Photo storage

Question

Five years ago I left dry CA for the tropics. Correctly anticipating humidity, I left boxes of photos and albums with CA brother. He scanned all the pictures (one file - among 15 has 285 photos), and I now have a disc with all the files. I will download to my computer, but I do have some questions, and some history tech folk may have suggestions:

1) Should I print the photos (I know ʻarchival paper)?

    (I once lived in Paradise CA and know paper is not a good keeper of photos)

2) Should I download all from the disc and save on the computer and in the cloud?

3) Is there a ʻfuturisticʻ media anyone knows of for the next step?

    I ask #3 because we all once saved to hard drives that do not exist; and to floppy discs that cannot be read by ʻmodernʻ machines; and to thumb drives; and to any number of other things that are now obsolete. We likely wrote with Sharpie on the discs (which may corrupt the files).

What is everyone doing to preserve their old family photos?

Comments

Really, every 5 or 10 years I just move everything over to the latest medium. I'm putting a lot on flash drives these days, but I still use optical media too.

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Nice brother!

Re: #2 and # 3... Cloud Storage..Let them worry about the storage tech. Ask relatives to store copies.

Have you considered creating a photo album and gifting printed copies to relatives?

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I store my actual family photographs in acid-free albums. Never use the store bought "magnetic" albums. I store my personal photographs in a similar fashion. I store all my negatives (shows my age) in a non reactive sealed box with non reactive material between them. I store my pictures taken with an electronic camera such as from a cell phone on a 2 TB hard drive and are backed up on a personal cloud that is not offered by a company on the internet such as Microsoft or Google. The oldest family photographs must be handled with cotton gloves by everyone and I ask them not to touch the picture itself, just from behind or by the corners. But we seldom look at them. I usually show them a print from a computer.

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Thank you, everyone, for all the good ideas. My brother is in charge of the actual photos and I will relay your storage info, Jerry.

Peter, I would love to give printed albums to relatives, it will take some time to select from so many.

Good idea, Ben, to change the media to keep up with tech.

I am auditioning Amazon Prime Photo for storage, put a few up today and will report back. My brother and I decided to work together to index each folder he made. We will try Google Sheets in Google drive so we can both edit.

Thank you everyone.