, but these are expensive. Id guess about fifty bucks for a credit card size to a thousand for a wall size would work. This is only a matter of time given Moore's Law.
I figured there was a gimp plugin for this available already. Should be easy enough to do to detect the white edge of the photo, then rotate. I say easy of course having never written a perl script for gimp, so it may be harder than it initially looks. But edge detect algorithms are established, all you have to do is ask the user to point to a pixel that is the scanner's background color, and look for edges that have that color on one side. Edges that are not straight can be assumed to be within the picture and ignored. I figured the gimp would be the easiest platform for this.
It would be nice if every 5-10 years NIST or the Smithsonian would accept a standard that would always be accessible in the future. That is, the government would fund the continued existence of a select few outdated digital technologies in the interest of being able to archive data on that technology (and have it always readable).
This would come at some cost, but then everyone would know what to format use if they want to save something for the great great grandchildren.
I thought the slide feeder was for the LS-4000 only. Not that it matters - after shelling out nearly $800 for the LS-40, I couldn't afford the slide scanner even if it would fit my model.
--Jim
When I take underwater photos, I get the film developed but not cut. I also tend to use slide film since its much better. I then get a 1 hr photo place to scan the entire 36 pictures. They will do a single roll for about 1/2 the cost of 36 pictures if they negatives are cut. I then put their CD in my pc and run a small script that uses convert to convert the images to 400x300 and 100x75 thumb prints. If any of the pics are very good I get them rescaned at very high resolution. Kodac Photo CD is much better than their picture CD but its hard to find palces that will still do that. I've got two photo cd pics (reduced in size) at the bottom of www.abnormal.com. I've got a few pics taken with a $200 800kpix smasung camera (click on the fish, then the nice trpical islands)
Remember the worst 35 mm film has a resoluion of about 50 megapixels while the better stuff has a resolution of about 300 megapixles.
I go through about 4 (usually business related type) books on CD a month. At ~$20-$30 a pop, that adds up. I am trying to get my listening habbit to pay for itself. So far I don't break even. If I am going to recommend a product Amazon happens to sell (my printer for instance, which I really do own and love), you're damn right I'm going to put my affilate link in there.
You will see it's a +5 comment, so I'm not just "spamming", but actually providing some useful content.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I finished scanning my mother's childhood album a few weeks ago. M$ made it difficult, but that's another post. The tools that worked were Electric Eyes (to liberate corrupt M$ tiffs to png), Gnome Midnight Commander (gmc, to autogenerate thumbnails 100x100), Bluefish (to make a html tabled view page template one day I'll make webmagic do this, but I may still prefer the straight simple html). HTML, thumbnails, larger jpgs and as large as possible PNGs are stored in seperate directories. The html has tables of thumbnails that point to larger jpg's. The user is made aware of the PNGs on the album's first page. All the pictures in the different directories have the same name to minimize confusion. The albums have coppied to CDs and placed on ftp sites to share with anyone who is interested. I'd post a link, but I fear some ass will put a nasty little winbot DoS on me for my trouble.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Digital photos themselves do not fade, only their prints do. All prints fade no matter if the shot was taken digital or analog. That, I think, was the point not understood in the start of this thread.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
I wrote my own software for managing the collection (creating viewable size pictures, thumbnails, etc.), and so far, the best way to organize them is in a directory structure like /YYYY/MM/DD/ so that you can get to any specific day easily, and since you usually don't have that many pictures for any specific day, it manages it quite nicely.
Biggest issue so far is space. I may be living in the past, but having some important directory take up 40% of a HUGE hard drive is kind of unsettling. Backups are also a pain, it takes many CD-Rs to store everything, and even with DVDs, it would still be a major pain requiring several DVDs.
The best parts are that you can easily share it with your family, just startup a web-server and have your family browse through the thing. You can also combine it with other media, for example, my collection has digitized home movies (MPEG format), files, etc.,
There is no worry about it outlasting technology, since I'm sure I'll move it over to the newer machines/technology as those become available. The family will maintain the whole collection. You also don't throw away (shread or burn) the originals, so in case something horrible does happen, you still have some physical backup.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Why not? It's a standard image format, not some proprietary monstrosity. There's plenty of information available on it so that you could write a decoder for it. Hell, I've written a JPEG encoder and decoder myself from the specs; it's not as fast as the IJG software and it doesn't handle all of the different varieties of JPEG coding, but it works with the most common features and shows that you can do a JPEG implementation by yourself if push comes to shove. I don't think it'll come to that, though.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
You forgot to factor in the cost of a new printer every few months when the print heads in that piece of sh*t clog up...unless you can wait the couple or three weeks it'll spend at service getting fixed. You'd have to be nuts to recommend an Epson inkjet to anybody. (Back when I was working for The Man, we'd usually have to replace the demo Epsons once every month or two in order to have working demos. With HP, Lexmark, or Canon, OTOH, a particular demo printer would usually last at least until it was discontinued.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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.
There are also many online photo development services available to Canadians, see Tables of Online Photo Service Sites.
"...saying that sofware written FOR Windows is usually lame is a bit fanatical."
No, that's simply my experience. I've found that WinDOZE software usually is lame, especially when it comes to TWAIN drivers. Of the seven or eight TWAIN drivers I've used over the years, the Nikon driver is the first to offer the ability to auto-number files according to a user-provided pattern. Hell, it's the first to even remember its settings from one use to the next. I have an HP flatbed scanner sitting on my desk. When I use my TWAIN driver, I have to click off the scan settings every time the driver comes up. It's a small thing, but it makes using the scanner more difficult than it needs to be. (And that's when it's not crashing or locking up the calling applicatien.) It's lame software.
My experience with general-purpose software is that Macintosh software is usually the easiest to use. It's a cliche, but it's true. Unix/linux software generally provides the klunkiest UIs, but almost always provides a way to drop down into script mode so I can program whatever is missing from the UI. That's why I use my HP flatbed scanner with linux and scanimage. Finally, I find that WinDOZE software generally is the most awkward to use because you're locked into the poor UI. Want to do something the UI designer hadn't thought of? Too bad, you're almost always out of luck.
Finding a TWAIN scanner driver that makes the job of scanning and archiving photos so easy was a startling experience. I expected the Nikon scanner driver to be pure crap, like most TWAIN drivers. It's not only better than most TWAIN drivers, it's also better than most winDOZE software. It's actually very impressive. But maybe I just have higher expectations than you do.
Oh, and I call it "Windoze" not to be clever, but to express my utter contempt for it. I don't give a shit what you think of that.
--Jim
Maybe the original poster is just too young to have had experiences such as you describe, but I'm with you 100%. Like most Slashdotters, I imagine, I'm more oriented toward the future than the past. Even so, sometimes I imagine what it might be like to have a "holodeck" recreation of my surroundings as a child. Sitting in the back seat of our old car, with a young Mom and Dad in the front seat, surrounded by my favorite candies, some of my old toys....
I don't know how realistic VR is going to become, but even if I have to just do it in my head, having pictures of the old people, places, and things helps me to recreate a world that was good to me and fill in a lot of the details. Seeing even older pictures helps me to recreate worlds that had a big impact on my life, even though they disappeared before I came along.
These things matter to me, and they matter more as I get older and can begin to really feel my place in the sweep of human history.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
As I've gotten older, I've noticed a definite change in my orientation from a close up on my own personal here and now to a wide angle view of family history. I remember my parents when they were younger than I am now. I can remember my grandfather when he wasn't much older than I am now, and I'm surprised at how I'm beginning to relate to them as peers.
They're gone now, but I want to know them more now than I ever did. The photos aren't even close to being enough, but I'm sure I glad I have them.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
At some point, it would make sense for a service bureau to offer the service of reclaiming data off old media and copying as much as possible onto new media. We already have SBs that will recover data from crashed hard drives and others that will copy old super8 movies onto VHS and others that will move VHS to DVD.
It seems that there is a generic business here: moving data from old, even damaged, media to new media. A lot of local SBs already do parts of this. Maybe over time, we'll see a franchise appear offering a wide range of such services, that uses old designs and virtual machines to manufacture the necessary equipment for its franchisees....
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Yes, but Superstore can have your photos done in an hour (two hours for digital pictures, I think). I'm not a big fan of mailing away things like memory cards, and for a lot of people (myself included, even on Sasktel's DSL), it's faster to drive to Superstore and get the photos developed there than it is to upload them anywhere, not to mention much less complicated. And besides, rare is the Western Canadian city without a Superstore. Or at least, sucky is it.
--Dan
Enough said.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.