What Do I Do With All This Stuff???

nick wrote:
> So I am converting from film to digital. Cool.
>
> I have many, many large boxes of Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides.
>
> I have envelopes on envelopes of negatives too.
>
> I have rolls of film from the old "Slides and Pix from the Same
> Roll" offers.
>
> Now I upload my digi-prints to the PC, print what I want ....
> Then What??? Do I delete all the files? Do I burn them to
> a CD or DVD that has a lifespan of, what, 4 minutes??

CD's and DVD's life span is maybe half of that of a slide or negative
and likely more than most prints. Of course they can't be totally trusted
because the don't fail slowly, they fail all at once.

If you want to be sure of them, you make at least two copies. You keep
one and send one off far away. I send copies to my kids out of state. That
way no fire or simple defect will cost me all the images I wish to maintain.
That is far safer than keeping the negatives or prints or slides.

Remember to replace and update those storage devices on a regular basis.

It also helps to reduce the total number of images you are keeping. You
really don't need to keep 16 very similar images of the front of the church
where your son was married.


>
> Do I save them to a hard drive that I then take offline and
> store in a vault??
>
> What do I do with all this digitized "stuff" ?????

--
Joseph Meehan

Dia 's Muire duit
 >> Stay informed about: What Do I Do With All This Stuff??? 

On Thu, 08 Mar 2007 00:49:58 GMT, nick wrote:

> So I am converting from film to digital. Cool.

So you're converting from film to digital. Yawn. Er, I mean,
like, coooool, dude!


> I have many, many large boxes of Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides.
>
> I have envelopes on envelopes of negatives too.
>
> I have rolls of film from the old "Slides and Pix from the Same
> Roll" offers.
>
> Now I upload my digi-prints to the PC, print what I want ....
> Then What??? Do I delete all the files? Do I burn them to
> a CD or DVD that has a lifespan of, what, 4 minutes??
>
> Do I save them to a hard drive that I then take offline and
> store in a vault??
>
> What do I do with all this digitized "stuff" ?????

Put it all in a locker, forget photography and take up model
railroading or collecting very British tea cozies. There are some
for every taste, whether Cotswold Cottage, Ginger Cat, Plum Sauce,
Lorna Doone, Black Adder, more Wodehouse or Marmite.

http://www.bluemoontea.com/tea-cozy.htm
http://www.amazon.com/As-British-as-Tea-Cozy/lm/R27I5ZPFAUK94I
 >> Stay informed about: What Do I Do With All This Stuff??? 

nick wrote:
> So I am converting from film to digital. Cool.
>
> I have many, many large boxes of Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides.
>
> I have envelopes on envelopes of negatives too.
>
> I have rolls of film from the old "Slides and Pix from the Same
> Roll" offers.
>
> Now I upload my digi-prints to the PC, print what I want ....
> Then What??? Do I delete all the files? Do I burn them to
> a CD or DVD that has a lifespan of, what, 4 minutes??
>
> Do I save them to a hard drive that I then take offline and
> store in a vault??
>
> What do I do with all this digitized "stuff" ?????

There is NO practical way to preserve your images, digital or otherwise,
"in perpetuity". But you can create several levels of redundancy with
digital images.
I keep ALL of my images on my computer Hard Drive.
I copy all of my KEEPERS to a DVD.
I copy my EDITED keepers to a CD. (longer lifetime, I think )
I then copy the CDs and DVDs to an 80 GB External Portable Hard Drive.
My plan is to make new DVD copies every 4 years, CDs every 5 years
Haven't decided how frequently I'll refresh the Portable.H.D.
I should, but I don't, store duplicates at another location.
Bob Williams
 >> Stay informed about: What Do I Do With All This Stuff??? 

Joseph Meehan wrote:

> CD's and DVD's life span is maybe half of that of a slide or negative
> and likely more than most prints.

Wow! Is that ever encouraging! I recently scanned about twenty
storage boxes of slides. They had been around from as long ago as
1966. Guess how many, stored in total darkness, had turned green
or purple -- ektachrome, kodachrome, etc. What a waste.
 >> Stay informed about: What Do I Do With All This Stuff??? 

nick <nick DeleteThis @NOSPAM.ORG> writes:
> Wow! Is that ever encouraging! I recently scanned about twenty
> storage boxes of slides. They had been around from as long ago as
> 1966. Guess how many, stored in total darkness, had turned green
> or purple -- ektachrome, kodachrome, etc. What a waste.

I don't think they're wasted. The colors shifted but those color
shifts happen in a fairly consistent way, that is, you can make
appropriate adjustments manually on a slide to get the original colors
back, then apply the exact same adjustment to the rest of the slides
from the box and fix the colors on all of them pretty efficiently.
 >> Stay informed about: What Do I Do With All This Stuff??? 

nathantw wrote:
> There are numerous companies that will convert your slides and negatives to
> dvd.

I can do that myself. But then what do I have?? A bunch of DVDs with
a shelf life of what?? I'm looking here for duration, not fancy.
My old slides lasted 30+ years then started to die. My DVDs will
last what, 10 years? maybe? I am looking for a real answer, not
just another temporary solution.
 >> Stay informed about: What Do I Do With All This Stuff??? 

ASAAR wrote:
Ummm, and this is supposed to be helpful???

Thanks so much.

Now crawl back into your hole and go back to sleep.
 >> Stay informed about: What Do I Do With All This Stuff??? 

On Thu, 08 Mar 2007 02:54:04 GMT, nick, who's not even nora wrote:

> Ummm, and this is supposed to be helpful???

Yes, if it teaches you to start new threads as you did here:

> So I am converting from film to digital. Cool.

So, what have you learned from this, if anything?

Then too, adding that CDs and DVDs have a lifespan of 4 minutes
does little to indicate that you'd be able to winnow good advice
from bad.
 >> Stay informed about: What Do I Do With All This Stuff??? 

nick wrote:

> I can do that myself. But then what do I have?? A bunch of DVDs with
> a shelf life of what?? I'm looking here for duration, not fancy.
> My old slides lasted 30+ years then started to die. My DVDs will
> last what, 10 years? maybe? I am looking for a real answer, not
> just another temporary solution.

nick, you are right, digital media (irrespective of type; optical,
hard-drive, etc) does have a limited life, BUT, so too do
slides/negatives. the big difference is that once you've got a digital
version it is much easier to create multiple copies, and without any
loss of quality. the great advantage of multiple copies is that they can
be stored in multiple locations, so if for whatever reason one storage
location is destroyed you can easily restore your memories from copies
that have been stored elsewhere.
yes, over time you may need to update them to whatever the newest format
is, but the point is that you can easily create copies, and without a
loss of quality...something you can't do with slides/negatives.

is there a way that will perfectly preserve all of your photos forever?
the answer is a definite no, and there probably never will be. but you
have to accept the fact of nature that over time everything degrades.
you can only use what is available, and at the present time, like it or
not, digitial media is the best option.
 >> Stay informed about: What Do I Do With All This Stuff??? 

This message is not archived
 >> Stay informed about: What Do I Do With All This Stuff??? 

On Mar 8, 2:49 am, nick <n... DeleteThis @NOSPAM.ORG> wrote:
> Joseph Meehan wrote:
> > CD's and DVD's life span is maybe half of that of a slide or negative
> > and likely more than most prints.

Cibachrome colour prints last pretty well. And I routinely scan
classic silver halide prints from the turn of the century for a
historical project and most of them are still in very good condition
stored in shoeboxes in various peoples attics. The only ones that have
faded were never properly rinsed or fixed in the first place. And some
of those can be rescued by a judicious choice of a linear combination
of the green and blue channels.

The worry for DVD and CD is that in a century or so it will be hard to
find any hardware to read them.

How many people have a Paxinoscope at home these days to look at
Victorian era moving pictures? But at least with analogue prints you
can at least see what you have got. eg
http://www.victorian-cinema.net/machines.htm#praxinoscope

You need to periodically migrate the data onto new reliable media, and
never rely on a single backup format or medium for important data. Do
it correctly and you have perfect versions of the digital data, make a
mistake and you can lose everything. A single drive if out of
allignment may write data that only it can read again - when the drive
fails so can access to your data.

Professional archivists already have this problem for various elderly
formats of magnetic media that were written on kit that was out of
allignment or in obscure undocumented formats and it is the devils own
job to rescue.

Whereas a paper print can still be looked at and interpretted with
damage if you damage the media or corrupt compressed digital data you
may be left with nothing that can be decoded sensibly.
>
> Wow! Is that ever encouraging! I recently scanned about twenty
> storage boxes of slides. They had been around from as long ago as
> 1966. Guess how many, stored in total darkness, had turned green
> or purple -- ektachrome, kodachrome, etc. What a waste.

If Kodachrome turned any colour over that timescale you are doing
something very wrong. All the Kodachrome slides I have seen back to
the original inception of KK25 have been virtually mint apart from a
few scratches.

Ektachrome was never very stable but unless you stored them in bright
sunlight or they were subject to poor quality processing leaving
traces of active chemistry in the emulsion I would not expect them to
fail over this timescale. I have plenty of slides from that era and
before all kept in nothing more special than a dark dry cupboard.

Various software tricks can rebalance the image provided that there
was some signal in each colour channel. You pay for this with
increased noise in the final image but that is usually preferable to a
wild colour cast.

Regards,
Martin Brown
 >> Stay informed about: What Do I Do With All This Stuff??? 

There are numerous companies that will convert your slides and negatives to
dvd. A couple of them are really reasonable. Check out
http://www.photoscanningservice.com/

500 slides scanned for $.39 each isn't bad and $.49 for 2000dpi isn't all
that bad either. http://www.digmypics.com/OE/Pricing.aspx

"nick" <nick.RemoveThis@NOSPAM.ORG> wrote in message
news:W4JHh.15017$zh.11260@trnddc08...
> So I am converting from film to digital. Cool.
>
> I have many, many large boxes of Kodachrome and Ektachrome slides.
>
> I have envelopes on envelopes of negatives too.
>
> I have rolls of film from the old "Slides and Pix from the Same
> Roll" offers.
>
> Now I upload my digi-prints to the PC, print what I want ....
> Then What??? Do I delete all the files? Do I burn them to
> a CD or DVD that has a lifespan of, what, 4 minutes??
>
> Do I save them to a hard drive that I then take offline and
> store in a vault??
>
> What do I do with all this digitized "stuff" ?????
 >> Stay informed about: What Do I Do With All This Stuff??? 

nick wrote:
> nathantw wrote:
>> There are numerous companies that will convert your slides and
>> negatives to dvd.
>
> I can do that myself. But then what do I have?? A bunch of DVDs with
> a shelf life of what?? I'm looking here for duration, not fancy.
> My old slides lasted 30+ years then started to die. My DVDs will
> last what, 10 years? maybe? I am looking for a real answer, not
> just another temporary solution.

There probably isn't a permanent solution, but it is much easier to copy
a few DVDs to a new medium when something better comes along than to
scan 5000 slides.....
 >> Stay informed about: What Do I Do With All This Stuff???