Three years ago, in an uncharacteristic fit of responsibility and foresight, I decided to transfer my collection of family photos from paper to the digital world. It’s been a very rewarding ongoing project and not nearly as grim as I would have guessed.
Why would anyone with any semblance of a real life consider spending a couple of weekends distilling cherished family photos into great strings of zeroes and ones? The short answer is this: Photos on paper are not built for the long haul. Look at almost any set of color prints from the ’60s or ’70s. It’s a fair bet that the bright, flower-power colors of that era are already halfway faded into some muddy, greenish-gray chemical soup.
The goal here is to freeze time before light, chemical instability or the unthinkable (such as a house fire) further damage your family’s collective memory bank.
Although I have only a rudimentary grasp of graphics, I managed to get the initial transfer job — about 350 shots — done in about three days with a basic personal computer (with just 64 MB of RAM), an inexpensive flatbed scanner, some photo-editing software and a removable-media storage system to capture the end product. From there on, all I’ve had to do is periodic additions to the collection.
This is repetitious, detail-oriented work. But there are a few things that can make the job go faster. For example, if I were to start this project over again, I’d make every effort to get all the disparate collections together in one place at the start. It’s just much easier to do everything in sequence when you have all the source material to draw from at once.
I’d be a little tougher on the initial editing as well. If you can get your head around the basic truism that only one in every 5 or 10 shots is actually worth saving, your task will become simpler. Conversely, if you believe all 60 photos you took at little Billy’s 4th birthday party must be preserved for future generations, this process is going to be very hard.
Once you’ve edited the raw materials down and placed everything in sequence, you’ll want to start some sort of catalog. I used a plain-vanilla text file and logged each individual shot by date. (This is more flexible than a serial number system, particularly when there’s the possibility that more material from the same dates may need to be incorporated later on.) I chose to include just the bare bones captioning information: names and locations. One photo, one catalog line, no exceptions. As a general goal, you want each archival master copy to be as information-rich as is practical. You can always make smaller, lower-resolution copies later for publication on the Web or sharing as e-mail attachments. But with storage space and high-resolution scanners both dirt cheap, it’s inevitable that the questions will arise: How big is too big? How rich is too rich?
Without naming some arbitrary magic number, you want the file to be of comparable quality to the original print. Bear in mind that a high-resolution scan will not do anything to improve on a low-quality original image. In other words, there’s not much point in making a 10-megabyte scan of a 30-year-old Polaroid snapshot.
Your family album may be jammed with museum-quality art, but mine is filled primarily with amateur snapshots. On average, the scans I’ve made are between one and three megabytes, with a resolution of somewhere between 100 and 300 pixels per inch. The smallest is around 300 kilobytes, and the largest is about 12 mb. (These file sizes all refer to compressed size, when the image information is stored in the JPEG format.) For what it’s worth, the most recent “super high quality” shots from my Olympus D340-R digital camera are just 400K to 700K compressed and they look as good or better on the screen than most of the larger scans.
My collection numbers about 500 photos and resides on a single, one gigabyte Iomega Jaz cartridge. The Jaz system was the most economical mass-storage system when I began the project three years ago. Today, given the number of attractive rewritable CD recorders in the $300-$400 range, I’d probably go in that direction.
While a 1 gb Jaz cartridge sells for about $90, a 650 mb blank compact disc is about a buck. CDs, being optical, are also much more stable than any magnetic storage medium. Regardless of which option you choose, it’s imperative to have copies of the archive stored at multiple locations. A backup copy isn’t going to do you any good if it disappears along with the computer in a burglary or fire.
Of course, completing this virtuous-yet-tedious chore does not mean you’re off the hook. The Imaging Fairy did not come and wave a magic wand over your removable storage media, thus making it forever safe. Image formats will change. Hardware standards will move forward. It’s probably prudent to assume you’re going to have to migrate this material from one medium to another at least once, lest your photos eventually become as accessible as the songs on an old wax cylinder from the Victrola era.
Although it may not be a permanent solution, the transfer from paper to digital represents a great leap of sorts, maybe the biggest thing you can do to make sure your family’s images are still around when your grandchildren are grandparents. That should be reason enough to make the effort.
