I have 3×5 (and smaller) pictures that my grandfather took in WWII – the negatives either having been lost or thrown away before they came into my possession. He died when I was 5 years old and the pictures of him during this set of pictures are some of the only ones that I have. However, not having the negatives means I will never be able to duplicate at the same quality or print these rather small pictures at a larger size to have framed.

“If not having negatives is good enough for a professional photographer AND National Geographic, it’s good enough for me and 99% of the population.”
– So only 1% of the population has had a loved one pass away and wish for a negative for a larger reprint?
Pictures ORIGINATING in digital are good enough for NatGeo – I am fairly certain they haven’t thrown away decades of slides and negatives.

The aggressive manner in which you have been responding to comments that are simply addressing concerns has just lost you a reader. Congrats on that. There are always two sides to everything.

I have to correct a major error in your statement. Film made from 1950 onwards is composed of cellulose triacetate which is NOT flammable. Kodak specifically moved to this technology in response to problems with earlier negatives, which were nitrate based and which indeed are flammable. You will see the words “SAFETY FILM” on the edge of 35mm negatives from the last 60 years expressly for this reason.

The negatives will melt but they will not add anything to a fire. The Materials Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) for cellulose triacetate in fact rates the material at 0 for flammability.

Finally, I don’t understand the argument you make about digital being good enough for National Geographic now, so it must be good enough for everything. This may be true for images which originate in modern digital camera sensors, but has nothing to do with the low quality scans typical of most run of the mill drugstore labs. There was a reason that NatGeo relied on Kodachrome/Ektachrome slide originals for their publications for so many years, and it wasn’t really that long ago that they moved to digital input.

Mr. Coes is exactly right in that a lot of information is left on the table if you rely on a scan of a typical consumer photo print.

But, if you want to store them in your home, by all means store them in your home. Just remember that they are highly flammable. If your home goes up in flames, they will instantly be destroyed and will fuel the fire. A digital copy backed up online won’t make your home burn faster, and you’ll be able to see your pictures again.

Also
Since the 90′s, all of the prints from quick labs, Target, CVS are inkjet prints from 300dpi scans, so you’d be scanning a cruddy print of a lo-res scan with no negative to go back to.

Please.

Fighting with depression and anxiety, it has been a really good thing to be able to look back at my life and realise that not everything has been pain and suffering.(to put it bluntly)

For me it is very important to have these tangible photo albums. Yes I know they might just last longer and all that if I had them scanned.
But for me, that was not the goal.
The goal was to minimize my stuff and at the same time create something that holds meaning to me (before they were just more stuff on the shelves)

Unfortunately, the type of scanner you are referring to is going to leave a lot of the original information embedded in the negative behind. I’ve seen the difference between a $100 scanner, a $1000 Nikon Coolscan 5000ED scanner, and a professional multiple-$K drum scanner and you would be astounded at how much cleaner the photos look as you go up the equipment scale.

This is especially true for those difficult photos where the camera wasn’t set right, the light was bad – and often these are the ones which have some relative in the corner that appears nowhere else and is now long gone. Often you don’t know which photos are the critical ones where you need to go ‘all out’ for years or decades.

In other words, the information content of the negative is very high and it’s a compact physical form. You can scan too for the convenience of replication, but it is really not going to replace the original information. Having both is always a good idea – and approximately 200 rolls of negatives fit in a single 3.5 inch binder using PrintFile or some such negative sleeve holding one roll per page. (See the Light Impressions website for supplies.)

Unless you’re shelling out $40,000+ on your next digital camera, the negatives produce a far better print than any of the point-and-shoot cameras today. Contrary to the article most photo-printers are not printing digitally. All of the 4×6′s that people get printed are still exposed to light sensitive paper and chemically developed, even if they came from a digital file. This is not the same as the larger format digital printing that professional photographers tend to get done.

Unless you have a drum scanner or something like Nikon Coolscan, scanning the negatives on your own is pointless. It will be less expensive to send off your negatives to a company like ScanCafe, but if you’re worried about your negatives getting lost overseas there are brick and mortar photography stores that will scan them. Keep in mind, if the negatives were cut, even into strips of five or six, it will be far more expensive to get those scanned than if you had a full strip of 35mm film.

Now as a photographer with a lot of money invested in digital, I still shoot film, mostly medium format black and white, for the sense of permanency and the chance to physically interact with the medium. There is something about leafing through prints and holding negatives up to the light that you will never get staring into the screen of your computer.

Now my next step is sorting into decades, removing duplicates and adding detail (probably using Picasa) and tagging. My question would be.. for those of you who tag your photos, what tag system have you used that has worked for you, and you have been able to maintain without it being too much of a chore to tag every time you add a new photo?

Personally, with that amount of data it’s not really feasible for me to upload it all on Flickr – and I am reluctant to delete a single one as most were taken by my late father). I simply keep several backups on keys, hard drives, mum’s place and a friend’s place, and every month or so as I add new photos I will use some synching software at each location to make sure everything is in sync.