Re: How to digitize precious photos?


<PunishSpammers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message >>
> I think you are right on this as long as the trasnfers get better and
> better. So far in audio we have lost a lot of data on older digital
> recordings. Many factors here but lets just call if fade, bits are gone,
> high end suffers, etc.

While it probably is impossible to improve the files, once scanned, the
inverse certainly IS true: the condition of the original pictures is
currently about as good as it will ever be. They will only deteriorate over
time. Might as well scan them now.

I saw a woman in New Orleans seeing her home for the first time since the
flooding began. First thing she cried over was the family album--or what
was left of it. It was as though her past memories had been taken from her.
Had she kept copies stored off-site it would have made it possible to
restore her memories, to a certain extent.

I never knew of a single person that stored their negatives in a
geographically distant location, but there are tons of people that are
swapping disks of family shots with relatives, to ensure that other copies
will survive. At least for the short-term, the practice seems to have
benefits. No way to really know if digitization will really keep the images
alive for the long haul, but at least people are attempting to preserve them
as best they can. Before digital, preservation of family photos was
something that was not even on the radar screen.

Even if having extra copies of images does not ultimately help, it certainly
cannot hurt--and I suspect that, even if a lot of images do become lost to
the ravages of time, there will be a lot of them that will survive.


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