Preservation of digital photographs for future generations

Interesting and helpful thoughts and suggestions. Plus, I now have a new perspective to ponder: my grandkids and family generations beyond them may have no interest in paper prints; maybe prints, like cursive writing, will become irrelevant in the future.
I think you're wrong about this. I think no matter what, family photos should be printed as well as digitally archived and backed up.
Even if you don't do more than throw them into a thumb drive and print them out as 4x6 at Walgreen's, they will be appreciated down the road. You might even be able to upload to Walgreen's via internet. Sadly, Costco and Sam's locally have stopped doing prints.
There is an app on my phone called FreePrints. One gets X amount of free prints every month.
What's funny is that if I've shot the images on my "real" cameras I have to get them into my phone to make use of the app. But that's easily done.
 
Whatever anyone chooses, be sure to label the pictures!!
I have several old photo albums from my grandma and I have no idea who are in many of them.
 
I had been backing up pictures and movie slide shows of many of them on DVD's. So now I've put them back on my computer that is backed up with a WD My Passport drive as I noticed a couple of my DVD's stopped reading.

But honestly. Who's going to care? I might copy them, at least some that future kid might want, on a memory card or second drive for them to keep. But who's going to look at all this stuff? I still believe making a few good prints, blown up and framed properly, and giving them as gifts to family is the best way to go. No one really cares about these things except us because they're ours. No one's going to look at them after we're dead. Better off scrawling your initials in some wet concrete sidewalk if you're looking for immortality. I once snuck into the Temple of Dendur in NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art in their Egyptian wing. I was there doing maintenance work before the museum opened. I saw someone had scrawled his initial on one of the inside walls. It was dated sometime in the early 1800's. Better than some old photograph, for sure. :)
Here's the whole link for the temple.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/547802
DP246639.jpg
 
Your worst enemies with respect to preservation are moisture (humidity) and light.
If you can keep your photos in a cool but dry, and dark place, they will last longer.

Steve Thomas
 
I have appreciated old family photos and the time people gave to save them and identify them. I have photos with explanations going back into the horse and buggy days. There are some journal type entries as well. Found out my grandfather loved photography and great grandfather did trick horseback riding. Now I know where my passions came from! We are currently making copies so my brothers and I each have a history of both parents families. I’m trying to update some unlabeled photos. It was nice for my 81 year old father to explain his family to my girls. It gave them something to talk about and the history was interesting. I’m trying to write down things that only my parents know-things they’ve mentioned, but I forget. I’m trying to gather information and pictures from my husbands side-they keep no history. I think the photos are lying in a drawer. Please print photos for the future generations and include written information as well. Some may not care, but the ones that do will be thrilled.
 
I have cds full of photos that I took in 1995 when CD burners first came out. The are still good. It's going on 24 years now.

Glad your CDs are still OK, but early CDs were only rated for about 10 years. You might want to make copies and backups.

I have even mega cheap mass-printed CDs from 20+ years ago that are fine. In all my years I've lost ONE CD... which is kind of amazing to me.

That said, I backup everything important on archival gold DVDs when I can... bluray if it's just too impractical from a size perspective. AND I keep everything on spinning disk and backed up local and to the cloud via CrashPlan. (which has saved my butt once so far)

I wouldn't trust memory cards, generally. Flakier than CD/DVD in the short run.

Should I die, I have instructions for my family on how to retain all this information safely.

Printing is not a bad idea... I dug up a few prints from my family from when they came over from Italy... so it certainly works on some level, but I dunno... never wanted to bother. (which sounds funny after I just typed all that) lol
 
I worked for an online mail-order photo printing company many, many years ago. The marketing went like this:

Memory Card: 1 year

Local HDD: 5 years (average life span of an HDD at the time)

CD/DVD: +/- 10 years

Photo prints: 100+ years, if stored in optimal conditions

Uploading to an online storage service leaves you vulnerable to their terms, how long the service is maintained, how long they stay in business etc.
 
Of all the media, print is the only one that is future-proof in technology. CDs are fantastic and durable, but computers aren't even coming with them anymore. How much longer do you think they'll be around? Digital is fine, but I've found that some of my earliest digital videos from the 1990's won't open for some reason. It takes work to keep up with technology and to keep converting when necessary. I'm not going to risk RAW files from a DSLR circa 2005 will be able to be opened by software 25 years from now. It's hard to imagine JPG files not being able to be opened considering how widely used they are, but technology advances in brutal ways at times. There used to be a billion VCRs around. Now, if you have something on VHS, there's a good chance you have no way to view it and have to buy a used unit. I knew people in the 90's who invested a lot on LaserDisc movies. What a waste of money that was. They aren't worth trying to watch today.

I archive my photos to whatever digital is in widest use at the time. I started out on slow, old, hard external drives, but today I'm keeping them on SSDs. But that's not enough, so I use the cloud as well. However, by far the most viewed of all of our photos are the ones that we put into albums. I always have them printed by a lab. Our kids tend to take a billion photos with their phones, but I rarely see them looking back through them. They might have some on social media and that would be the only place they have them as they clean out their phones. I think they will regret that someday. I'm glad we have a library of photos. When we're gone, our kids can look through them and decide what they want to keep. Sadly, few will make it past our grandkids.
 
So basically what I've done is I've built a file server that uses an N+2 arrangement for the drives (ie, if I have four disks, two disks' worth of capacity is used for fault-tolerance, two disks' worth of capacity is for file storage, six disks would be 4+2, etc) and I've both purchased an external hard disk drive and a blu-ray multilayer burner and higher quality inorganic "high to low" discs to burn onto. I need to work on my setup a bit, as I went with OpenMediaVault and I'm unhappy with it, but since my RAID array is in hardware and my OS disk is on an entirely separate controller I can easily build another system and then mount the RAID filesystem again.

The point of all of this, the RAID disks are my primary live access. In theory I have warning when a disk is failing and I can change it out and keep the live access running. The external hard disk is a quick-access offline backup, where I theoretically can plug-in to any computer to retrieve contents, but in the event that fails, the optical discs should be readable by any multilayer BD drive, of which there are considerable numbers. Perhaps not as many as DVD, but the tradeoff for much more storage is worthwhile.

So, the reason to not just go with an external hard disk drive is that the read mechanism and the storage medium (the read heads and the platters) are integrated into one unit. If something in the read mechanism fails, I cannot easily and inexpensively move the storage medium to a different read mechanism. Data recovery companies charge hundreds of dollars to simply attempt this, and it could run into the thousands if there are problems finding an identical drive etc.

I don't trust "cloud" backups. Cloud is someone else's servers. I've had loss of data on someone else's server long before it was called Cloud, and I don't wish to go through that again.

So if anyone wonders what's annoying me about OpenMediaVault, the thing is fragile and fickle. Right now the web interface to maintain it is broken on my box, it broke when I tried to install a network time protocol daemon for other use on my home network. It's mostly a gatekeeper anyway, it simply automagically handles file permissions, account creation, and network share creation, once systems that do the actual network share operations are running it's not actually doing anything. Additionally its designers apparently don't see any value in being able to back-up the RAID array to a non-UNIX-type filesystem that loses some of the permissions that Linux and UNIX filesystems maintain, such that I can't plug an NTFS-partitioned USB hard disk in and have it mirror the RAID array contents to it while maintaining as many of those file permissions and characteristics as the differing filesystem supports. Since the goal would be for my wife, who isn't a heavy Linux user, to be able to take that external hard disk and plug it into her Windows laptop to read the contents if the file server itself should die, this is a problem. OMV would be much more useful if they'd acknowledge that the world isn't perfect and sometimes someone needs compatibility to closed-source OSes like Windows.

If you go with blu-ray or DVD, be mindful of the kind of dyes used in the substrates. Organic dyes tend to degrade over time. Inorganic dyes mean costlier media, but that media seems less failure-prone.
 
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Of all the media, print is the only one that is future-proof in technology. CDs are fantastic and durable, but computers aren't even coming with them anymore. How much longer do you think they'll be around? Digital is fine, but I've found that some of my earliest digital videos from the 1990's won't open for some reason. It takes work to keep up with technology and to keep converting when necessary. I'm not going to risk RAW files from a DSLR circa 2005 will be able to be opened by software 25 years from now. It's hard to imagine JPG files not being able to be opened considering how widely used they are, but technology advances in brutal ways at times. There used to be a billion VCRs around. Now, if you have something on VHS, there's a good chance you have no way to view it and have to buy a used unit. I knew people in the 90's who invested a lot on LaserDisc movies. What a waste of money that was. They aren't worth trying to watch today.

I archive my photos to whatever digital is in widest use at the time. I started out on slow, old, hard external drives, but today I'm keeping them on SSDs. But that's not enough, so I use the cloud as well. However, by far the most viewed of all of our photos are the ones that we put into albums. I always have them printed by a lab. Our kids tend to take a billion photos with their phones, but I rarely see them looking back through them. They might have some on social media and that would be the only place they have them as they clean out their phones. I think they will regret that someday. I'm glad we have a library of photos. When we're gone, our kids can look through them and decide what they want to keep. Sadly, few will make it past our grandkids.
Looking at the old prints of long lost family members I can guarantee print isn't future proof either.
Even with my own much more recent prints there are some that have faded rather severely. Active archiving with transfer to newer media & converting formats as required is the only way to be sure - but I doubt many of us have the time for that!

If you have important stuff on VHS there are still services that will digitize it for you, no doubt the same is true for laserdisc, but the cost will outway the desire for movies that were on general release (& probably already available as DVD/blue-ray or an easily used digital format). It's probably not a good idea to leave any such data unconverted for much longer if you do want to use it.
 
Of all the media, print is the only one that is future-proof in technology. CDs are fantastic and durable, but computers aren't even coming with them anymore. How much longer do you think they'll be around? Digital is fine, but I've found that some of my earliest digital videos from the 1990's won't open for some reason. It takes work to keep up with technology and to keep converting when necessary. I'm not going to risk RAW files from a DSLR circa 2005 will be able to be opened by software 25 years from now. It's hard to imagine JPG files not being able to be opened considering how widely used they are, but technology advances in brutal ways at times. There used to be a billion VCRs around. Now, if you have something on VHS, there's a good chance you have no way to view it and have to buy a used unit. I knew people in the 90's who invested a lot on LaserDisc movies. What a waste of money that was. They aren't worth trying to watch today.

I archive my photos to whatever digital is in widest use at the time. I started out on slow, old, hard external drives, but today I'm keeping them on SSDs. But that's not enough, so I use the cloud as well. However, by far the most viewed of all of our photos are the ones that we put into albums. I always have them printed by a lab. Our kids tend to take a billion photos with their phones, but I rarely see them looking back through them. They might have some on social media and that would be the only place they have them as they clean out their phones. I think they will regret that someday. I'm glad we have a library of photos. When we're gone, our kids can look through them and decide what they want to keep. Sadly, few will make it past our grandkids.
Looking at the old prints of long lost family members I can guarantee print isn't future proof either.
Even with my own much more recent prints there are some that have faded rather severely. Active archiving with transfer to newer media & converting formats as required is the only way to be sure - but I doubt many of us have the time for that!

If you have important stuff on VHS there are still services that will digitize it for you, no doubt the same is true for laserdisc, but the cost will outway the desire for movies that were on general release (& probably already available as DVD/blue-ray or an easily used digital format). It's probably not a good idea to leave any such data unconverted for much longer if you do want to use it.

The problem with Laserdisc and VHS are both are low-resolution formats. I have a TON of both (like, 800 titles on VHS, 500 titles on Laserdisc) and my previous efforts to digitize have always resulted in usable but not particularly enjoyable conversions. Arguably DVD is also a low-resolution format, albeit digital to start with so less headache with archiving. When we view low-resolution formats later when we're accustomed to higher-res content, the low-res content looks poor.

Now that said, I think we've got awhile before it really matters when it comes to digital photography. 4k is basically 8.3 megapixel. 8k at 16:9 aspect is basically 37.7 megapixel. When one considers that high quality photographic prints can be made from basically 10 megapixel images, we should be fine, so long as the original files, the equivalents of the negatives, are retained. They have some nice advantages in that they won't fade or warp like slide film can be subject to, and they're infinitely copyable so that someone can maintain multiple sets of backups scattered around to prevent loss unlike that single box of slides, and the image formats used are common enough that conventional programs can read them in most cases unless someone is only shooting raw.
 

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