Where to put all our photographs?

custardy

i would always recommend an online back up
we have pics on various back ups plus stored online

isofa

There are plenty of high archival quality DVD-Rs which are guaranteed for over 100 years.

Delkin Archival Gold Scratch Armor CD-Rs are rated for 300 years.
Their DVD-Rs are rated for 100 years and similar Blu-Ray-Rs are rated for 200 years. (A single BD-R is £25, or a ten pack £200, but they store 25GB each!)

They aren't cheap but have a 24 carat gold reflective layer. http://www.delkin.com/products/archivalgold/index.html

Combine that with hard disc storage and keeping in several formats like JPEG and a digital negative format like Adobe's DNR from RAW files and you'll have a decent storage span.

Printing onto cheap photographic paper, will result in faded images within 20 years, you need to consider the longevity of the paper used as well. Cheap prints, in general, are on cheap paper.

Marty_J

snowedunderitall wrote: »

Just a quick bump for this, those who store their photos online with winkflash and others, do you not worry that one day it just won't be there any more??!!! I'd rather a 'known' name to store my photos on?

Try uploading them to Windows Live SkyDrive then. You get 25GB of storage for free.

I don't think Microsoft are going anywhere any time soon.

buglawton

Kodak also offer a sort of backup and printing service (annual sub) but beware, there's no easy way to re-download.

Any online provider can and do change their T's & C's at any time.

One tip I would give is: 3 MB files are overkill for snapshots, you can compress then to say 100KB and for web page or even A5 size printing, quality is acceptable. At 100KB per image backing up becomes very fast & portable. Not for real archiving, but a better-than-nothing backup.

Syman

Marty_J wrote: »

Try uploading them to Windows Live SkyDrive then. You get 25GB of storage for free.

I don't think Microsoft are going anywhere any time soon.

I have not founds a way to upload more than 5 files at a time though.

I will be here till the middle of next year at that rate:eek:

ThomasK31ly

Zip files up to 50 MB, If its photos, upload with windows live photo gallery.

Marty_J

Syman wrote: »

I have not founds a way to upload more than 5 files at a time though.

I will be here till the middle of next year at that rate:eek:

The bulk uploading tool uses ActiveX, which means you'll have to use Internet Explorer to upload more than 5 files at once.

Or alternatively, download Windows Live Photo Gallery, and upload your photos using it.

Money_Grabber13579

Marty_J wrote: »

Try uploading them to Windows Live SkyDrive then. You get 25GB of storage for free.

I don't think Microsoft are going anywhere any time soon.

That's exactly what I do. I've got them all stored on an external hard drive, and then backed up to skydrive. At least if 1 copy get's lost, there's still another!

buglawton

No but MS might decided at any moment to start charging, just like Kodak did with us.

I imagine Skydrive is like a virtual hard disk on your computer, I used this idea before from AOL it seemed to cause instability and slowing down and an issue with a network printer, becase the software is fooling your computer that the drive is really local. How does Skydrive perform?

isofa

I think the skydrive is only accessible via a browser, rather than being a virtual drive accessible locally on your PC...