Conserving your photos.
You should consider how to preserve your old genealogy photos. There are many ways to do this: private scrapbooks, private media storage, posting to a private website, posting to a public website, posting to social media sites, etc. These all have downsides. Paper, plastic and magnetic media all deteriorate over time. Websites will not deteriorate but will they be there in 500 years? Probably not. And certainly not if they must be paid for. Archive.org is a nonprofit site that will accept any and all of your photos at no charge. Here is a statement from them:
“For cultural materials that…belong in a library, [Archive.org] offers free storage, and free bandwidth, forever, for free. As a result, there are now millions of works available through [Archive.org] and most are available only for ‘non commercial use’ and ‘with attribution.’”
Archive.org is a true, non-commercial site. It is there for all of us to use. It is funded by many large nonprofit organizations that are more than happy to donate money to the cause. They also accept donations from individuals. Check their About page, and you will see that they will be around for a long time.
You can upload one photo or thousands of photos. It makes no difference. Once you have uploaded 50 or more photos, you can ask that they be designated a Collection. You can name the Collection anything you want: The Popovich Family Collection, for example.
Each photo should have a text description with it. The words in this description are the words that the search engines will find. Write this description carefully. Include, for example, variant spellings of surnames. This description has no length limit, and you can change it at any time. You can delete or add photos to your collection at any time.
Your photos can be any size and any common format. One problem with onscreen images is that they look good on a screen but they cannot be copied, blown-up, and printed to a larger size to put into a picture frame to hang on a wall or to stand on a desk or mantle. If you tried to do this, they would just pixilate and look terrible. But Archive.org does not reduce the size of the photos you upload — the onscreen thumbnails are made smaller but not the original photos that are available for downloading.
Your collection will be on Archve.org “forever, for free,” as they say in their blurb. If you want the collection to be maintained in the future, all you have to do is give someone your account information (your email address and password). Yes, your email address will not last forever, so the person you designate to carry on your collection must update this security information, as must their successors. Following this simple rule will allow your collection to continue for a long long time. And at no cost to anyone.
A collection can be deleted only by the person in charge of it. If that person is deceased or fails to maintain the collection without deleting it first, the collection will still be there.
Learn more here:
https://archive.org/about
https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/categories/360000153592-Archive-org