What Photo Storage Do You Use?

[meierlde]

My Ektachrome slides show at least some degradation. The champ is Kodachrome. It has/had the advantage of basically being a black and white film to which the color dyes were added when processed. Apparently, these dyes have much more staying power than the ones built into the film.

The bad one was Eastman Color film which is a film that was used to make copies of slides, as well as many movies at the time. Lots of movies have had to be restored due to the fading.

 

[NW-Bound]

I've been digitizing lots of old family photos. I've come to realize that the only photos that I really care about are photos of people and a few of homes and other personal items.

I just don't care that grandma saw the Golden Gate Bridge back in the 50's. It pretty much looks the same as it does now.

Digitizing old photos will be my next project. I bought my 1st digital camera in 2003, and this was the year my father died. So, I have no photos of him in my digital collection right now.

When people are young, they may not care so much about family photos, but when they get older they learn to cherish photos of people who are gone, or even of themselves in earlier ages. I recently looked at some of our travel photos in 2003 and 2004, and we looked incredibly young. And I like to look at photos of my children taken when they were growing up.

 

[meierlde]

Digitizing old photos will be my next project. I bought my 1st digital camera in 2003, and this was the year my father died. So, I have no photos of him in my digital collection right now.

When people are young, they may not care so much about family photos, but when they get older they learn to cherish photos of people who are gone, or even of themselves in earlier ages. I recently looked at some of our travel photos in 2003 and 2004, and we looked incredibly young. And I like to look at photos of my children taken when they were growing up.

I started digitizing my dad and grandfathers photos so my nieces and nephews would not fight over them someday. (I have no children myself).
Of course now they might fight over who gets to keep the physical media, but I have found 40 year old color prints begining to fade as well as some older slides turning red. So long term preservation except for black and white photos is better digitally, if you copy the digital images to new media every so often and do proper backups.

 

[NW-Bound]

Many of you seem to see no need for remote, off site backups. But one fire and all your redundant drives are history.

I thought about this potential problem, then forgot about it and never did anything.

I guess I can throw a copy of everything into a pocket USB drive that can hold 1TB, then put it in my RV. I will need to use an encryption method to protect my financial records in case the RV gets stolen.

I even thought of putting a NAS drive out in the shed in the backyard, but the running of Ethernet cable out there is too much work, and the WiFi signal does not go that far.