Fair warning: if you’re thoroughly uninterested in photographs, or archiving large collections of photographs of your family life, do yourself a favor and skip this blog posting.

Have you noticed that when victims of floods, fires, hurricanes and other disasters are interviewed about what they managed to take with them when they fled from their houses, the most common thing they refer to is their family photo albums? Obviously, some people will focus on their jewelry (e.g., Grandma Bertha’s diamond necklace), or their pets — but in the final analysis, almost everything else is just … things. “Things” can be replaced, albeit sometimes at great expense; but heirlooms and memories cannot. There may not be many good strategies for protecting the family jewels, other than keeping them in a bank vault; but it has now become relatively easy to protect one’s photo archives — by digitizing them (if they weren’t created in a digital form to begin with), and then storing one or more copies outside the home, in a safe place. And in today’s Internet-based world, an increasingly attractive option is to store one’s photos on Flickr, PhotoBucket, Kodak Gallery, and other similar services.

I got my first 35 mm camera in 1969 (yes, that’s me, above, in 1969), and have been what can best be called a “serious amateur” photographer ever since then. I could never make a living at it, and have never won any awards or prizes; but I’ve gotten great pleasure out of photographing scenery on various trips around the world, as well as people that I encounter in all walks of life. When I began raising a family in the 1970s, much of my photography shifted to the usual family scenes: thousands of pictures of drooling babies, birthday celebrations, school sporting events, family vacations to various parts of the world, and holidays when relatives gathered to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas. I have no idea how many photographs I’ve taken during the past 38 years, but it’s probably in the range of 50-100,000 pictures; of these, I’ve saved roughly 13,500. I probably have no more than 100 that are impressive to provoke an unbiased observer to say, “Wow — that’s a really great photo!” … but the important thing is that the collection of all 13,500 tells the story of one family’s life. As such, it’s a treasure that will be passed on to the next generation, and therefore needs to be protected.

Indeed, it’s even more of a treasure than you might imagine at first. When I decided to digitize all of my “traditional” film-based prints and negatives (i.e., just about everything prior to 2002), I went one step further and digitized all of the photos in as many family photo albums as I could get my hands on. Some of these are childhood photos of my wife and myself; some of these are photos of our parents; and we’ve got some photos of grandparents all the way back to 1910. So it’s almost a century of family photos; and after an enormous amount of tedious effort, these have all been annotated, tagged, categorized, and organized into appropriate “albums” within specific years, and years within decades. Obviously, nobody is going to have the patience or stamina to go through 13,500 pictures, one by one, in chronological order; but they’re organized in such a way that you can go through whatever subset you’re interested in (“hey, remember those hilarious pictures of Aunt Matilda dancing the Charleston on the dining room table, back in 1982, when she was roaring drunk?”), or searching for any specific photo based on date, subject, or various keywords.

I’ll spare you the details of how I got all of the old photos into digital form. As it turns out, I began worrying in the early ’90s that my slides and negatives were getting a little warped and cracked, so I spent a bunch of money to transfer them onto CD; and since it was relatively expensive, it forced me to cull most of the boring and repetitive photos. When I got really serious about digitizing old photos a couple years ago, I found that the local photo shops were willing to take on the task at a more affordable price. In many cases, the negatives and slides had disappeared, and all I had was shoe-boxes full of old prints — jumbled, disorganized clumps of decade-old photos from Visiting Day at the kids’ summer camp, or Christmas pageants at their schools, or picnics in the park. I threw out the ones that were out of focus, thoroughly embarrassing, or completely inexplicable (“Who is that ugly little kid, and why is he picking his nose? He’s not one of ours, is he? Why on earth did anyone bother taking a picture of him?”); everything that was salvageable was taken to the local photo shop to be scanned and digitized.

Okay, so now I’ve got the photo archives reasonably well-organized; and with the convenience and quality of today’s digital cameras, the archives are growing much more rapidly than in the past (I’m not constrained by the need to change rolls of film after every 36 shots, and a 4 gigabyte memory card can typically hold 500 digital images or more). And as mentioned above, I now consider these archives almost as important — indeed, sometimes more important — than the various business documents and client files on my desktop/laptop PC. So I back it up regularly; and at least once a month, I take a backup hard disk (which is now no larger than a pack of playing cards) down to a safe-deposit box in the local bank. I’d love to go one step further, and store a backup copy of the photos on the 4 GB flash disk that’s attached to my keyring, along with all of the other business files and documents (including all of the manuscripts of all of the books I’ve written) on that flash disk, but it won’t fit: because of the way iPhoto stores its digital images (more about that below), my photo archives take up about 36 gigabytes.

Aside from the inconvenience of dragging backups of the photo archive down to the bank for safe-keeping, there’s another limitation in my current setup: how do I share the photos with family and friends? My wife and I have computers on the same network in our home, so we could theoretically share one copy of the iPhoto archives. But that turns out to be slow and clumsy, so I simply export each new iPhoto album that I create, burn it onto a CD (yet another backup!) and copy it over to her machine. But that obviously doesn’t work the rest of my extended family, especially because some of them are still (despite years of preaching on my part) victims of the Dark Side; god only knows what kind of photo management software they use (if any), but it runs on Microsoft Windows.

Obviously, the solution is to upload everything to the Internet; indeed, that’s been an option for several years, but I’ve just started organizing this approach in a methodical fashion; up until now, I’ve had about 3,000 “public” photos available on my Flickr page (which you can find by clicking here); but now I’m uploading all of the family/friend photos, and configuring the privacy settings appropriately. I’m using a shareware program called Flickr Export to automate the process of uploading iPhoto albums to Flickr, with all of the comments, tags, and photo-titles preserved; if you’re using some other combination of desktop photo software and Internet photo repository, I’d recommend searching for equivalent plug-in/shareware tools to mechanize the process as much as possible. Even with the automation, the uploading to Flickr is going to be a long process; I can only automate the uploading of one album at a time, and I probably have 500 albums altogether. But it runs in the background, so I can get other things accomplished while it’s chugging away …

Once I’ve finished uploading everything, then I’ll need to contact everyone in my extended family and ask them to sign up as a (free) registered user on Flickr; that will allow me to identify them as “family members” (as distinct from “friends,” who will be invited separately), so that Flickr will allow them to see all those boring birthday parties and Christmas gatherings that the rest of the human race will be lucky enough to avoid. I’m not sure whether I’ll be brave enough to dispense with iPhoto at that point; that may depend on how practical and successful Flickr’s newly-announced Picnik photo-editing service turns out to be.

I’m also not sure whether Flickr’s search mechanism will be enough to satisfy me; I love iPhoto’s “smart album” mechanism for gathering pre-specified photos (i.e., based on tags or search terms) from multiple albums into a single “virtual” album. And I’m a little distressed that Flickr doesn’t have an obvious way of “rating” the pictures on, say, a 5-point scale; I’ve been reasonably careful to do this with my iPhoto pictures, so that I can easily show you what I think are my ten very best photos from the entire archive … or my hundred best pictures, or my thousand best pictures. But you don’t care, do you? And I have to admit that nobody else does, either …

In any case, even if I do decide to keep iPhoto and its own (redundant) archive, I’ll at least have the luxury of offloading the pictures from my primary laptop computer, onto an external hard disk that I can leave behind when I leave the office. That may not sound like a big deal, but as noted above, my iPhoto archive is a gargantuan 36 gigabytes; that’s because iPhoto, with the best of intentions, insists on keeping backup copies of each “version” of a digital image, as you go through various stages of cropping, straightening, red-eye elimination, and “enhancing.” It used to be possible to eliminate all of the unwanted backups with a shareware program called iPhoto Diet; but it hasn’t been updated lately, and won’t currently work with iPhoto 7.

But even if I keep the iPhoto archive as an “emergency backup” for a while, my hope is that the long-term future will involve all of these bulky photos being uploaded to free, remote storage that I don’t have to worry about; the same is true for my burgeoning email files — and before long, the same may be true for almost everything that I’ve got on my laptop hard disk. It’s beginning to look like the “thin-client,” Web-based computing model may become a practical reality within the next year or so … and that would make it more and more likely that I could gravitate to the new super-thin, ultra-light, sub-compact notebooks that we’re beginning to see … Heck, maybe someday I’ll be able to all of my computing from an iPhone-sized device.

Anyway, I’ll let you know how the archiving process comes along in the weeks to come. Meanwhile, you might want to investigate some of these archiving services yourself …