After losing both of my parents and cleaning out the family home, I am now in the mood to start dealing with a multitude of old pictures, newspaper clippings and family certificates etc. Many of the photos were in those sticky back photo albums which have lost their stick and have deteriorated. The photos are various sizes and the older ones are black and white. Has anyone found something that works really well to store photos (album? box? file? other?) How have you preserved clippings and certificates? Should everything be scanned and put on the computer? Maybe the kids and grandchildren would rather have these photos on a memory stick? I'm looking for suggestions that work.

I had a number of mine from the 1800's reproduced. The originals I packed in acid free paper but now that I have replacements I don't worry too much about them. I had a photographer do them but with the new scanners you could probably get an excellent copy right at home.

I bought two of these (not the exact model, I can't find the link but same idea)
http://www.qvc.com/qic/qvcapp.aspx/v...e-Mini-Scanner

and scanned all the pictures. It didn't take long at all, especially with two going at the same time. I went through 4 HUGE boxes - china size - of pictures. It was a huge relief to know that they were now secure, regardless of what happens to the house (I keep watching all the homes destroyed by weather). I made multiple copies of the CD's and distributed them. I still have the pictures, and I will keep them, but I'm glad they are all not digital as well.

I think the machines cost me $200, but then I sold both them on ebay for, like, $150 so it really cost me zip. I'm sure there are others available on eBay as well.

It was a really easy process.

As for the paper documents, I scanned those as well. One less thing to worry about.

I got a digital scanner at Kmart for the same reason. This is the one I got: http://www.kmart.com/shc/s/p_10151_1...2&blockType=G2 . I have box after box of pictures I want to scan and be able to share with both DD's and my grandchildren. I also figure it will work to help cut down on paper item storage.

And if something would ever happen to our home, I would still have the little sd cards.

When storing on media, be sure to change it every so often. I had many designs that I digitized on CDs and when I went back 3 years later, I could not read them. I did find someone who could remove the info and put it on a stick for me but he said even then, with technology moving so fast, you have to keep updating everything. I now have them stored in about 8 different places and on different medias.

Good point about the possibility of deteriorating media devices.

I guess you could always store them in the "cloud" or some web photo hosting service (webshots, flickr, etc) and then not have to worry about the physical media.

Made me think of Max Headroom. ;-)

Couple of ideas (since I'm doing the very same thing)

Scan and store on disks/flash drives/external hard drives/hosting service as suggested above

Definitely take them out of the old-style photo albums and put them into archival quality scrapbooks/photo albums.

Photo storage boxes are ok, as long as #1 the pictures can lay flat, and #2 they are archival quality.

What I'm in the process of doing right now is looking at the thousands of pictures my mother took. I bought some archival safe storage pages - a CD goes in one side and a contact sheet goes in the other. I am going to eventually get everything that isn't scanned already scanned and save them to Photobucket and/or Picasa. Mom was working on a memory book, and the CD I'm currently working on seems to have everything in it. Dad and I are going to look into what it would cost to have the pictures all printed in a hard back memory book and offer it to all my siblings and their kids. It will be Mom's legacy. Dad's 81, and while he's healthy, I'd like to see this project done before he joins her.

As a scrapbooker here are mural bits.

Scan and save two two types of media. Ie one copy in the "clouds" one copy at your home on a hard drive, another copy stored offsite on CD, thumbdrive, external harddrive etc. Media does change and deteriorate so you will need to keep on top of creating replacements as needed. By segregating the copis to different locations you tend to protect against disater, virus, etc

I'd also place the hard copies into acid free storage to prevent further deterioration. I'd also find a wayti document who is in the photos. Once that info is lost the need to keep the photos diminishes.

I did not ask the question...but some good advice I will use

thanks

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I agree with this. Some years ago my faithful old Mac half egg was dying so I put everything on disks. But when I tried to read them on a new Mac, much of it was garbled, but for some strange reason, not everything. Some of it I can go through it and remove extra letters/numbers and Greek looking stuff, enough to know what the story/letter/etc was about.
I think what I should have done was send it to myself on various email addresses, then I could have easily retrieved it on any computer, Mac or otherwise.