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Preparing to meet one's maker...

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camner

Active Member
Premium Classic Member
Joined
Sep 28, 2008
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737
Location
Tacoma, WA
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
11.5
Operating System
  1. macOS 12 Monterey
My photo collection is getting close to 20,000 edited and published photos, of which probably about 75% are family photos dating back to 1975 (pre-2003 photos are all scans).

Being just shy of my 70th birthday, I figure that I have most likely someplace between 10 and a maximum of 20 years to get my photographic affairs in order.

In the pre-digital era, someone's family photos were either (at one extreme) thrown into the proverbial shoebox with (hopefully) something written on the back of the prints giving some information about who was in the picture and when it was taken. At the other extreme, there were those who meticulously created photo albums that thoroughly documented "Who, What, When," and maybe even sometimes "Why" for each photo. Most of us probably are someplace in between. The net result was something that subsequent generations could look at and enjoy, particularly the situation where an adult is looking at photos of their own childhood.

My family photos from 1975 – 2003 were carefully documented and entered into photo albums with acid-free sleeves, etc. They are in good shape, and even with some dye shifting, should serve adult children and their children (and perhaps beyond?) well.

From 2003 onward, I have many more images managed through Lightroom, with keywords, location information, captions, etc. And in the place of physical albums, there are virtual albums online at SmugMug and a nice folder tree of exported images on a local hard drive.

Physical albums can be found by one's heirs and perused as desired. But there's no guarantee that the SmugMug albums will continue to be available (someone has to pay the annual bill, which may not be something somebody else would wish to do for very long). And as far as local exported files are concerned, it's one thing to have someone look at the photo themselves by double clicking on the image file, but it's another thing to expect that they would know how to look at the metadata to find out who's in the photo, when it was taken, where, etc.

So I have been thinking about how to leave the digital "albums" in a form that are reasonably easily accessible by those who may be tech literate but not terribly conversant with Lightroom or other digital asset management software. Given the number images involved, I don't think it is feasible to create printed books of photos… It would be prohibitive to do so.

Although I haven't been able to find discussions of this topic, I'm sure I am far from the first person who has thought about this issue. I would love to have the thoughts and advice of this wonderful community.
 
There have been a few brief discussion previously. So far, there does not seem to be any real consensus on what is actually a descent path forward.

My parents are in their mid 70s. Their solution is two fold, my brothers and I have access to the password file to access FB. In FB, my mom has done a fairly good job of posting images and providing a lot of the meta information. The downside to this is we have not found a good way to export the information :D We have found and use multiple picture frames which can stream the images.
The second solution is they maintain a root folder with sub folders by year, location and/or event, with the images. This is missing meta data, but otherwise is a descent starting point.

My myself, and my kids. My youngest has expressed some interest in taking over my Adobe account and becoming the family photographer. Otherwise, the solution is I maintain an export of all images with all meta-data at 100% jpg in our family OneDrive folder. What I would like, is something like the publish function from Classic which can maintain disk folders to match album structures....

Tim
 
the solution is I maintain an export of all images with all meta-data at 100% jpg in our family OneDrive folder.
I've been thinking about something like that too. The JPEG file format will probably be widely accessible for decades to come, as will its basic metadata fields (caption, capture date, and keywords).

What I would like, is something like the publish function from Classic which can maintain disk folders to match album structures....
See the Collection Publisher plugin.
 
I took up sharing on the web. https://rossdickinson.com
Just curious, do you have a plan for somebody to take over domain name registration payments after you have moved on from this planet? It is something that I have thought about as I have a number of domain names.

--Ken
 
This matter concerns me deeply. I have attempted a number of forms of digital archiving in the past. When I think back at them, it's laughable. Mag tape and floppy disks, if you can find a reader, are almost certainly corrupted due to mag coating deterioration. I bought a stack of archival quality DVDs. Computers with optical drives are now an oddity. HDDs are on the way out. Cloud storage or hard copy seem the only options. Cloud storage puts all one's IP into the hands of others trusting in their solvency long enough for one's decedents to access the data if they can or even know how. We trust that the jpeg or TIFF formats have longevity but are we deluding ourselves? I don't know. Tech changes so quickly once the next big thing comes along.
It seems to me, hard copy has endured fairly well. However, its weakness is lack of metadata. An archival format that shows the image plus maybe metadata on the back would be good.
I see many problems but have no solutions. Looking forward to what others have to say.
 
I'm still looking for a someone to pass my skills to when I leave. Always a dreamer. I have a Synology DS412+ with 4 6 Tb drives. Still learning.
 
Good timing. I just gave a presentation to my local photo club last night.
I am in my mid 70s and and have been thinking about this for a few years. I have talked to a lot of photographers, parents, and heirs, and have considered the longevity of digital solutions. I have moved a few times, and I have seen what my immediate heirs do with what I might already have shared with them. I also know what I think of old photos that have been passed on to me. I have quite of few photos where the current family asks - who is that?

The following is a quick summary of my approach and thinking.

The solution depends in part what you want to pass on and what your expectations are. I don't believe I am naïve and I try to keep my ego in check. I have taken photos mostly for myself because I enjoy the process.
I have a catalog of >200,000 images. I am a fool, imo, if I think any of my heirs want that in any form. I have maybe 500 or so which are in the class of "my best " photos. Even that is too many for my heirs if they are just simple photos.

As a technologist, I also believe that storage technology and technology companies will continue to change. I am not a believer that if I stick something in the cloud today that it will be accessible to my great great grand kids in 75 years.
If I want to pass something along to my heirs that I think they will actually look at and treasure in 50-75 years, I have concluded that it has to be a printed book with selected photos that have accompanying text describing the who, where, and when of the photo. They won't care about the best hummingbird I have shot unless it includes a photo of my wife (eg) and a story as to how I captured it.

My solution is going to be a printed "Family Photo Book" that will end up as ~75% photos and ~25% text.
It will include some old photos passed on to me, as well as a lot of photos that I have taken. All will be narrated with text.
I may also produce a pdf of that book and try to pass it on digitally, though I don't hold much hope for it to make it 75 years.

It is a lot of work, and I am almost 1/2 way through, but I am committed to getting it done. It will probably be supplemented by other smaller printed books on specific topics, such as Our Visits to the Grand Canyon, where the need for a text story is less, but the need for accompanying descriptive text still exists.

Good luck in your adventure and in the pursuit of a solution.
 
My "solution" involves a lot of extra work, but is based on the premise that no relatives/friends will be interested in ploughing through my 155000 images or learning LR, so what I have been doing is creating thematic collections (holidays, art, museums, pets, etc) and publishing those as pdfs using the Book module in LR Classic. That way you are in control of the pre-selection and the narrative (if there is one). We are happy with the result and regularly look at these pdf photobooks (the counter now stands at 115) and share them with family and friends. The pdfs, by the way, are stored on phones, pads and laptops and are thus always available (they are also saved in the cloud). It may be a lot of work but one advantage is that it allows me to "relive" holidays and such. It is also a great way to "remember" past events.
 
Both Jimmsp and gYab61zH above suggest photobooks. That sounds good to me. I was leaning in that direction. Anyone know of a Photobook book for dummies?
 
Try these: https://www.lightroompresets.com/bl...2-take-advantage-of-the-lightroom-book-module
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R1tWPJAS_s [I like Antony Morganti but have not seen this vlog]
and then there is the inimitable Julieanne Kost (from Adobe): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-tkBHTpUyg&t=1s

PS. I always use the Large Square PDF setting because it gives me nice double-spread pages for panoramas and such.
PSS. Just don't publish your book to Blurb or anywhere else printed for that matter. I tried. The results are always a disappointment (no backlighting) AND you page number is limited to max 230 (Blurb). Some of my books run to >800 pages.
 
I'm enjoying this discussion since I occasionally think about the legacy of my catalogue.
As mentioned, technology changes, and I can envision a future where there is an AI that can interrogate LR to look for selected patterns ;-)
However, a dual or tri saving approach may be needed. In my case, I print my photos for my own enjoyment. I have picture rails around my office with the prints pinned to pieces of white board. As I make new prints, old ones drop off the end and are put in portfolios. I've started to place a label on the back of each with the file name and some metadata so I can find it later in the LR catalogue.
My folder organization is by geography with year within that if there are too many files. This makes it easier for anyone to find photos.
So it sounds like those of us, of a certain age, need 'In the case of my demise' instructions for all our tech.
  1. How to long into my devices e.g. passwords
  2. Clear my browser cache ;-)
  3. 'How to Understand my Pictures for Dummies'
 
I am 51 (as of two days ago) my kids (including step kids) range in age from 18 to 31. When I discussed with them previously, all object to printed books.
All prefer a trimmed down library of images. So in my system, that is 2 stars or more. Which is roughly 7,000 out of the 30,000 images I have kept. I am fairly ruthless in deleting images. I peaked at over 100,000 images :D
I figure the kids will further reduce/prune the images using the meta-data in the images. Hence why I am going to use JPEGs with all the meta-data included in it. One thing to note: JPEG as a standard is about 40 years old. The technology to store JPEGs has changed, but the format of the data has not.

Tim
 
Try these: https://www.lightroompresets.com/bl...2-take-advantage-of-the-lightroom-book-module
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R1tWPJAS_s [I like Antony Morganti but have not seen this vlog]
and then there is the inimitable Julieanne Kost (from Adobe): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-tkBHTpUyg&t=1s

PS. I always use the Large Square PDF setting because it gives me nice double-spread pages for panoramas and such.
PSS. Just don't publish your book to Blurb or anywhere else printed for that matter. I tried. The results are always a disappointment (no backlighting) AND you page number is limited to max 230 (Blurb). Some of my books run to >800 pages.
Thanks!
 
Well, I've clearly poked the bear! Thanks to all for your responses!

My feeling is that the legacy probably doesn't have to extend more than 1 or 2 generations after us. I think if someone told me that they found all the photos taken by the first ancestor of mine to come to the New World in the early-mid 1600s, I'd probably say, "Gee, it would be interesting to see a few pix of the guy and his immediate family," but I doubt I'd have much interest in seeing his vacation photos!

In particular, I think our children will enjoy seeing themselves as kids, as well as seeing family vacation photos, etc. (the latter because it brings back memories). I also find that my grandchildren not only enjoy seeing pictures of themselves, but also enjoy seeing pix of their parents when THEY were young. I find it hard to believe that my greatgrandchildren (whom I do not expect to be able to meet) will have any interest whatsoever in seeing pix of their greatgrandparent's garden, no matter how beautiful.

But, as I said in the original post, I really feel that it will have to be easy to access both the photos and the "Who, What, Where, When" info, or else interest will be quickly lost.
 
I may have posted this before here but it’s probably worth posting again. I was listening to a talk, I think it was by digital asset management expert Peter Krogh who has worked with a number of historical archives, and he had some advice that I thought was very good.

He said that when historical preservation organizations look at what documents survived through the ages long enough for us to experience, one thing stood out, much more than how archival the medium was: What survived the best were works where multiple copies were distributed. It is extremely difficult to ensure the survival of any one item for more than a few generations, but handing out multiple copies dramatically increased the chances of survival. It really helps even out things like how willing or able any particular family member is to maintain annual payments for the one family photo website, or the one printed family photo album. But for example if you order and distribute 15 photo books, or create a 1000 image JPEG archive and send a download link to 30 family members, there’s a bigger chance that will make it down to a few more generations.

For digital archives, I strongly believe it doesn’t make much difference whether or not the digital media will last 1000 years, because the format and/or hardware is unlikely to be available and supported only a few decades from now. So the way to keep a digital archive available for generations is to continually migrate it to the latest media. This has many benefits, like the images I used to store on many CDs (hours and hours to read/write and back up) now fit on one very fast SSD (mere minutes to read/write and duplicate the entire archive).

And actually, photos are just a subset of this issue. The real, primary issue is building a family culture that migrates digital documents consistently, to preserve family financial, legal, and personal data files, account logins/passwords, etc., many of which might never be printed. So periodic forward migration to preserve all essential digital family records is already not optional; it must be done anyway. Family photos should simply come along for the ride within whatever system you designed to handle that.
 
". . . to accept the things we cannot change, and the wisdom to know the difference".

one of the things we cannot change is that nothing (apparently) is forever. the bible says that heaven and earth will ultimately pass away and astrophysicists say much the same thing. the best we can hope to achieve is to extend our legacy, not preserve it. the most essential ingredient for this is nontechnical: you need survivors interested in it (if not right now, eventually). just the way wills need executors.

now that the airy philosophy is out of the way, I suggest that the essential ingredient for preserving a photographic legacy is redundancy. (REDUNDANCY -- multiple copies -- is the safest way to ensure survival of anything, not just photos.)

as noted recommended archival media changes with technology but the best we can do is create redundancy with the media we have now.

today's media of choice for backups as i see it are 1) printing, 2) cloud, 3) hard drive, 4) blu-ray optical drive. some of these will be suitable for only the best of the best or even the best of the best of the best; others for your entire catalog.

1) make prints on archival paper with archival inks (perhaps feasible for only the best of the best of the best). you can refine this to taste eg the best of the best of the best printed more than once with one copy going to dark storage in an air conditioned location. (except for the archival paper part, photobooks have are a variant of this. i do not know if any photobook vendors offer archival materials but there might be. otoh photobooks as pdfs are an interesting idea.)

2) store in the cloud and store in _multiple clouds_. (point noted earlier in this thread about necessity for your successors to maintain the cloud accounts). you may be able to afford only one cloud large enough for your entire collection but you can at least store the best of the best in the smallish amounts of _free_ cloud storage from eg microsoft (5G), apple (5G), google (15G), and others. (smallish by today's standards but huge by yesterday's esp for jpgs; and may grow over time). some services such as shutterfly, etc. offer unlimited free storage for photos. (yes i know, multiple accounts can get messy; and yes i know that microsoft, apple, google etc may eventually wind up as roadkill in the unknowable future).

3) export your entire lightroom collection to one or more hard drives -- the more the better. a 5 terabyte hard drive today costs $125 (USD here and elsewhere) or less so more than one is quite feasible. you can initiate the export from lightroom with little effort, just a few clicks, altho it may take a very long time -- overnite and more -- to complete. 5 terabytes should be enough to store about 400,000 good quality jpgs. however, dont expect hard drives to be archival over then long haul.

4) store the best of the best on recordable blu-ray discs. external usb 3.0 blu-ray drives are available for $150 or less. blu-ray discs store up to 100 gigabytes (BDXL format) -- nowhere near what hard drives store -- but they are not susceptible (afaik) to electromagnetic hazards (eg as might result from thermonuclear war or certain more prosaic accidents). blu-ray M-Discs (also up to 100G) claim to be archival for 1000 years. and they are not prohibitively expensive -- about $10 each and you can get an M-drive for about $130. main point is that optical storage is vulnerable to somewhat different hazards than magnetic, making it a more useful form of redundancy.

finally keep redundancy (and security) in mind when saving account and media locations and credentials for your successor(s).

multiple physical locations for your redundant copies are a good idea as well if feasible.

as far as metadata is concerned, lightroom export preserves nearly all metadata in exported files.

sorry i dont have an easier answer: if it were easy, it wouldnt be such a problem. i cant think of anything else except that there may be a business opportunity lurking here.
 
So many of the articles I have come across are focusing on the (very important!) issue of PRESERVATION of data. (Obviously, if the data is gone, nothing else matters.). BUT, it strikes me that equally important is how to have others ACCESS the data in a relatively straightforward manner. If access doesn't conform to the KISS principle, we (well, posterity) may find wonderfully preserved data that no one looks at, and what's the point, then? I've run across many methods to preserve (such as the great list @jslesinger has provided. But I haven't seen very many ideas about straightforward access (though there are a few good ideas in this thread).
 
So many of the articles I have come across are focusing on the (very important!) issue of PRESERVATION of data. (Obviously, if the data is gone, nothing else matters.). BUT, it strikes me that equally important is how to have others ACCESS the data in a relatively straightforward manner. If access doesn't conform to the KISS principle, we (well, posterity) may find wonderfully preserved data that no one looks at, and what's the point, then? I've run across many methods to preserve (such as the great list @jslesinger has provided. But I haven't seen very many ideas about straightforward access (though there are a few good ideas in this thread).
I suspect that distribution (i.e. younger family members who are interested in preserving this information/data) and migration (i.e. asking them to migrate the data as best they can as technology changes) is probably one solution. It would be great if there was a service that could do long-term retention, but technology is just too dynamic to offer such a product. And who would guarantee it after the founding generation was no longer alive? I do not know of any trust types of arrangements that involve data hosting, but I wish something like that existed.

--Ken
 
I've long since resigned myself to the fact that there's nobody in my extended family that is ever likely to be sufficiently interested enough in raw images to consider installing and learning any Lightroom version, though there'll likely be some interest in having jpegs of some of the images, particularly family photos. Accordingly my own approach to the question of inheritance is simply to organise into albums those images of mine that might be of some interest to someone else, and to share those albums from the cloud (probably via a single LrWeb Gallery) to all and sundry. That leaves it entirely up to them if they want to view the albums, and should they have any further use for them (or some of the images therein) they can use the LrWeb download option to get themselves a reasonable-quality Jpeg (of either specific images or complete albums). All I need to do is ensure that my subscription continues for a short period after I'm gone (12 months probably), and to ensure that all recipients of the Gallery are aware of that finite period.

This approach eliminates any requirement on my part to "publish" (and keep publishing) any new images, no exporting and subsequent transfer of data would be needed. There's also no need for any of the recipients to use up much, if any, space on their own devices. The metadata (Title, Caption, Keywords, Location) is in the images and will also be included in any downloaded jpegs. However, it has to be said that as simple as this sounds I've had to set things up carefully to ensure that it will work. LrWeb's download function is not great, i.e. it doesn't include much metadata from the cloud library when downloading, I've only got it to work by ensuring that all my raw images in the cloud are now converted to DNG, which thus have all the metadata embedded....and the download "export" will currently include that metadata. Obviously that's something I need to keep my eye on, just in case subsequent changes invalidate that approach.

But at the moment it works well. All I need to do is check my current album organisation and decide which albums might be of interest to any member of my extended family (and make changes where appropriate), and setup the Gallery. After that it's all pretty seamless.
 
equally important is how to have others ACCESS the data in a relatively straightforward manner.
I think that for decades to come there will be widely available, easy to use methods for viewing JPEGs and the most commonly used metadata fields (caption, capture date, keywords, location, and lat/long).
 
thanks @camner for reminding us of the importance of KISS (keep it simple stupid) . two thoughts come to mind, neither of which I have researched seriously. but here they are anyway: 1) slide show as a PDF, and 2) the LR Web Module. Disclaimer: I havent use either extensively so what follows may off base. but here it is for whatever its worth:
  • LR slide show module. slide show as PDF is nice but the file size gets large pretty quickly. you will probably want to have multiple PDFs organized in some way the intended audience will understand. examples: son.pdf, daughter.pdf, familyoutings.pdf, rustythewonderdog.pdf, etc. you will know better than i how much sense this makes for you. vulnerability -- continued support for PDFs. your guess is as good as mine.
  • LR web module to create a web gallery. you can copy the gallery to a thumb drive and it will render in any modern browser without an internet connection. instructions to user are as simple as double-click on index.html. (or rename index.html to beginhere.html) this also has the nice feature of placing the caption metadata field on the large image you get when you click on a thumbnail. so you can annotate for posterity. vulnerabilities: continued support for javascript, html, css, jpg, png, gif. again, your guess is as good as mine. i think there might be hope that because these are all software technologies they just might survive in some form. they are all essential to web as we know it and the web is so huge its hard to see us letting them die. especially since there is no actual set of machines that need be maintained at someone's expense and they could probably be virtualized or emulated in some successor technology. but my crystal ball is as cloudy as yours.
 
This is a big topic far beyond the scope of this LR forum and is something discussed and written about in all of the photography forums. Countless articles have been written about it, and the advice changes yearly as media evolves. We photographers love our own work more than anyone else will (including direct family).
The world is awash with images, and they aren't as unique and valuable as they once were. We are inundated with them in our daily lives now. Technology changes rapidly. Storage media evolves and is changing rapidly right now.
It all comes down to culling. I have hundreds of thousands of images organized into my own folder and file naming structure. It is all in one folder and fits on one 8 TB SSD. Am I going to hand that to someone? No. Who would care?
I have 30,000 full-size jpegs exported from the raw on my Flickr account organized into folders for all the world to see, and ten million people have at one time or another accessed those files. So my kids and grandkids and friends can go there if they want to. But will Flickr surviuve ten more years?
Will the SSD I hand my three adult children of my top 5,000 images survive 5 years? Will they care 5 years after I'm gone?
Probably not.
Cloud storage. Obvios answer, but that too is a minefield of complications for ten reasons I could name when it comes to someone getting to it 5 years after you are dead.
Printing? Sure. Maybe 25 images? No.... That is the worst solution of all.
Someone said Blu Ray. I thought I was reading a ten-year-old post when I saw that. LOL.
The answer for now is culling down to 5% of your total holdings. Export the full-size jpeg. Put it on a good 1 TB SSD. Hand it to four of your closest offspring.
Then update your will and prepare to move on. LOL.
Let's hang on for as long as we can. And remember ... unless the image contains a picture of the person (or other direct family members) that you are handing the SSD to, they will probably never look at it again.
 
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