It is a personal decision, and unfortunately none of will know what woks best for the folks asked to carry forward the information. I suspect that many years from now, historians will look back and find a big gap of information from what they may refer to as the "dawn of the digital age".
There is also a distressing impermanence to the analog age.
My parents will celebrate their golden wedding anniversary next year, so we want to make a photo book looking back over 50 years. I've got all the digital images they and I have ever taken (other than the rubbish that was culled almost immediately). However, the analog material is much more troublesome.
Most of the photos that both my parents took before they were married are on slides - there are around 1000 slides, almost all Kodachrome, complete with captions and quite a lot of dates. The colours have faded, but they have been stored well, and I expect them to scan well for material that is over 50 years old. Somewhere, there might be some black-and-white images that my father shot; he used to shoot 35mm on an old all-manual Zenit, doing his own developing and printing. However, I've yet to unearth that material: perhaps most or all of it was lost or deliberately discarded after his first marriage ended in divorce.
When my parents became a couple, they switched to shooting colour negatives, mostly for financial reasons. Sadly much of this material is in poor condition. The negatives that I have located are all jumbled up, with many of them seemingly having been lost or thrown away as they were felt to have little value once any desired reprints had been ordered. Quite a lot of pictures from my early years were shot on 126 film using cheap cameras. I doubt these images are worth scanning from the negatives even if I can find suitable film holders because of the poor resolution. The rest of the analog material was shot on 35mm colour negative film, typically on decent quality point-and-shoot cameras, so I would expect those negatives to be of better quality than the 126 material.
The prints were what was valued in the colour negative days, with the most valuable prints mounted in albums that were made of materials that were definitely not archival. Most of these albums are those awful ones where you lift a plastic cover sheet and stick the prints directly onto the low-tack background of the page, then lower the plastic cover sheet. I hope those albums are no longer made, as they are a dreadful option to store and display anything of more than ephemeral value. With the passage of time, the glue has dried up, set hard and has yellowed, so there is little hope of ever removing the prints without severe damage. Worse still, the album pages and especially the glue are not acid-free. Fortunately, very few of the images show obvious acid damage; almost all are merely faded and permanently stuck to the album.
After experimenting on a few pages, I think the only hope with the equipment that I have to hand is to lift the cover sheet gently, scan the prints without removing them from the page, and then carefully clean the scanner glass to remove any glue residue. I wonder if a better option is to buy a copy stand and suitable lighting so that I can photograph the prints in situ. I would welcome any advice. If I scan this material, I am going to spend ages cleaning the scanner and waiting for the solvent to evaporate before I can scan the next page. I realise that I should consider buying Peter Krogh's book on digitising photos.
There is also an extensive collection of my late grandmother's albums, which are in a similar state to my parents' albums. I don't have any of my grandmother's negatives to my knowledge - I think they were all thrown away. Some of the older material in those albums is black and white. Her mother died at a fairly young age, after which her father tore up and burned almost all the family photos. My grandmother always lamented the loss of what her father destroyed; she had very few photographs from before her marriage. I would like to preserve some of these photos to pass on to the family.
I am aware of the importance of digitising this material, as the originals will only deteriorate further. The time might come when I have to downsize, which might force me to pass on or discard most of the originals. There is also the ongoing risk of losing them to fire or flood.
Any advice on how to tackle this project would be appreciated.
