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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.
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.)
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
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
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
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
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?
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."
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.
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.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.