Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Ha, just last week I finished scanning the really old stuff! You never know what will happen to you or your stuff, a fire, a flood, a tornado. My son's, girlfriend's, parents came home from a shopping trip and found their home burned down to the foundation. Scan those puppies and give copies to everyone. You never know, one day you may be asking Cousin Earl for a copy of that CD you handed him.
I don't think "preserved" and "digitally" go together very well. Digital images on a CD will likely be gone in a matter of years rather than decades, so you'll need to copy them over to a fresh CD every few years. While you may do this, will your children or grandchildren? Or will the CD get tossed into a box and forgotten until it has nothing on it, gets lost, or until there are no CD readers available? Remember the 5.25" floppies of only 20 years ago? How many have readers for those, or for that matter, for even the 3.5" floppies of a decade ago? How about 8-track tapes, or even VCR tapes? You can bet that CD technology will go the same route as the floppy disk and the 8-track in years to come.
If you want archival photos, copy the old ones, especially the old color prints, and have them printed onto archival papers by archival means. (Your desktop printer is very unlikely to produce prints that will last more than a couple decades AT MOST!) The best archival inkjet printers use pigment-based inks, not dye-based, but 95% of the printers use dye-based inks. And the best archival papers are acid-free, yet 95% of photo paper has acid in it.
FWIW, Epson does make some relatively inexpensive ($350-$450) inkjet printers that use pigment-based inks (Ultrachrome, K3). Use one of them along with acid-free paper, seal the prints and store them in a dark, cool place, and they should last for a few hundred years before noticeable fading occurs.
I hope you don't consider this off-topic. I think it's an important point.
I don't think "preserved" and "digitally" go together very well. Digital images on a CD will likely be gone in a matter of years rather than decades, so you'll need to copy them over to a fresh CD every few years. While you may do this, will your children or grandchildren? Or will the CD get tossed into a box and forgotten until it has nothing on it, gets lost, or until there are no CD readers available? Remember the 5.25" floppies of only 20 years ago? How many have readers for those, or for that matter, for even the 3.5" floppies of a decade ago? How about 8-track tapes, or even VCR tapes? You can bet that CD technology will go the same route as the floppy disk and the 8-track in years to come.
If you want archival photos, copy the old ones, especially the old color prints, and have them printed onto archival papers by archival means. (Your desktop printer is very unlikely to produce prints that will last more than a couple decades AT MOST!) The best archival inkjet printers use pigment-based inks, not dye-based, but 95% of the printers use dye-based inks. And the best archival papers are acid-free, yet 95% of photo paper has acid in it.
FWIW, Epson does make some relatively inexpensive ($350-$450) inkjet printers that use pigment-based inks (Ultrachrome, K3). Use one of them along with acid-free paper, seal the prints and store them in a dark, cool place, and they should last for a few hundred years before noticeable fading occurs.
I hope you don't consider this off-topic. I think it's an important point.
I have copied a few hundred using a high-resolution scanner, and put them on 2 hard drives, and a few DVD's (I know both mediums do not last forever). Nowadays, when you can get 2 or 3TB hard drives for $120, for the moment I am just relying on redundancy.
I am just wondering about the cost, with the acid-free paper and the ink... both my father and grandfather were shutterbugs, taking tons of family pictures, and they inherited pictures all the way back to relatives that were in the civil war. (Daguerreotypes are really cool). I have about 10,000 family and relatives photos... Not to be off-topic, but a large fraction of them are slides. I haven't figured out how to copy them with good resolution, at a reasonably fast rate. I could project them using a slide projector, and use my digital camera. Not sure how well that works. I could load up the rotary trays on the projector, and maybe copy one every 10 seconds. But then add in all the time to reload the trays, download them to hard drives, etc, and we are easily looking at 1 minute each. So that runs about 166 hours, or 7 days around the clock (The total data space is only about 40 GB or so, so that is a drop in the bucket).
So back to the original thread; I have digitized a few hundred, and want to do them all, I just need to find the time.
It is difficult to find the time, but a good way to preserve them.
Jaggy, do you share your FTM tree with relatives or online or is that just for personal use?
I have a couple of trees available online but they are not complete trees. The FTM tree is my 'master' and I have made that available to relatives. One reason was wholly practical .... my research discovered a history of heart disease amongst the men of my paternal grandmother's family (including my own father).
I have scanned all my ancestry photos - from around the 1860s up to about the 1950s or 60s. After that, there are far too many family photos to scan them all. I have them on two hard drives, as well as many of them uploaded to Ancestry.com
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Will later, hopefully.
(The total data space is only about 40 GB or so, so that is a drop in the bucket).
