archiving scanned and captioned old photos.

[Eugene Warren]

My current interest is genealogy and how to save old scanned photos. At present I have lots of CDs/DVDs but am wondering whether using memory cards (SD) is a better way to save these photos for future researchers. My guess is that I am not the only one doing this and I would like to benefit from what others are doing. To repeat: Is it better to store photos and documents on a memory card or on disk?

[Doug Pardee]

Today, the best approach is probably to use an external hard drive. The things are quite inexpensive, much faster and easier to work with, and probably more reliable over time than CD/DVD. Longevity of flash media is an unknown.

One big advantage of the hard drive is that it becomes much easier to move the collection to a new drive in the future, because it's all in one place and access is much faster. If you store on SD or CD/DVD, you'll have to load and copy each storage unit individually.

The speed of the hard drive is also useful if you use a browser-style photo management system that needs to search the photo files themselves when looking for something. But not a big deal if you use a catalog-style system that keeps a separate database.

Keeping a duplicate copy is a good idea if losing the photos would be a problem. Some people put their duplicates in an online service, so that they will still have a copy of the photos if their house burns down and destroys their equipment, drives, and media.