Ask HN: Archiving Family Photos? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Archiving Family Photos?

2 pointshelterskelter3 comments

Hi, I recently had a family member pass who had three kids with two husbands. This person was the designated "family picture person", and given the family structure, sharing the photos is not going to be as easy as everybody would like it to be. I want to digitally archive all the family photos they had (LOTS of hard copies, probably some negatives, and digital (iphone pics)) and make them available to everybody in the family. I wanted to know if anybody had done something like this and had what worked, didn't work, or what you wish you had done differently, etc.

My current gameplan is to:

1. Get a high-quality scanner (suggestions?)

2. Calibrate it (any tips?)

3. Scan photos, potentially negatives as well to TIFF or RAW (any special software? I'm using Linux but would get a new machine if I needed to)

4. Also grab the highest-quality copies I can find on their devices, pull photos from their social media if we can't find the original, etc.

5. Give files metadata (dates, location, people photographed, events). We'll probably get everybody together for this and try to make an event out of going through everything together, recalling as much info as we can.

6. Checksum everything

7. Save to SSD, and burn to M-DISC (along with an explanation of the archiving process, how to verify files, a family tree, family timeline, etc)

8. Give everybody an SSD and two M-DISCs.

I'd also like to create some sort of online availability. Is there a low- or no-maintenance solution here? Ideally, people could browse family photos, get a lower-res copy for sending photos over Signal or uploading to social media, and also have the ability to download a higher res version as well. Maybe a static site with a cheap provider? Any suggestions?

I'm early in the planning stage, I just want to know how to make this as easy as possible while achieving the best results. This will be "the" definitive digital archive for family photos for the foreseeable future and I'd really like to get it right.

Small recomendation: Don't tell people it's a M-Disc, just call it DVD.

> 5. Give files metadata (dates, location, people photographed, events). We'll probably get everybody together for this and try to make an event out of going through everything together, recalling as much info as we can.

That sounds nice but it's a lot of work. At least ensure the photos are saved, without metadata.

SSDs are vulnerable to bit rot. I recommend multiple copies on spinning disk at a minimum. For photos of historical family significance, consider uploading to familysearch.org as part of a family tree; this system is maintained by the LDS Church (Mormons) with a billion dollar trust contributing to their technology apparatus. Their longevity is likely longer than personal systems. M-DISC sounds reasonable for the use case but there is some concern about media authenticity [1] [2]; ensure you keep extra drives in inventory and have a media verification schedule. LTO tape might be better if you can find a used tape drive at a reasonable price [3].

I maintain a Dropbox account, Apple Shared Albums, and a private Peertube instance for sharing this media. Instructions for care and feeding are part of my death package for the next custodian to continue operations. Remember you’ll have to hand this off to someone in the future for archive continuity.

I cannot speak to scanning, I outsourced this due to volume; CharterOak Digital out of Stonington, Connecticut is a vendor I can recommend, as well as ScanCafe [ScanDigital now] out of Carmel, Indiana; no affiliation with either. Do not destroy or dispose of the original media or artifacts post digitization if at all possible; keep those stored somewhere safe as physical backups of last resort. This is how the Internet Archive operates, and so I believe it to be a best practice.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40239553

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/yu4j1u/psa_ver...

[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/HardwareLoan/comments/eoeuax/lto_ta...

Additional potentially useful resources:

https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/publications/managing-...

https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/archives/archi...

https://files.archivists.org/groups/museum/standards/4.%20Ar...

Thank you! I was going to be using SSD's for medium-friction accessibility and M-DISC for long term reliability, but it never hurts to have a few more mediums.

I appreciate the links, I think outsourcing may be the best option, given the volume.

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