I have decided it is finally time to archive the big crate of photos that has somehow come into my posession over the years. I’ve become the unofficial family archivist, it seems, and many of these go back to well before I was born. Most haven’t been seen in years, so I figured it was time someone set about scanning them so they can be backed up, burnt to CD, and distributed around the family.

This weekend I have done the first 508 of them.

It’s slow going. 508 sounds like a lot, but it’s only a small corner of the box which is, at a rough guess, a foot and a half deep, a foot and a half wide and three and a half feet long. That’s a lot of photos still to go.

And then there are the ones in mum’s loft. So perhaps there will be 10,000 in total.

Storing them is obviously going to be a problem. After they have been scanned the originals can be ferreted away somewhere - just like the music CDs, which now all reside in a shared iTunes library. The digital versions, though, still need to be backed up.

At the moment my overall photo library is about 17GB and stands at 9,537 pictures, and because I’m doing these latest scans at a high enough resolution that I’ll not need to worry about scanning them again in the future, they are taking up even more space than the pictures from my digital camera.

Let’s assume the final total is 40GB, that one gigabyte is 1024MB and that a CD holds 700MB in total. I’d need 59 CDs just to back up the whole collection. And with current recommendations being that you renew your backups every two years or less that’s a lot of copying (CDs degrade over time, so you shouldn’t just make one definitive set of backups and expect to be able to come back to them five years later).

40GB would, of course, fit onto about 10 single-sided DVDs, which would be far more manageable, but then you’d still have the problem of cataloguing them. How do you know which one contains pictures that are of me AND a birthday party AND in the 70s AND taken in the garden? Without an index that lets you search on those terms across all of the 10 discs you’re stuck.

And so you’re back to square one - leafing through photos just like you would if they were still in their packs, only this time the leafing is done on screen and the packs are folders on a hard drive.

I don’t know why I bothered.

It has been fun, though. I have watched me and my sister grow up, and revived some people who are now long dead. The other thing I have noticed is how every summer really was sunny, just like I remembered.

More worryingly, though, every winter also had snow. You don’t get that any more down here…

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 6th, 2005 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.