That was what I thought and I had switched to SSD, but then I learned bit rot means without refreshing the data it will degrade in about 3 years. A motionless de powered hard drive is best for archive, but still will degrade over a decade and of course IS fragile. You drop it once, game over. I looked into archival blue ray; that can last 100 years, and it would fit on 20 blue rays, but having a reader in the future is a big question. Same with tape. With print I print it out and can forget about it. I would expect to pass on a digital archive that is curated in retirement to my kids, but this is a fail safe to managing my iCloud. I’m not even sure if I die if the Apple iCloud beneficiaries technique will work. If you practice good cybersecurity, it can be hard for others to access if you pass unexpectedly. |
USB flash drivers (and SSDs) aren't shelf stable. They need power to retain their data. Home-burnt CDs and DVDs aren't great, but should last 5-10 years in dark storage. IT guy and hobby photographer here. Definitely make prints (proper silver-halide prints from a photo lab), but not 50k. That's insane. I bet you can narrow the to-be-printed list to 500-2000 pretty quickly by not printing duplicate pictures of the same thing, out-of-focus pictures, etc. Definitely keep the digital copies of everything. If you are on a typical budget (no file server, no tape drive, etc.), make three copies on separate mechanical hard disks (USB ones are fine, but they should be physical spinning disks, not SSD), store them in geographically diverse locations, and replace each one with a new one every five years or so. Bonus points for using different drives from different manufacturers. A space-saving option if you just want a human-readable, physical copy of everything would be to output to film (unmounted slides, essentially). This takes up less space than paper prints, and the film copy contains more information than the prints would. It is less fun than flipping through prints. If you have a slide projector, you could mount the slides and look at them that way, but then you lose much of the space-saving advantage. The reason for keeping the digital copies as well is that, if they survive, they will contain more information than print or film copies, they contain metadata, and they aren't subject to color fading. Having multiple copies in different locations will also help to guard against fire/flood/theft risks. |
Nobody needs 50k. Don’t make that your digital legacy. Your kids won’t find important photos in that mess. |
That’s not true. Why can’t you just speak for yourself instead of trying so hard to get strangers to dump their family photos that may be treasured by future generations? I am so happy that I have my old family photo albums. Even the ones that seem “useless” are valuable to me in different ways. |
Even the person who loves you the most won’t even bother to look at it even at 100 pics. Even more after you die.
Pick the best 200. |
One way I read to manage photos is to, every day, go back on that day's pictures for however long you've had your phone and delete the bad ones. Every day for a year. |
I have 50 photo albums from my grandmother sitting in a closet. Forn30 years they were in a closet in my parents house (after she passed). I am certain that when I pass, our kids will toss them - they don't care.
Print a few, frame them, and hang them up and enjoy them. Do not waste a single resource on printing out 50,000 photos that no one wants. |
I’m in the midst of creating my own photo archive, and I can believe someone might have 50,000 images to deal with.
I had never heard of bit rot. Now I have something new to worry about. Sob! |