Old Picture Negatives

[KaraBoo]

I'm going through all of my old photos and scanning them to my computer's external hard drive.

I'm doing this to finally organize them all, sort them into photo albums and just have an easier way to share the older photos when/if I want to.

I am finally throwing away photos that I've kept for no other reason than the fact that they were part of the roll and I paid money to develop the roll only to find a crappy, blurred, thumb in the way, sidewalk, back of the seat, whatever photo.  

My question is - what should I do with the original negatives?

I'm tempted to throw them away once the photos are scanned, but....now I'm second guessing myself. Any reason I shouldn't?

What about the rest of the photos that don't end up in albums - what do you personally do with those?  

[sesfw]

I went through boxes of slides several years ago and put in the trash anything I couldn't identify. When my uncle died many years ago he had drawers and drawers of pictures and if we couldn't identify people in the ...... the trash bag.

Negatives that you can identify and choose to scan I would keep. As technology advances someday the medium you are using now won't be usable then.

I have so many pictures on this computer that I'm dreading replacement time.  The extra special pictures I have printed either on photo paper or regular copy paper.

[bean29]

Idk, if you scanned the pic you don't really need the negatives. You used to get better quality pics from negatives but I don't think that is true anymore.

When my Dad died in Jan we made a run to Best Buy and bought a scanner that would scan fast and give good resolution. DD is 16 she called the store and confirmed they had it "in stock" before we left home. Got to the store and the guy in the computer dept insisted they only had the high quality fast ones on line DD was like wtf the lady I talked to said they had several. She went to the service desk and asked and they said yes they did not have it on display but they had it in stock.

Anyways DD scanned over 200 pics and did a video. I have many many more to scan. Our scanner has a special attachment to scan negatives.

[NastyWoman]

Bean, would you mind telling what brand/ model scanner you got. I have long thought about scanning my pictures, but I need an impetus to start (like no longer being able to hide behind not knwing what would be a good scanner).

[justme]

There's some scanners or additions to scanners that make scanning the negatives really easy. Haven't tried, but I've been told have the negatives is more flexible if you want to edit the phots.

[Opti]

I'd keep the negatives just because technology changes and I would
expect recovering pics from negatives or actual photos will be more viable
over the years than from whatever format the scan is in now. For example,
whatever is stored under Windows 98 or a really old MS Word format is
generally unusable unless you have an old system. All electronic formats
get stale and go out of common use. "Hard copy" tends to be useful for
a much longer period of time.


Congrats on going through all your pics though. I've been looking at some
pics my Mom finally sent me about a year ago. (Just realized the pics with
a farm cat and some dogs seem to have been taken when I was about a year old!)
Saving good pics is a blessing. Tossing negatives of thumb prints or fuzzy shots
is wise.

[midjd]

I can see the format going stale if you're copy/pasting into a Word doc or something, but a JPEG is a JPEG, isn't it? I have digital pics that are more than 15 years old. Even if at some point technology advances to make those formats obsolete, there should be some way to convert. You're not going to just wake up one day and be unable to access your photos without warning.

Negatives don't last forever, either.

I'd trash em - maybe keep the really treasured ones, but I don't see any need for all of them.

[Opti]

Feb 24, 2014 4:19:45 GMT -5 midjd said:

I can see the format going stale if you're copy/pasting into a Word doc or something, but a JPEG is a JPEG, isn't it? I have digital pics that are more than 15 years old. Even if at some point technology advances to make those formats obsolete, there should be some way to convert. You're not going to just wake up one day and be unable to access your photos without warning.

Negatives don't last forever, either.

I'd trash em - maybe keep the really treasured ones, but I don't see any need for all of them.

A Jpeg is very much like a Word doc in that the format and requirements change.
I'm not sure how old Jpeg's are or what version is sanctioned/approved at this
point, but the Jpeg standard I was familiar with in 1990 is not the Jpeg standard
that exists today. It may share some similarities, and yes there will be notice, but
many people seem to miss the window. Witness the fact that Word has even changed
their files from .doc to .docx signifying a significant non-backward compatible change.

I have old media I personally didn't convert in time, and had I made hard copy
at least I'd still have the recipes. So I am speaking from personal experience and
from having requests of people not realizing that converting files from a Windows 98
machine is now an expensive proposition only done by those people who kept old
machines and newer ones to convert files. My last UNIX admin job about a decade
ago, had a refresh cycle based on the fact technology and file formats become
stale and obsolete. Places like Iron Mountain charge good money to refresh info
on a regular basis to current readable formats. If you think you are going to upgrade
and keep current every 3 years or so, stay electronic. Most people won't do that
and images will be lost or very costly to save.

[wyouser]

keep your negatives and periodically make new backups of what you have stored. All of the formats we have come up with so far appear to have a shelf life and may be lost in the future.