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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)
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'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.
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 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
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?
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.
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