Ken Weitzel wrote:
might be a file you are comfortable with and understand many people
will not even recognize it as an image file. Film scanned at high
resolution and saved as 16 bit/color tiffs take up a lot of room, more
then your relatives might want to deal with. There are programs that
will convert all your tiffs to jpeg format and resize at the same time
if desired. The point is future generations might be more willing to
deal with your photos is the collection can fit on to a fairly small
part of their hard drive, but not so interested if the collection takes
up boxes of DVD.

This is not to say you delete or destroy the full resolution version,
but that you have the collection in a smaller format for ease of use.

Scott

Scott W wrote:
I wouldn't want to put a downer on this worthwhile and admirable
exercise [which I'm doing too] but here are a few points to consider:

1 Archiving on optical media is unproven. Be prepared to copy the data
onto fresh media after a few years. Think back only ten years - floppy
discs were contenders for "archival" media! Nowadays many new computers
don't have floppy drives... and I found to my horror that some essays I
wrote and saved on floppies only about seven years ago are now
unreadable. I think that optical media are more hardwearing than
floppies, but there are concerns about the stability of the dyes used
in CDs and DVDs. You can help by keeping them in a dark place, but test
them regularly and be prepared to migrate the files.

2 Keep your eye on developments! Be prapared to copy and convert your
images often. Hopefully, it will be a quick and easy process
[especially if you avoid zip files, though using internal zip
compression in TIFFs ought to be feasible], and future storage media
will have the capacity to store many DVDs! You'll eventually get the
lot onto a chip of some sort, I imagine. None of us are going to be
around forever, so leave clear instructions to this effect for whoever
you want to care for your collection in the future.

3 In around fifteen years, we have moved from the kilobyte era to the
terabyte era. File size will not be an issue in the future. I'm sure
that screens will resolve high definition images at 300dpi one day!

I think that scanning photos and putting the discs in a box to be
forgotten about for 50 years is unrealistic if you really want them to
survive. Repeat the mantra: Care and Maintenance!

Good luck & best wishes.