Your Digital Legacy
 

Recent events, unimportant here, got me thinking about how I'd pass on my digital legacy. Most of this consists of photos stored on hard drives and backed up in various ways, but there is also a blog and a web site; the sort of stuff which, in pre-digital days, would be pasted in to photo albums or stuck in a box in the attic awaiting future discovery by descendants or strangers unknown.

Most of the stuff is, of course, of little value. Who really cares about the first blossom on that Vanda we bought on our first road trip to Chonburi? On the other hand, someone really ought to save the photo of me holding my first grandson soon after he was born.

My digital library contains about 35,000 photographs taken beginning about 2000, plus scanned versions of earlier photos. I'm beginning the slow and sometimes tearjerking task of going through all that and separating the wheat from the chaff. I'm trying to select the best photos of people and occasionally places or objects that seem important.

My plan is to have all those photos printed up as a photo book or books, perhaps by Apple. (I'm far from making that decision.)

I'll probably also try to save much of the stuff digitally, although I don't have much faith that the data I save today will even be accessible a decade from now. (I still have the first code I ever wrote preserved on half inch nine track tape and Hollerith cards....)

Any thoughts or advice?

Advice: Make certain the login information for online stuff is known or available to those who may outlive you.

Thought: I don't know that I'd bother pruning things. Many of the old photos I have from my family probably weren't obvious keepers back in the day. But they survived and made it to me. What I see and derive from those pictures isn't necessarily what the original owner(s) saw. Instead of pruning, if you're willing to invest time then my own experience has been that annotations are a huge boon to the recipients. I have lots of old family photos that, without the accompanying notes, would be almost meaningless because there are many of people I don't remember, never met, etc., so the notes tell me things like who I'm seeing, when, and where.

Note that the Hollerith cards are still readable sans hardware, and will remain so for as long as the paper lasts. So maybe you'll get another millennium out of the cards.

Core memory from 1950's era computers is still readable.

Good idea on the login information, although the entire website is backed up locally, so the photos and comments from that are available.

I'm not actually deleting much; mostly awful photographs.

And, yes, I plan on doing annotations for the ones I'll print. What I really want to hand down is a browsable representative sample; mostly people.

Anyone out there have experience having a photo book printed? My cousin, in the same boat as I, opted to have prints made which she stuck in standard photo albums. I somehow think a printed and bound book might last longer, but who knows.

Maybe I'll stick in a few of the Hollerith cards, just for yucks.

I got some Apple photobooks made straight out of iPhoto. (Easy Xmas presents to the grandparents of our daughter's first few months.)

Nicely done and quite reasonably priced. (I say this as someone who has done print production for illustrated books on art and photography!) I don't know who the job gets farmed out to in the UK.

^Thanks. Good to hear. I'm in Thailand but will have the books mailed to my sister in Oregon.

I'm very glad that my mother, who had a huge photo collection of family that included grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc. did not prune the collection because as NaOH points out, you can't possibly know what will seem of value to someone who gets the collection later. I've discovered a lot of gems and so has my brother so we scan and swap them via dropbox. Sometimes I don't know who I'm looking at, but he does.

Like I said, I'm not actually deleting many photos; just obvious junk. What I'm really doing is deciding which of the 35,000 will go in the photo books. I certainly can't afford to print them all...

NovaScotian's mother probably had an order of magnitude fewer photos than we do today - when every press of the shutter button costs money (and you've only got 24 to start with) you tend to be more selective, so prune away and be a bit ruthless about it.

Wifey complains that I don't keep every photo from the vacation but really, we don't need 6 pictures of each meal.

mnewman: take one image, output it to Hollerith cards, and add a photo of that pile to the gallery as "technological progress in my era"

So true. At the moment I'm going through photos I took on an around-the-world trip in 1977. Of course, I was using film. I took 20 rolls of Eastman 5247 color negative film. At the beginning of the trip I was incredibly spare about taking photos. Only 30 photos after a week driving across Afghanistan. Zero photos taken of a three day rail journey across the US. (Hey I was broke!) These days I can fire off 30 photos of a nice sunset.

Fortunately, I had the foresight to have the 1977 negatives scanned into TIFF positives burned to CDs. The original film and slides I made from it are long gone as are the rather crappy prints I had made. But the CDs are in good shape.

Once I've gone through them I'll replace the rather small and uncorrected photos that are posted here: Around the World - 1977

It is interesting that the Hollerith cards, punched in 1969, have outlasted film, magnetic tape, CDs, etc. I wonder how high a stack of cards representing a 6MB TIFF file would be....

If I did the math correctly, a 6 MB TIFF is 6,291,456 bytes. Each Hollerith card held 64 bytes. So that would be 98,304 cards. Since each card was .007 inches thick (0.1778 mm), that would mean the cards stacked would total just over 688 inches. In more normal numbers, that's 57.3 feet or roughly 17.5 meters.

A standard IBM card as used in an IBM 1130 had 80 columns and 12 rows, so there were 960 bits on a card. For 6MB you'd need 50,000 cards. In my grad school days, the standard estimate was 143 cards per inch, so the stack would be 349.65 inches, or just over 29 feet high.

I'm a sucker for such calcs. You probably didn't know that a furlong/fortnight is about 1 cm/min either.

OOPS -- NaOH beat me to it -- my column is shorter because I used all the potential holes in the card, but I neglected the true measure of the bytes that he used. Correcting for that, the answer is just over 30'-6" if you use all the holes. I see that NaOH shares my looniness about such things.

Well, you're both doing better than Grandpa Simpson, whose car got "40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"

Some guy tried to print out Wikipedia. The top popular articles produced a rather impractical volume, but it has very nice binding.

Hey old-timers - did anyone ever actually use a 1.5 bytes-per-column compression scheme with the cards? or was it strictly 8 bits plus formatting?

Hi

I have an alert set up on 'digital legacy' hence I'm here - I am working on my degree and its based around what happens to all you digital life and your assets after you go. Its a minefield when it comes to who owns what and what your rights are in regard to the ownership of your data, some US states are becoming aware of what a mine field this will be in the future and have passed legislation to help protect the individual and enable assets to be dealt with - there is an article here with links to the various legislation here :)

For the IBM 1130 cards it was 8 bits plus formatting. If you numbered the cards so you could sort them if you dropped the deck, you lost some columns (80 shrank to 72) and if you had labels printed on them, you lost two or three rows at the top of the card. My doctoral thesis calculations, all in Fortran II, required about 1000 cards. In those days you could always identify a techie -- we all used a folded in half IBM card shoved in a shirt pocket for our todo lists. Every computer room had lots of blank cards on shelves near the keypunches. If your desk or a chair wobbled, there were IBM cards under one leg.

Saving a lot of photos and making sure they are annotated is one strategy. That strategy assumes that people are motivated to look through your stuff and that they can pick up the context.

Another strategy is to tell very simple stories with your photos - stories that are addressed to a 10 year old that is living, oh, say 60 - 80 years from now. Stories that their mom or dad can easily grab from your archives and say, "hey kids, take a look at this!"

That's my wife's approach -- subject oriented scrapbooks

Which is why I've opted for photo books with a limited number of photos; somewhere between 50 and a 100 per year. I doubt anyone would be willing to wade through thousands of digital photos, but they might thumb through an annotated bound volume.

iPhoto Photo Books
 

I've now gone through all 35,000 photos and have chosen about 800 which I want to have printed as photo books. All I want is a very simple format: 3 or 4 photos per page (depending on orientation) and the ability to add a caption to each photo.

This seems to be impossible with iPhoto. You can choose from a number of themes, all of which want to do a mix of between one and half a dozen photos per page. None of the themes which allow more than two photos per page also allow a caption for each photo. Oh, well.

Moving on:

Anyone have experience with non-Apple photo books?

I would think that if you used your editor of choice to produce a PDF you could have it printed and bound at almost any service bureau that does low volume. Won't be as cheap, but it will be what you want.

Maybe that's a solution. Graphic Converter has a really nice feature that lets you create a catalog of an entire folder with a fixed number of images per page. You can save that as a PDF.

Good idea.

Before you start building the document, I'd suggest determining who will do your printing. That will tell you the specs you need to have in place (CMYK vs. RGB, DPI, page margins, etc.), and knowing that stuff in advance will save you loads of time and inconveniences later.

Separately, I haven't used Graphics Converter in years, but I can't imagine a document-based production would go well using that. I mean, making individual files for each page sounds brutal. Think about that: 800 pictures, 3 or 4 to a page, that's like 200–270 files to make all the pages. Use Graphics Converter for image editing, but a document-focused application will make your life much easier for page layout, even if you don't use InDesign or Quark and go with something simpler like Pages.

GC is pretty fast. One click and you have a multi-page PDF document with however many images per page you want. GC rescales the photos to fit (which is what I want) and has multiple options for each photo's header/footer. You don't have to layout each page, GC does it all.

Turns out that Shutterfly has a fairly decent interface for book creation and allows you to set up the pages pretty much any way you want, including text anywhere on the page. I think this will fit the bill for me. They also have a workable iPhoto plugin for uploading photos. Since I'd already exported to iPhoto thinking I'd use Apple's photo books, this makes it easy for me. Uploading is fast.

They got a good review from ZDnet. But, it seems it's a bit pricey.

I am temporary. I accept it.

Keep everything - with computers hoarding is OK
 

I have tons of video and quite a few pics that I want to pass on to future generations. Without any context most of the meaning is lost.

My app allows me to randomly display / play groupings of "video pictures audio and text" That way I can insert some text before the video or picture explaining the circumstances.

I keep few data formats... Mpg, jpg, bmp, mp3 and txt etc. When is portable then it has a chance at longevity.

So for my digital legacy there will be a USB stick that contains the app and a "click_this_to_explain" executable that will have some video and text explaining what and how I am passing on. The rest of the cataloged data will be on the USB stick as well.