Passing photo collections to children
Discussion
As usual I spend some time over the Christmas period sorting out the digital photo collection. On thing that I often wonder is how will I give the photos to the kids when the time comes. At the moments I manage all of my photos through Aperture. The photos reside in the Aperture Library, the videos (short photo camera clips as opposed to video camera 'home videos') are stored on an external HD as referenced files.
How would you do it in a way that at least preserves the meta data, the project or album structures (i.e. photos from x holiday) but gives them the freedom to take them into their future?
How would you do it in a way that at least preserves the meta data, the project or album structures (i.e. photos from x holiday) but gives them the freedom to take them into their future?
I can't tell you the latest hi-tech way, but the two thumping great Victorian photograph albums I have upstairs have survived almost 150 years, and the photos are as easy to see as the day they were put in. I wonder how many of the photos we take today will be that accessible in 150 years, if they still exist at all?
I think you are hoping too much to expect them to carry on the Aperture way of accessing your photos.
If you really want them to look after them when you are gone, export them to named folders as jpegs.
This is a subject that is starting to come up more and more. Most people are now calling it a "digital will" where you will have to leave all your password details and instructions on how to deal with the data.
Remember to assume the person dealing with it has no technical knowledge.
As Simpo says, a lot of photos will in the future be left to virtually rot in locked accounts and computers. Also, rarely do the people being passed the baton, have the same keenness (dare I say OCD) to accurately maintain a virtual photo library.
My advice would be to get some nice photo books done of the key life moments, they will get more use than a hard drive full of files in 50 years time.
If you really want them to look after them when you are gone, export them to named folders as jpegs.
This is a subject that is starting to come up more and more. Most people are now calling it a "digital will" where you will have to leave all your password details and instructions on how to deal with the data.
Remember to assume the person dealing with it has no technical knowledge.
As Simpo says, a lot of photos will in the future be left to virtually rot in locked accounts and computers. Also, rarely do the people being passed the baton, have the same keenness (dare I say OCD) to accurately maintain a virtual photo library.
My advice would be to get some nice photo books done of the key life moments, they will get more use than a hard drive full of files in 50 years time.
Print them out. Just printed 300 6x4's over the last couple of days to add to my sons album. Got another couple of albums to do for my daughter. Can't always rely on computers 
Anyway, I don't think the kids would appreciate browsing through my 63,000 photos. Just be selective and write on the back any details you feel should be added.
Anyway, I don't think the kids would appreciate browsing through my 63,000 photos. Just be selective and write on the back any details you feel should be added.
Simpo Two said:
5hero said:
write on the back any details you feel should be added.
Can't stress this enough. You know who everyone is now, but once you go blind or bonkers or die, they will be strangers for ever.Our plan for our daughter and son are to make a photobook each yeah or maybe 30 pages of our favourite photos of them growing up and with family they know etc. A nice collection of albums for them to look back and keep forever.
My Daugher will be rolling on 4 soon as we still haven't done one
My Daugher will be rolling on 4 soon as we still haven't done one
eh?
Is this really 2014?
Keep it digital. Printed photos only ever get stored in the loft. They change colour, eaten by moths, damaged by fire water.
When my daughter was 10 months old she found a photo of me. She'd never seen a paper photo before. Totally freaked her out, couldn't understand how Daddy could be on a wafer thin piece of paper.
Welcome to the future.
If you think the next generation are going to have 10 photo albums under the coffee table, your all deluded. Remember these are supposed to be handed down to future generations too.
For those who don't agree I've had similar arguments about physical music, video and books. Look how they've ended up.
Is this really 2014?
Keep it digital. Printed photos only ever get stored in the loft. They change colour, eaten by moths, damaged by fire water.
When my daughter was 10 months old she found a photo of me. She'd never seen a paper photo before. Totally freaked her out, couldn't understand how Daddy could be on a wafer thin piece of paper.
Welcome to the future.
If you think the next generation are going to have 10 photo albums under the coffee table, your all deluded. Remember these are supposed to be handed down to future generations too.
For those who don't agree I've had similar arguments about physical music, video and books. Look how they've ended up.
GhostDriver said:
loads of rubbish
When my daughter was 10 months old she found a photo of me. She'd never seen a paper photo before. Totally freaked her out, couldn't understand how Daddy could be on a wafer thin piece of paper.Are you serious? So will you only ever show her lifesize sculptures of yourself? iPads, laptops etc could scar her for life!
If you think the next generation are going to have 10 photo albums under the coffee table, your all deluded. Remember these are supposed to be handed down to future generations too.
That's exactly what I think - those albums will be kept ALONGSIDE the digital photos, not INSTEAD OF. Just like people collect vinyls and rare books.
I'm working on photos on Retina MacBook and 27' Apple monitor so definitely a decent quality displays yet I never feel as amazed by photos as when flipping through a good quality photobook or seeing them framed and hanged on the wall.
GhostDriver said:
When my daughter was 10 months old she found a photo of me. She'd never seen a paper photo before. Totally freaked her out, couldn't understand how Daddy could be on a wafer thin piece of paper.
I think that's a concern - but you didn't answer the question.To do so, first anticipate what people will use to look at photographs in the year 2160 (note the changes that have occured in the last 15 years let alone the last 150). I'd suggest that eyeballs will still be used, but iMacs and Tablets and Apertures and Clouds and JPGs won't.
GhostDriver said:
eh?
Is this really 2014?
Keep it digital. Printed photos only ever get stored in the loft. They change colour, eaten by moths, damaged by fire water.
When my daughter was 10 months old she found a photo of me. She'd never seen a paper photo before. Totally freaked her out, couldn't understand how Daddy could be on a wafer thin piece of paper.
Welcome to the future.
If you think the next generation are going to have 10 photo albums under the coffee table, your all deluded. Remember these are supposed to be handed down to future generations too.
For those who don't agree I've had similar arguments about physical music, video and books. Look how they've ended up.
So, can you guarantee an image format that will be readable in 30 years? Who's to say that computers will still work/exist? As Simpo says, eyeballs will always be here. My kids (2 and 4) love seeing images in print, in fact, they have photo frames in their rooms and ask when I take a new shot if I can print it for their room (well, my 4 year old does). There's also printed photos throughout the house, which they love seeing.Is this really 2014?
Keep it digital. Printed photos only ever get stored in the loft. They change colour, eaten by moths, damaged by fire water.
When my daughter was 10 months old she found a photo of me. She'd never seen a paper photo before. Totally freaked her out, couldn't understand how Daddy could be on a wafer thin piece of paper.
Welcome to the future.
If you think the next generation are going to have 10 photo albums under the coffee table, your all deluded. Remember these are supposed to be handed down to future generations too.
For those who don't agree I've had similar arguments about physical music, video and books. Look how they've ended up.
They will also have my 65000 (and growing) collection of images, I'm just saving them the bother of having to browse through to find the important stuff
Personally I love looking through old albums with faded photos.
I've scanned all my old photos into aperture so that the image quality won't deteriorate any further but I'd love to see what they look like in another 30 years.
I worry that print quality is too good now and the photos won't fade as they used to.
There's something magical about leafing through an album of of old faded pictures.
So OP, keep the digital images in aperture, perhaps export as uncompressed tiffs and highest quality jpegs if you have space and print a handful of the best images to put into photobooks or albums.
I've scanned all my old photos into aperture so that the image quality won't deteriorate any further but I'd love to see what they look like in another 30 years.
I worry that print quality is too good now and the photos won't fade as they used to.
There's something magical about leafing through an album of of old faded pictures.
So OP, keep the digital images in aperture, perhaps export as uncompressed tiffs and highest quality jpegs if you have space and print a handful of the best images to put into photobooks or albums.
5hero said:
So, can you guarantee an image format that will be readable in 30 years? Who's to say that computers will still work/exist? As Simpo says, eyeballs will always be here. My kids (2 and 4) love seeing images in print, in fact, they have photo frames in their rooms and ask when I take a new shot if I can print it for their room (well, my 4 year old does). There's also printed photos throughout the house, which they love seeing.
They will also have my 65000 (and growing) collection of images, I'm just saving them the bother of having to browse through to find the important stuff
Eh??!They will also have my 65000 (and growing) collection of images, I'm just saving them the bother of having to browse through to find the important stuff
Jpg might not be readable, but it will be able to be converted into whatever format is being used in 200 years time. Its digital so it wont loose any clarity or colour. Unlike the army pic above.
"Who's to say that computers will still work/exist? "
LOL you really serious?? Computers are still in their embryonic state.
Without computers, the world will be at a standstill. Even if they are turned into brain implants with storage on the gene helix (this has already been done), you think that you want be able to access Jpgs that are taken today?
Its not the same as trying to put a piece of vinyl into a CD player.
If there is an Alien invasion or Nuclear holocaust or smth than ok maybe we will be in the dark ages for a while and your paper photos will survive (maybe), but even then I'd rather have them on a flash drive than lumping around a huge heavy box.
We don't have any printed photos in the house. Loads in the loft.
We have a huge TV that rotates images in the front room. Phones, and Ipads and 3 other networked PCs hold the rest.
My 4 year old has her own camera, even she transfers her shots to the PC to view. She would browse photos on the Ipad from about a year old, and still does.
Yes she didn't know what a paper photo was, she only just found out what a CD is (we don't have DVDS, Blurays or Cds in the house either, my vinyl collection 3k strong also sits in the loft).
The only thing we do have are paper books for her, she has loads of them.
But me and my wife have thrown out all our books for a couple of kindles.
You may say shocking, but I think your a luddite. Ok maybe I'm being argumentative, but I do truly believe that days of physical media are numbered.
make a physical photo album by all means, but your grandchildren will think awwwe bless granddad and give you that mocking tone of voice we give our parents when they buy us CD vouchers.
Olf said:
I worry the opposite - that inkjet printers and photos printed by them won't stand the test of time...
It remains to be seen by later generations but the claims for quality inkjet paper and inks are that they are, mostly and if not left toi abuse byt the elements, guaranteed to last over 100 years without unacceptable fading. In which case they will doing better than most chemical based lab prints from the 70s and 80s by a very long way.They also don't rely on the availability of electricity to be viewable but hopefully that is not a big issue for the next 150 years.
As for note on the back ... with the advance and coming ubiquity of face recognition, "cloud" storage sites with tagged data and image matching search engines one might wonder whether at some point in the not so distant future the answers to the "Who on earth is that?" question may be no more than a click or two away for digital users. This might be considered a good thing or a bad thing depending on your needs and purposes. (It may also be overhyped .... right now we cannot be entirely sure one way or the other.)
GhostDriver said:
Jpg might not be readable, but it will be able to be converted into whatever format is being used in 200 years time.
The weak link in practice is 'will be able to'. You have a collection of 3,000 vinyl records, technology dating back to 1900, and whilst you *could* digitise them so you can enjoy listening to them on your latest tech, how many have you actually converted? Very likely the only information you can actually take from them is what's printed on the sleeve. Paper and ink that doesn't need a machine to decode.Quite probably you haven't converted your record collection into the latest wizzy digital format because you don;t have the time/can't be bothered (neither would I) - and so, going back to photos, when you leave your grandchildren 1,000s of computer files that their 2070 wizzy tech can't read, they won't be bothered to convert them either. Then their children will inherit some small, odd-looking bits of dusty plastic, say 'What's this old crap from 2020?' and bin them. Probably
I suppose the message is that just because something is new, it isn't always best. Your children will scorn your tech just as you scorn the tech of the last generation.
Gassing Station | Photography & Video | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff