For storage, digital photos is the way to go.
For enjoyment, I prefer the old-school prints.

Does anyone know of a service that will PRINT OUT (and/or use already existing prints) photos and then create a photo album with the prints?

-They came to me to pick up and deliver my originals and newly digitized copies.

-Their prices are very good for such a personal service.

-I was extremely pleased with the final product.

Check them out.

I read about (and can’t find the link now) a website where you can mail in your old photographs and they’ll make matching, hardcover albums from high quality scans. They send you the books and the originals back. Might be a time saver if you have loads of photos.

Yesterday I picked up the new iLife ‘09, and have so far been really enjoying iPhoto, training it whose faces are whose, in turn rediscovering photographs I didn’t even realize I had.

My free trial with Aperture is almost up, and I’ll just let that expire. The only reason I could think of using Aperture in tandem with iPhoto (something I considered doing) would be because of its ability to customize or create layouts for photo books. That’s not worth $200 to me, though. I’d prefer that iPhoto work with Pages in iWork for that, personally.

I’ll also echo the recommendation of using hard disk instead of CD/DVD for your archive media–onsite, offsite, anysite. You know you will need to migrate all of that data to new media to keep it accessible; the only question is when. Do you really want to manually load all of those DVDs into an optical drive, one by one and wait for each to copy? The same pain applies to the initial archiving process, which is then more likely to be postponed. The easier and faster backups are to perform, the more likely they are to get done regularly.

I think online backup has potential, but currently I’d treat it as an expensive last resort. The upload rate on my cable broadband is not that much greater than my capture rate, in raw format. And a full disaster recovery would take a long, long time, even at high-speed download rates. It may be more feasible if you only have jpeg images.

It’s also interesting that most of us (self included) are considering trading physical clutter of analog film for digital clutter of scanned images, which can be just as overwhelming, and in many ways much easier to screw up. I love the articles on reducing physical clutter, but I’m definitely interested in more focus on avoiding and reducing digital clutter.

They will also backup your photos for you once they are uploaded to their website and their design software is through a web browser – no extra software to download

Digital media (laser read) will be easily readable for maybe 2 years, and at max, with retro equipment, 10. so this whole project will need to be repeated every couple times the software/hardware is upgraded.

I just don’t want to be messing with them so often!

This post answered a few dozen questions that have dogged me, such as the reliability of CD’s(thanks Terry), what kinds of files to save (jpegs, whew!) and at what resolution, what to do with the old prints, what online services to upload to and who to use for printing albums. I have been thinking about getting a portable hard drive and Mark Moline’s storage and naming format has been very helpful. Thanks OogieM for the book title that could really benefit my efforts.

By the way Mark, my own German horse picture is a treasure, since it is being held by my great-grandfather in front of the family brewery about 1900!

Are any of the online sites better for photos that the whole family can access? What’s shelf-life of an online photo-storage site in today’s economy? Anyone nervous that a Flickr-type company might fold unexpectedly?