Are photo albums necessary?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Never throw away old photos. Just because you may not find any value in them that doesn’t mean that someone else may not. I can’t tell you the number of important items that previous generations threw out because they thought that nobody would care. Well I wasn’t even alive yet when some of these decisions were made and it has cut me off from my own relatives and history because of their thoughtless actions.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My goal is to get them all into an Aura, I just haven’t done it yet.

Just got one...it's great. Now I see them all the time

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Never throw away old photos. Just because you may not find any value in them that doesn’t mean that someone else may not. I can’t tell you the number of important items that previous generations threw out because they thought that nobody would care. Well I wasn’t even alive yet when some of these decisions were made and it has cut me off from my own relatives and history because of their thoughtless actions.

That’s part of why I do it. I use the assumption that there may be someone down the line for whom these things are very meaningful as many of them have been to me. I love seeing my great grandfathers face in that of my son. I feel like I’m just one of many stewards in the history of our family. It’s truly only recent in human history where we can have pictures of places and people and things that are meaningful to us. What a shame that so many take it for granted.

The descendants can - and will prefer to - see the face digitally as opposed to on an old, crinkled, faded, yellowing piece of paper. Don’t wait a moment longer to scan the pix you want people after you to see. They are deteriorating fast.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I still get all my photos in prints. There’s something different about flipping through physical pictures. I don’t like the idea of what are for me, my most valuable things being at the mercy of the cloud alone .

+1
I still order prints of my favorite pictures and put them in albums.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:we do not use printed photo albums. This is what phones are for. Also, when you die, these end up in a dumpster.

Best of luck to you if they're every erased from the cloud or the internet is ever cut off permanently.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I used to be an archivist, and I remember being taught that digital files have a lifespan of less than 7 years. The lifespan of a physical photograph is much longer: 100+ yrs?

Whether you actually want/need all your photos in the future is a different question but if you want to have a set of photos to give your kids in thirty years, you should have them printed. Putting them in an album will make them easier to keep (or have them printed into one of those books).

Scanning is great to share the photos or make a backup, but it's very unlikely those files will be accessible in 30 years unless you constantly put energy into migrating them to new file formats. Think about all the files on floppy disks or CD-ROMs that are really hard to access now.

Exactly. Honestly, the shortsightedness of some of these posters is so typical.

[Anonymous]

Can anyone recommend a reputable scanning service? My oldest child was born before digital cameras were ubiquitous, so I need to get his baby photos scanned.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I used to be an archivist, and I remember being taught that digital files have a lifespan of less than 7 years. The lifespan of a physical photograph is much longer: 100+ yrs?

Whether you actually want/need all your photos in the future is a different question but if you want to have a set of photos to give your kids in thirty years, you should have them printed. Putting them in an album will make them easier to keep (or have them printed into one of those books).

Scanning is great to share the photos or make a backup, but it's very unlikely those files will be accessible in 30 years unless you constantly put energy into migrating them to new file formats. Think about all the files on floppy disks or CD-ROMs that are really hard to access now.

On average, digital files, in general, might have a lifespan of seven years. That's not true of all digital files.

I have some floppy disks and am trying to work out how to get the files off those. By contrast, I have some photos of my great great great grandparents from the 1800s and was able to scan those and upload them to my family tree no problem whatsoever.