Re: Disposing of Slide Collections
Author: Freericks
Date: 05-23-2007 - 15:21
I want to jump in too regarding everyone who said don't digitize and don't put them on DVD. This well-intentioned advice is misgiven. Here's why --
1) Cheap DVDs oxidize in five years or so, but there are archival DVDs avaiable that will last 100 years. Even if that claim doesn't turn out to be true --
2) Copying a DVD takes five minutes. Even if you don't have the archival type, there is no degredation from copy to copy, so you can just copy an old DVD, or copy an old DVD to the new technology (this will be do-able for years - the gentleman with the tax returns on a floppy disk could have that copied to a DVD if he really needed.)
3) While a single DVD or 500G hard drive is as subseptable to fire or flood damage as a slide collection is, five DVDs in different locations are not. Once scanned, the images can be sent to many locations for safekeeping.
4) By digitizing, you will be able to share your images with hundreds of people, instead of one.
5) Even if TIFF and JPEG vanish next week, there will be a period of years in which programs will be common that can convert them to a newer format.
6) If the concern is really how will people look at the pictures after computers are gone, do you really believe even the most stable Kodachrome slide or color print will survive until there are no more computers? There is nothing left of all of the Greek painting Plato and Aerostatle saw. Nothing lasts forever, but lasting as long as humans work on computers is not a bad length of time.