Negs or Photo's

We are sorting through about 40yrs of photo's.

My question is should we keep the negatives or the prints or both.

Regards

my limited advice is keep all i have lost thousands of pics slides & negs because of others. KEEP ALL ian

I would keep both as I'm willing to bet that, as you sort them out, you will find some missing either one or the other . If you keep both negs and prints you have the chance of having the complete collection

I'm going through just such an exercise right now, except I'm scanning my slides & negatives.

After they're scanned, they're binned.

I've got room in my cupboards for loads of other junk now.

PS: I have 4 separate copies of my pictures & videos, one copy is about 15 miles away from my house. Only an earthquake, war, or similar disaster will destroy all of them. If that happens, I won't be in any position to care.

Keep all, as in years to come the scanned images could well be unreadable. In any event, the inclination for most people to look at some old unused hard drive in case there's something interesting on it will be very low.

A physical copy such as a negative or print potentially may get used again. I say potentially because colour negatives in particular are very unstable themselves.

My advice would be to keep all negatives, slides and prints of photos of relatives and scenes of historic importance. Cull all non specific, nondescript images with no nostalgic value.

Keep all sources of the originals that you wish to keep. Future generations can always re-photograph a print or negative. However, future generations will probably not have hard drives, usb ports, DVDs and CDs.

I agree with Graham.
And be ruthless too - if you have three of Johnny as a baby which are similar just keep the best one, and so on. It is hard to do, but needs doing.
Also label them with who is in the photo. I have seen so many family photos where we don't know who the people with our parents are, or which baby is which. The same will be true for your children or grandchildren.

Keep everything!!!!

madness!!

At the moment I have negatives, slides, most of the prints, and scans (on computer, removable HDD and DVD) of the more worthwhile ones... if space is at a premium at a later date I can always bin most of the prints/negatives and keep only those that I'm likely to want to print from.

I would keep both, even if space at a premium I would find a way and even if it is damp-proofing a garden shed and store them in there

Damn spelling

I have scanned all my negs and slides with a Nikon Coolscan. What a task! I cannot bear to throw the slides or negs away though. My brother used a High Street service which scanned his negs well although used far too much sharpening and too much JPEG compression which was a shame. That said, our family 40-year old KodakColor negs were in superb condition. Looking at the scans you could be forgiven if you thought they had just been taken yesterday. Incredible.

As for file format longevity, I find it impossible to believe that certain file formats will cease. If they start to wane, then we (or our descendants!) could always batch process them into a new format. The trick is to keep them on a media that does not die out.

Can your computer read 5.25" floppy disks or even the more familiar floppy that used to be an "A" drive? How about Kodak RAW files?

Admittedly most things can be read with a bit of searching for software on the internet, but there will come a time.

The days of the CD may be numbered, with no doubt the DVD to follow. Given enough time everything could be lost from our images. The biggest danger is that we will get old, cease to update and apgrade our sustems and eventually they will just be chucked away because no-one has the time or inlcination to make the effort.

Now I've cheered us all up, must be time for lunch!

I have to admit that on each DVD Backup I do I place a photo editor software that will read the DNG file as well as the JPEG file (Zoner Photo Studio 12) and in years to come when other software may no longer supports the files because a new format has been developed I still have a software that will then run on an 'old' computer.
Seeing it in the whole 100MB is not much but at least I got software in the future.
One thing is that I will Copy the Backup every 10 years as even DVD's do not last forever and my next backup I am sure will be on Blue Ray.
But I will always include some software so that whoever wants to open the pictures will be able to do so. A backup DVD ROM is always flying about and I am sure in years to come a Blue Ray will do the same.
Maybe one day there will be a backup system that will last 50 or more years without degregation.

I think it's called film....