digitizing old photos

[beowulf]

We have books and books and boxes and boxes of photos dating back to the 1920s. My mom was very active amateur photographer for most of her life and I have no real idea who most of the people in the pictures are. Scenery is different and there are some nice black and white scenes. She did all her own processing in the early days and one problem is that the photos are becoming brittle. I have lots of prints of pictures that I took until about 2000, when I bought my first digital camera. Now I have about 125,000 digital pictures that I rarely look at. I guess I'll have to find someplace that will digitize the best of the old photos and toss the rest. I have several family photos from the "old country" (of relatives I never met and died long before I was born) that are pre 1900, and I need to find a way to preserve them also. Sounds like a really daunting job.

 

[dadu007]

To the OP's original question:
Check out https://www.scancafe.com/. Sign up for their newsletter. Wait for a 40% off sale. Done.

 

[mpeirce]

Now that flash drives are so cheap and large, you might as well put your photos on one of those too. There will probably be USB connectors for a while. But I wonder how stable those flash drives are, long term.

My approach is to periodically copy "important" archival data to a redundant copy of the latest storage media every few years.

I'm currently migrating a scattering of old hard disk data on to one large new hard disk. That single archive will be duplicated onto another similar sized drive - of another manufacturer. The second disk will be kept away from the first. They'll both be USB 3 this generation.

In a new years I'll revisit this setup and move to whatever makes sense then.

The good thing is that storage sizes continue to increase nicely so it's cheaper to save even more data each generation.

 

[Souschef]

Before I switched to a digital camera in 2005, I had albums full of photos when I traveled with my late wife.
I ended up tossing them, because my sons would not want them (she was not their mother) and I am sure DW would not want them either.
OTOH, we recently had a videotape of DW and her late husband at a dolphin encounter
in Hawaii that we had converted to a DVD and given to her sons.

 

[mountainsoft]

It appears that our ancestors got it right the first time and the most reliable and longest-lasting data storage method developed so far is that old favorite, carving in stone.

The modern version of stone records are called M-Disc. They look like a DVD but claim to have a life of 1000 years (not sure how they tested that). They're available in sizes up to 100GB.

Of course, while the disc may last 1000 years, you will probably have trouble finding a drive to play them on in another 20-40 years. Remember VHS, betamax, floppy discs, 12" video discs, and Zip drives?

Better to convert your images, video, music, etc. to digital form, make multiple copies for protection, and transfer them to new technology as it becomes available.