storing 6 rubbermaid tubs of photo albums?

motorcycle jack wrote:
Not to throw gasoline on the fire, but I want you to know, YOU are the only one who will want those 6 tubs of photos. .

yep, when my Dad died, I went through all of his slides. tossed most all that didn't have a person in them at first glance. then tossed most of the others. he had a bunch of 35 mm contact prints from his tour in the WWII, most of which went away. Have given daughters copies of DVDs full of them so they can do what they want with them.
bumpy

Not to throw gasoline on the fire, but I want you to know, YOU are the only one who will want those 6 tubs of photos. We had a similar amount when we went full time, however we had learned from my father-in-laws experience. He had about 10 boxes of photos but when we settled up his estate, contacted relatives - only about 40 photos were passed out. Photos of important events like baptisms, weddings and a few family gatherings. All the rest had to be destroyed - no one wanted them. So when we went full time we asked the kids and g'kids what they wanted, digitized those and sent them out. Then we went thru what was left, digitized those we wanted, the wife made story books of trips, events, etc. and then they went to land fill. AFTER ALL, we have the memories, the books are easy to store and the digital ones we kept take up a couple of thumb drives. Bought a couple of those digital photo frames and plug a different USB drive in every month and enjoy the memories.

I have been using a Lexmark color printer scanner to do my pictures. With the scanner I use, the digital image comes out larger than the original picture which is really nice for faces. Being able to compare faces between generations to see the differences and same characteristics has been amazing. My photo editing program allows me to put names & labels directly on the scanned image. Family members have really liked that. They have heard of the older family members but never met them, so that allowed them to put a name with a face.
Enjoy the family history and remember the family stories as you work on this awesome project.
Selma

I miss the good old days of film. I'd take my roll to Costco/Sam's club, get prints cheap and a CD made of digital copies. nice and neat.
bumpy

We too are recent fulltimers. Several years ago I stopped printing off pictures, but at the end of the year I take my SD card into Walmart & put pics on a cd. Went thru pics and made my daughters memory scrape books, I still have photo's, but trying to weed them out. Plus w SD cards u can use a digital frame. :)

SCVJeff wrote:

mikeleblanc413 wrote:
Quality is relative! I'm with Bumby Road! Scanned images are far superior to copies from a camera. Anyone who says otherwise is inexperienced or has clouded information! A lot of technical issues are at play and I'm not going to spend the time explaining! I will say: they are your photos! The decision is yours!

Actually his preference is a copy stand.. Read up.

When I'm either scanning or copying a picture that 50+ years old, the last thing I care about is dynamic range either out of a scanner or a camera because there is an excellent chance it's not in the original. The original likely came out of a stack of pix with the emulsion scratched (even a little) surface dirt, or both, processed at the local drugstore, and the picture has degraded over time anyway. Negs aren't allot better unless you have something like Digital Ice to do background restoration. Short of a real photo scanner (not the run of the mill home jobs from Staples), and some good restoration software, I'll put my 12+MP copy stand camera up against the scanner market any day. Better lens, far higher resolution better gamma and knee control (especially RAW), and I don't have to worry about sloppy scanner transport rails to skew the image. Even an old picture deserves a chance up against lo-rez scanners.

you forgot another advantage, takes 1/100 of a second, not 15-45 seconds to scan.
bumpy

mikeleblanc413 wrote:
Quality is relative! I'm with Bumby Road! Scanned images are far superior to copies from a camera. Anyone who says otherwise is inexperienced or has clouded information! A lot of technical issues are at play and I'm not going to spend the time explaining! I will say: they are your photos! The decision is yours!

Actually his preference is a copy stand.. Read up.

When I'm either scanning or copying a picture that 50+ years old, the last thing I care about is dynamic range either out of a scanner or a camera because there is an excellent chance it's not in the original. The original likely came out of a stack of pix with the emulsion scratched (even a little) surface dirt, or both, processed at the local drugstore, and the picture has degraded over time anyway. Negs aren't allot better unless you have something like Digital Ice to do background restoration. Short of a real photo scanner (not the run of the mill home jobs from Staples), and some good restoration software, I'll put my 12+MP copy stand camera up against the scanner market any day. Better lens, far higher resolution better gamma and knee control (especially RAW), and I don't have to worry about sloppy scanner transport rails to skew the image. Even an old picture deserves a chance up against lo-rez scanners.

Quality is relative! I'm with Bumby Road! Scanned images are far superior to copies from a camera. Anyone who says otherwise is inexperienced or has clouded information! A lot of technical issues are at play and I'm not going to spend the time explaining! I will say: they are your photos! The decision is yours!

yes but, I doubt that many of us still have negatives for all of these old pictures. my copies of old photos using my low mpix digital camera are as good as the original.
bumpy

There are several good points made above. As a former pro and having scanned over 10,000 images, here's my take:

1) Scanning is superior to a copy stand and camera - for a number of different reasons.

2) Scanning the negs (if you have them) is superior to scanning the prints... by orders of magnitude. Paper prints are only good for about 300 samples per inch. Even an older Nikon film scanner is capable of resolving about 4,200 PPI from a negative. The negative scan will also reacquire dynamic range that was lost in the paper printing process. In addition, negatives don't deteriorate nearly as quickly as paper prints do, so your old photos will look much better scanned from the negs (again - if you saved them).

3) As mentioned, get your photos out from behind plastic and out of any albums that weren't made with acid-free paper. If you plan to keep them, find a climate-controlled storage facility of some sort, too.

4) As also mentioned, backup your digital image collection in several places on several different types of media. Optical storage media have not been around long enough to know how long they will last. Hard drives are magnetic and magnetic forces change/fade with time and drives fail. I back up to both optical and magnetic media and re-copy each backup every year or two. It doesn't take much time or money.

5) Archiving and preserving your treasured images is a labor of love and, if you want quality, does not come cheaply in terms of either money (to pay someone else to do it) or time and money (your's to buy the equipment and do the scanning yourself). Every time I have archived my own images or restored some for someone else, it has been more than worth it. You just have to be selective and understand that you can't do them all!