How long do you want or expect your images to last?

[PhilT]

Hi Dave, I hope you're back home and fell good. Best wishes of good health.

[george013]

Thanks for all the contributions. A few thoughts.

I think whether or not you have direct descendants makes a big difference. If we had kids, which we don't, I can imagine they might enjoy looking at their parents or grandparents history, but I can't imagine our tribe of nephews and nieces felling the same way.

Then there's the medium. My mother has a couple of shoe boxes (whatever happened to them) of photos of relatives and friends. Some of them are real social history of life in a Lancashire cotton town at the beginning of the last century. I'm the only one interested, but at least they are there. Once upon a time I used to keep photo albums, which I still have, but I haven't produced a new one in years. I have a few recent prints and hundreds of stored transparencies, but who's going to look at those? The rest are just ones and zeroes on various electronic devices and they will surely go when I do (and having backups in the Cloud won't make a difference).

As for feeling maudlin. When you're in the back of an ambulance on your way to hospital with the siren going, as I was just a few weeks ago, you might hope for the return journey, but still your mind wanders.

As the refrain of a cheesy country and western song goes:
"It's not what you take when you leave this world behind you, it's what you leave behind you when you go".

But that goes beyond a photo forum

Cheers, Dave

That's why this question. As long as you take care of them, they will last longer as you.

But serious. Your photo's in the shoebox is explaining everything. It's physical saved at a sometime unknown place to be found later. For you they've a emotional value, for me they give some view on how people behaved in former times.
Last year I was called by a person who said they had a letter from my mother dated somewhere 1950. He scanned it and sent it to me. Just wonderful to see how that formal style of writing has changed and to read what was important for her. My emails will last shorter as my letters or photo's.

Good luck.

George