I am heavily involved in genealogy, practitioners of which have a huge interest in maintaining data, documents, photos, and other research for the next generations.

I have a copy of a handwritten family tree and other notes written by great-grandmothers, cousins, and great aunts, some of which survived close to 100 years. If they had computers back then, I doubt any of the data would be available now. The photo books I have shared with relatives contains copies of these letters and charts and family photos, and even if half of them are destroyed or lost in the next 50 years, the remainder will survive, hopefully for much longer.

It amazes me how much faith other genealogists have in cloud storage or paid services like Ancestry, owned for the past 10+ years by a series of profit-focused private equity firms. Policies change (for PE's benefit), subscriptions lapse, people delete accounts, or online services get shut down, as some Ancestry users discovered the hard way:

https://slate.com/technology/2015/04/myfamily-shuttered-ance...

Another problem with these services: Even though I can share a link to an online tree or a shared cloud folder, more than half of the recipients hate to deal with them because they are forced to learn a new UI or get prompted to death to sign up for a paid service they don't need. The other half eventually forget the links or the information that was in them. Paper or books is the only proven long-term storage medium for genealogy data.

What do you do to preserve your accounts? I share your concern about the services available today and don't subscribe to them. That said - my question for you, as you are heavily involve: what do you do and is it effective / costly / built for what time period?

Thanks!

I use a desktop software program to organize and save data (Reunion for Mac) and export a backup GEDCOM from time to time which can be imported into other applications if need be:

https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/GEDCOM

GEDCOM has many drawbacks, but it's the de facto standard, it's been around for nearly 40 years, and it's plaintext.

Core data and pictures and family stories gets put into photo books and widely shared with relatives, including some cousins I barely know. I've done three so far for different branches, and will do some updated ones as well as new research is completed.

> I've found that the greatest benefit of cloud storage is not as a backup, but as our primary place to keep and look at photos. We started uploading and organizing everything in Flickr a few years ago, and now we spend more time enjoying our photos with Flickr's web and mobile apps than we ever did when they were scattered across our laptops and backed up to an external hard drive.

This is a good point. I was 100% anti-cloud for my photos, but have to admit the barrier of bringing out the external HDD and hooking it up to a PC means we hardly ever look at them.

Not really a need for big external drives any longer. Terabyte thumb drives are under $40 on Amazon and can be put on a hub or otherwise tucked away. SD card is a more expensive option but gets out of the way more effectively.

So I am going through this process with my mother who is organizing photos. I asked her the intended audience and a lot of it is for posterities sake.

My next questions were then how do you arrange a project for the intended audience (context and information is important as random photos of people 100 years from now won't have much value). And then how do you create it so the paper book lasts for 100 + years.

Your idea on Blurb was was interesting to me. Do you know the quality of the paper of the book will survive a long time or did you look into that? Also what reasons did you settle on Blurb (if you don't mind me asking)?

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction - I was about to suggest printing out individual copies and putting them in classic photograph book with plastic covers and adding her own blurbs.

You make a good point about context and information. Part of the work in making a book is writing all the captions to tell the story. I think we've all looked through a box of old photos from our childhoods and wondered, "who is that?" "where was this taken and when?"

The books we've made through Blurb look high quality to me. They offer several choices for the type of paper at different price points, but I didn't do any research on that. We went with Blurb because it has some relationship with Flickr for pricing and an interface to import our photos from those already organized albums (see "Prints" from the drop-down menu on Flickr). It used to have a decent web app for creating a book. Now you have to download and install their Windows-only desktop app, but it's good.

I've looked into this. Unfortunately, most commercial book printing services don't offer sufficient quality for the binding, paper quality, or image duplication. Or, some things will be good, and other things will be bad. Apple's old photo book service (discontinued 5+ years ago) had fantastic photo reproduction but the bindings were terrible.

If you are making a book for your mom, pay for the higher quality options if offered, such as hardback with a dust cover over paperback, and the heavier paper if offered.

The U.S. Library of Congress recommends acid-free paper for archival storage (https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/perm/pp_x1.htm...) but AFAIK this option is not available for commercial photo books.

I've recently started building a few Blurb books. I haven't had one printed yet, but I'm working on curating a "best of" collection from my photos (e.g. Best of 2020, 2019, trip to XYZ, etc...) and carefully arranging them all. It does take time, but I'm looking forward to the result. But as you said, not cheap.

I also use Adobe Lightroom, not just for editing, but for storing photos. It's a great way for me to look at, organize, and even publish-to-web, from either my desktop, laptop, or mobile. As for it being a cloud solution, I'm more comfortable with handing my photos to Adobe's cloud than to Google's (or Facebook's!) Although it contains far far more photos than I plan to put in my Blurb books, it too is a "best of" sort of thing.

My "source of truth" is a local hard drive dedicated to photo storage. When I shoot, my camera is set to RAW+JPEG, and I save both copies. The thinking is: RAW has the most data, but do I know for sure that someone digging through these photos in 100 years will have proper Sony RAW Codec to view them? Probably, just JPEG is a nice fall-back.... I organize photos using the following file structure

  /{celestial_object}/{continent}/{country}/{state_or_province}/{city_or_locale}/YYYY.MM.DD__album_title 
  .. e.g. /earth/north_america/usa/california/los_angeles/2021.01.18__visiting_steve
  .. e.g. /moon/mare_tranquillitatis/2021.01.18__first_shoot_with_new_celestron_lens
  .. e.g. /jupiter/2021.01.18__galilean_moons

Once a year I plug in a second hard drive and use Macrium Reflect to mirror the image. Then unplug that second hard drive an put it somewhere "safe", which at the moment is a storage unit down the street.

I'm looking to get a NAS and set up RAID, but even then I'll still mirror the disk periodically and keep a copy in a safe place.

But I do encourage everyone to consider printing photo books.

My family has used Blurb for many years. Once you've created your book, just wait a few weeks and a 50% coupon usually comes around.

I love Blurb. We use it to make photobooks every year. It forces us to pick the 200-300 photos from the year that really mean something to us. The rest of the 50,000 photos go into our Google Cloud drive. Not that they don't mean something, but there's no way we can enjoy 50,000photos/year.

How do you handle organization of the massive amount of day to day photos taken on phones? It seems really tough to keep up with the increased volume the reduced friction has created.

> For posterity and "the test of time," I really think you need to create physical photo books.

Didn't work out for my dad. A leak in the roof poured water on the albums, and all the emulsion ran away.

A friend of mine had her family home burn down, all photos/films gone.