U of S | Mailing List Archive | alt-photo-process-l | Re: preservation of negatives/slides/prints

Re: preservation of negatives/slides/prints



Diana,

In regards to the issue of to scan or not to scan, here's something you may
want to consider.  

The tricky thing about digital storage, as you alluded to, is that
standardized formats are constantly changing.  It's only a matter of time
until the CD/DVD is replaced by bigger and better things.  If you don't stay
on top of the new technologies and periodically migrate all of your data to
the new media standard, there will be a point where you won't be able to
access any of it.  When the Zip drive faded into obscurity a few years ago,
a professor in our English department contracted me to migrate all of her
files from the last 7 years to CDs (took several days).  Now that the 3.5"
floppy drive is slowly being phased out by major computer manufacturers like
Dell and Apple, everyone that's had data on floppy disks now has to move it
all to a hard drive or CD/DVD.

With this in mind, I agree with Gawain.  If you're not planning to do
anything with these images in the near future, it may not be worth scanning
all of them right away.  On the other hand, if the negatives are in fairly
bad shape, you might want to scan them before the quality degrades too much.


Camden Hardy

camden[at]hardyphotography[dot]net
http://www.hardyphotography.net