Digital storage of old photos. Help me

[walterjay]

Purchased a photo scanner to digitize and clean up some old photos. I also have a lot of photos on our phones. I want catalog them, do minimal editing and safely store them without a lot of cost. We have been looking at various options. What is a recommended system to do simple editing and storage of the pics. Cloud, hard drive, stick? There are free on line sites to do this. Are they trustworthy?
What are you all doing?

 

[thastinger]

Cloud and stick. You can get 15G free storage with Gmail accounts. The USB sticks are cheap, the problem will be remembering where you put it.

 

[Cropduster172]

A 512 GB thumb drive is about $30.

 

[BISCUT]

I have about 80k digital images. Cheapest and safest route out without diving into a "system" is to stagger a few HD's and back up using 2. One is on your desk/laptop, second stored in your house, and this offsite. I had a friend who kept his in a USPS office box in USPS envelope.

 

[supton]

I was just looking at SD card vs USB drive for a computer I just picked up, and it seemed like mechanical HD still holds the edge in retention/durability? I don't want to say, flash drives are prone to just up and die, but it wasn't a feel-good finding.

I was tempted to finally get a lock box at the local bank. They don't offer any sort of warranty, but it's highly unlikely that anyone is going to steal the box or have it damaged in event of fire. What do the IT guys recommend? 3-2-1? 3 copies, 2 of which are on different file media, and 1 is off-site in case the absolute worst happens.

As to storing, I'm a big fan of folders and readme files. Dropping the photos into OneNote or Word and then adding info might be really nice--I know there are a lot of names to faces that I no longer remember. And places where I was at, maybe my thoughts and feelings, etc. Not sure if OneNote will be around "forever" though. But it might be nice to jot down things for posterity.

Personally I'm anti-cloud but it is clearly the new and upcoming thing where it's all going.

 

[CarbonToast]

I think a simple plan is to do Google or Icloud plus retain a copy on your local machine. IF cloud holds your data hostage, you have hard copy. If your hard drive crashes, you have the cloud copy.

For cataloging, there are already tools in Google photos and icloud photos. Once you get the images scanned and uploaded use those. Think of it like Adding images to the photo gallery on your smartphone.

How many gigabytes?

Also, good job working on this. I can't even get people to use icloud backup for their prized family photos only stored on their local device.

 

[AZjeff]

#1 - DO NOT toss your paper photographs after you digitize them.

Do a search and do some reading about safe digital data storage. The 2 things most commonly mentioned are you have to update your storage medium as technology advances and have multiple back ups. The cloud and dedicated media storage sites are fine for a back up but not as primary storage. Buy quality physical storage devices/media. I need to get serious with our images as well.

 

[Vil_Riker]

I scanned and stored old photos on a solid state drive and on Google. I tossed them in the bin because past doesn't matter...

No one cares about digital photos, though. I still have some paper photos from 1910 era of family members I don't know. Will the technology be the same in 100 years to retrieve old photos from Google or a thumb drive?

 

[cptbarkey]

A 512 GB thumb drive is about $30.

these do fail, so rotate it out every few years or whatever the warranty is. I've had a slate of them die the past few years.

 

[Cropduster172]

these do fail, so rotate it out every few years or whatever the warranty is. I've had a slate of them die the past few years.

True. I've had USB hard drives that are likely a better way to go but more expensive. I've only had 1-2 thumb drives ever fail though.

 

[Reggaemon]

Don't put all your faith in thumb drives. I've had photos go bad after years of storage.

 

[alarmguy]

#1 - DO NOT toss your paper photographs after you digitize them.

Do a search and do some reading about safe digital data storage. The 2 things most commonly mentioned are you have to update your storage medium as technology advances and have multiple back ups. The cloud and dedicated media storage sites are fine for a back up but not as primary storage. Buy quality physical storage devices/media. I need to get serious with our images as well.

What a timely thread and post.
I have digital photos going back to around 2002. Currently stored on a couple Disc Hard Drives and Shutterfly and the more recent from a few years back also on iCloud. I think I trust storing digital media on physical drives more than digital chips. I am under the impression that chips need to be energized from time to time. Also another posted in here about issues on long term chip storage. I sort of had a similar occurrence a long time ago on chips going corrupt, not sure if still a concern but anyway, agree to save the hard copies for sure.

Thing is Im looking to narrow them down to a select few a year. Meaning when I am gone from this earth my kids are not going to want to go through 1000's of digital photos. I also dont know if there is a holy grail to store digital photos either compared to hard copies. So anyway, that is going to be my project this year. Get everything under control into a nice tidy package for digital AND select a few photos from every year going back to around 2002 and print them out. Put them in photo albums to have available to my kids when I am no longer on this earth.

Shutterfly is one source to get them printed however one of my presents for Christmas this year was a simple Canon Photo printer, claims up to 100 year photo preservation. No ink to dry up inbetween use either. SO between that and Shutterfly these two will be my source for hard copy photos in a series of albums.

 

[fsdork]

If you're not constantly shuffling photos in and out of electronic folders, optical media (burning a CD/DVD) is less prone to degradation over time vs. thumb drives. The flash media in thumb drives needs to see power periodically to keep retaining data, and even then I wouldn't trust it long term. This is true to a lesser extent with hard drives.

So, for our wedding photos - one copy on the cloud (Google Drive in our case), one DVD at the office, and a duplicate DVD in the fire safe.

 

[Marcozi]

Store the scans in 2 different devices such as a hard drive and a thumb drive.

 

[Pew]

I would recommend cloud and a USB drive at minimum. I also keep a copy on my personal computer, so 3 copies in total; none of them are important though - just scenic photos from travels.

If you get a USB flash drive, make sure it's from a decent company. The only one that I recommend is Sandisk - who coincidently makes garbage SSDs.

 

[Carmudgeon]

As noted, flash memory is not archival quality, and needs to be "recharged" periodically.

Neither is optical media, unless specified.

Don't on any single solution, spread the risk around.

 

[ctechbob]

#1 - DO NOT toss your paper photographs after you digitize them.

Do a search and do some reading about safe digital data storage. The 2 things most commonly mentioned are you have to update your storage medium as technology advances and have multiple back ups. The cloud and dedicated media storage sites are fine for a back up but not as primary storage. Buy quality physical storage devices/media. I need to get serious with our images as well.

This.

Just remember, 2 is one, one is none.

Storage is cheap. Multiple technologies, and multiple locations. Update the storage as technology changes and verify the backups on a regular basis.

 

[eljefino]

I scanned and stored old photos on a solid state drive and on Google. I tossed them in the bin because past doesn't matter...

No one cares about digital photos, though. I still have some paper photos from 1910 era of family members I don't know. Will the technology be the same in 100 years to retrieve old photos from Google or a thumb drive?

The ease and cheapness of digital photography has made it mean less. Still meaningful, of course, but my pictures on film from "the before times" are near and dear to me.

I got a film/negative scanner which gave "meh" results but then used the adapters and a macro lens with my modern DSLR and the pictures POP! Photo paper back then was real cheap and didn't show all the colors or tonal range the negatives were capable of. Agree with the idea of keeping your original originals somewhere dry (mold!) in case better technology comes along.

 

[alarmguy]

The ease and cheapness of digital photography has made it mean less. Still meaningful, of course, but my pictures on film from "the before times" are near and dear to me.
..

I couldnt agree more. I REALLY miss film, pictures, composition and exposure used to mean something.
Now photos are more commonplace than anything on earth. Including the ground we walk on.

 

[ka9mnx]

No, never, archive on the cloud. The cloud is for photographers who travel and need easy access to their data.

Digital storage degrades over time unless occasionally written to. Future improvements in digital technology can and will improve it's reliability. Optical storage will eventually degrade so the "100" year life is not true. Although, subject to mechanical damage, spinning rust is, as of now, the best option.

I began shooting 35mm film many, many years ago and loved it. Cost and convenience forced me into digital. Now I shoot with old low megapixel DSLR's and an old camcorder (I like the look).

On my computer the only thing on my digital boot drive is programs. All my work, and photos, reside on an external, laptop size, 2Tb spinning drive (work drive). Every night the digital drive and work drive are backed up on another external spinning drive. I keep 5 days of backups. The only thing missing in my set up is an off location storage option (a third spinning drive in a bank lock box).