You are conflating file size and number of pixels for true resolution. The DSLR method puts the neg through yet another lens with all of its aberrations and optical resolution limits. It may or may not get you scans with more optical resolution or dynamic range.
No, Iām saying my medium format film comes scanned at 1394 pixels by 1394 pixels and my DSLR images of my medium format work comes out at 3744 pixels by 3744 pixels.
I also trust my $1000 prime lens over the lens in a $200 scanner.
If you have a great lens and and excellent DSLR vs a crappy scanner you may well be right; however, that wasnāt your argument. I stand by what I wrote.
You missed my main point, which is that your best bet is to store the images in multiple formats to guard against any one of them being destroyed.
Iāll also add another suggestion: make copies of the best images and arrange them in an album. Make several copies of each album and give them to your relatives. That way people can pull their copy of the album off the shelf any time to enjoy it (thumb through it, write notes in the margins, etc.). Thatās the true value of these photos. Squirreling them away in an attic is an archival exercise that, while of critical importance, is only tangentially related to the actual real-world enjoyment of the photos.
Logistically, the easiest way to create such an album is to digitize the images. And once youāve digitized them itās simple enough to save the files in multiple formats: CD-ROM, DVD, BlueRay, USB, whatever.
Fun fact: A great lens and crappy scanner is my argument.
āmy scannerā āMy cameraā
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Celluloid degrades. New negatives might last hundreds of years, but 60 year old ones wont. A humble Archival CD stored in total darkness will last longer than your āat-handā negatives.
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Cloud: I agree. But then thereās google and microsoft. Can you really see them going anywhere?
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Format incompatibilities arenāt the problem they once were because of expiring copyright and open source alternatives.
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Nothing beats 2 on-site and one off-site, particularly if itās automatic and particularly if one of those on-sites is part of a RAID. If you do that you basically wonāt ever lose your data.
Iām trying to work out a better way to store photos.
Thereās this high-tech thing called āfoldersā 
Mr bannana is right: get rid of icrud and apeturd. Even Adobe Bridge (which you get with lightroom/PS) will work better than either of those. If you donāt have it, just pirate. Adobe doesnāt need any more money.
Automatic backup services are cheap these days (like $5 a month for one computer or $13/mo IIRC for unlimited machines). A NAS is a handy addition but you need an offsite, in case of fire/flood.
Thanks for the guide, Dean!
Several years back I bought myself an Epson Perfection 750V (basically the same as 700 you mention) to archive decades of my dadās family photos. It had apparently been a top recommendation for around half a decade, even back then. Itās pretty good, taking about 1 minute per 35mm frame at 3200dpi (for a ~4800x3400, 24bit, 4MB Jpeg), doing batches of up to 16 exposures (4 strips of film), which is the bulk of the material. I had the following problems though:
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Dust is a huge problem, an ever present battle. The best solution Iāve found is repeated use of āair dustersā (bottled air with a fine nozzle), despite feeling terribly wasteful. Lens bushes donāt lift the particles off, just making it worst. And I turn the digital dust removal off, since it regularly removes true details, like shirt buttons.
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I have found no good solution to processing [110 film][1] (so would appreciate any suggestions). Scanner has many different frames/holders, but none small enough. Iāve tried and failed to get 3rd party holders of any type. The strips are curled unless being firmly held. Whatās more, the scanner seems unable to focus sharply on film laid directly on the glass bed. The holders suspend it a good few millimetres up, hence Iām a little surprised with your use of transparent walletsā¦?
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/110_film
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A regular burned DVD-R starts to degrade in as little as a year. Iāve lost track of how many āarchivedā DVDs Iāve had go bad. There are burnable DVD media (Mitsui MAM-A Gold Archive DVDs), and formats (+R) that are supposed to hold up better, but as a general matter, burned DVD-Rs are not archival.
- How long can I expect my recorded CDs/DVDs to last?
CD/DVD experiential life expectancy is 2 to 5 years even though published life expectancies are often cited as 10 years, 25 years, or longer.
http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/initiatives/temp-opmedia-faq.html
Keep in mind that large run CDs and DVDs (āreplicatedā) are stamped by a glass master, not burned into a dye layer like DVD-Rs are. Stamped optical media lasts longer since it doesnāt depend on the longetivity of dye that was made to degrade in order to record the media. It is easy to accidentally conflate the two kinds of DVD when looking up life expectancies.
Also, digital media is more subject to catastrophic failure than analog media. Negatives may fade, but still be usable. But with digital, loose a few bits out of millions due to bit rot and entire images or even discs are gone.
I have nothing against digital. I make my living off of it, but we need to recognize that long term digital archiving has major issues yet to be solved.
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Totes concur. CDās are totally untrustworthy after a decade and I have digital images nearly twice as old as that.
I imagine there will be some digital version of the Vivian Maier story seventy five years from now, but with all of the existing digital images taken daily of every day activities weāll never notice in the flood. āOh, more old images from the turn of the century? Stack them in that giant pile.ā
Is your 110 still in the ācanisterā or is it more about getting it scanned?
Very good guide. After my parents died I scanned more than 8,000 prints, negatives and slides, plus over 5,000 from my wifeās family collection. I purchased an Epson Perfection 4870 and software from LaserSoft (not affiliated with eitherā¦) the software can do an infrared pass if your scanner supports it to help repair torn or creased prints in software (not as well as something like Photoshop can do with a lot of user time), dust removal, multiple scans for better dynamic range and a host of other features,
Scanning that many images can be a daunting task; I set up my scanner in our living room, so whenever there was a TV show I watched, I could fill the scanner bed with images to scan during commercial breaks and then let it do the scanning during the program. Took a month or more, but once I got a nice rhythm it went quite smoothly.
I keep a set of the scans on my Drobo-mini (again, not affiliated, I just like it) as well as several archival sets currently on Taiyo Yuden DVD+R. www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/DVD-media.htm has a good review and list of media that ranges from great to ādrink coasterā. Use a utility to actually read the media ID code. ImgBurn & Toast do this, or there are free apps that do this as well.
Also, for DVDs, only use +R media. Why? Read this great article on choosing media: http://adterrasperaspera.com/blog/2006/10/30/how-to-choose-cddvd-archival-media/
Iāve also bee looking into blu-Ray M-DISC which claims 1,000 year life (of course thereās the whole āhow long will the media format be around?ā question), but at least the fewer physical disks the data is on, the easier it should be to transfer it to the next generation hardware/format. I also have three sets, one in a fire-safe in my house and two sets located off premises. Every year I sample some disks to scan for errors to see if the media is degrading. Itās become a Holiday Tradition :-).
Finally, what to do with the images, now that they arenāt just collecting dust in a box? One thing I did was to assemble them into a roughly chronological order and convert them into a video. Even at 15 frames per second you can retain a lot, especially when a block of images is from the save vacation or event. To see the highlights of my parentsā entire lives presented over ten minutes is fascinating.
They may be passĆ© today, but I still like photo-mosaics, where a large image is made of hundreds of smaller āpixelā images, especially when the have added meaning. I made a mosaic of my parentsā wedding picture made of all the life events that lead up to that, for example.
Bottom line, now that you have your images in an easily accessible format, DO SOMETHING CREATIVE WITH THEM!
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Right, but many people still have tabletop scanners whereas a good, high-quality DSLR is harder to come by. Which is why I appreciate this article.
Thank you for your post Dean, this information is helpful. And for also tackling the issue with an eye for frugality!
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I wonder if anyone could give me some useful tips on how to correct the colors in this picture from 1970. I donāt know if the negative can be found, and itās obviously of sentimental value. Iām afraid that Iām not that familiar with how dyes fade, and Iād like to correct the color balance.
Thank you for this post - I see Iām doing it in right way. My father was a journalist and photographer in Russia, he worked mostly with writers, actors and composers, so his photos are not only privat, but surely world cultural heritage. I am about to scan all his negatives right now - and I did already almost 25.000 photos since 2 years (and still in work). I scan with Epson 4990, and even if there are newer scanners out there, but the quality I get now is very good - contrasts and sharpness are great (and I also scan with the whole scanner bed instead of foto holders).
In this archiv there are all kinds of negatives, beginning with glass negatives till micro cameras etc, and I must say, glass negatives are still most sharp and have an - indeed unlimited - resolution. I scan mostly in 4800 Dpi (the boundary where EpsonScan still not interpolates the quality, all above means lack of quality).
Sometimes there are pretty convexed negatives - and here I have the problem with the choice: either I put a glass (from a glass frame) on it, and it get Newtons rings sometimes, or I scan them so, and they are concaved (which can be fixed with photoshop object correction tool)ā¦ There are apparently an anti-Newton-ring-glass out there, but they are expensive and small usually, so I have sometimes to rescan both situations discribed above in order to work with them.
Another issue is categorization and inventarisation. Windows photo gallery has a database system with tags and labels, Adobe Bridge either, but they arenāt so compatible and not so confortable. Another tool I am trying to use now is Daminion, which allows multuitagging with cascaded system, but Iām still unsure about it. If you have some advices how to make a best and long-living digital photo-archive, Iād very appreciated.
And then I backup. I backup and backup. I copy the digitalized negatives to various external harddiscs and to DVDs, in multiple variations in multiple locations. I donāt use clouds, since 1) I donāt trust them, and 2) my data is growing and I donāt know such huge cloud I could save all the photos. Sure, Flickr has 1 terabyte, but NSA has Flickr, so I pass. 
And Iām glad I am not alone sitting around my scanner, with precious negatives in my cloth gloves.
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What are your available resources, Photoshop? Lightroom? GIMP? MS Paint?
Totally doable, and very quickly, feel free to PM me and Iāll literally just drop the image behind these corrections.
Use a cloud that you pay for, not something free like Flickr. I pay about five bucks a month for an encrypted unlimited backup and itās totally worth it so Iām not burning CDs and sorting out which ones are where.
My dadās been doing this with some old family negatives. Heās not as tech savvy as heād like to pretend, and is doing an awful job technically, but the big advantage to me of this procedure is to have him sit with me and explain who the people are in some of the old pictures he is scanning. I assume the big ol box of negatives will still be there when he is gone, but his memory will no longer be there for me and I want the brain dump.
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FYI, if you want an option for this type of thing that you can mess around with yourself, the free program Picasa has some great, easy to use corrections. The fill light option does so much for almost any snapshot, and the other corrections are easy to use - just avoid the filters which mostly are gimmicky.
I am very good with Photoshop but will open up most photos first in Picasa for some quick corrections. A few things, like straightening pictures and fill light, Picassa does better than Photoshop.
a few little tweaks made in Picasa.
