Protecting Your Photos -- A Digital Strategy
Very sorry to hear about your photos. This is one of my greatest fears, that my house will catch fire and all our photos will be destroyed before I can get to the task of digitizing them.
Been meaning to do that for years. Real soon. Any day now.
A greater fear is that the house will burn down and we'll all be killed, of course. Second biggest fear is that all my computer disks and papers and writings will be destroyed. Then film, video, and pictures.
Another good reason for your readers to scan all photos (or at least the ones you really love, and especially the really old ones) is because they do fade after years and decades. The media of paper and sunlight.
Once they're digitized, the electronic storage medium can deteriorate -- possibly faster than the actual paper photos -- but if a person (and her descendents) are disciplined about it, that's an easy problem for your readers to overcome: Make regular backups.
Flikr and the other online photo storage sites will make regular backups for you, so that is one solution. If Flikr were to suddendly go out of business or be victimized by a cyber-attack and go down, taking your photos with it, one solution to that would be to upload your photos to several of the free photo services online (including the big companies like Yahoo and Google, which are less likely to suddenly go out of business -- although they are bigger targets for cyber-terrorist hackers, I suppose, but hopefully have better security because of this).
People ought to make a regular backup on their own. Make regular weekly or even nightly backups of hard drives. Make backups of important CDs every ten years, I guess. Store the CDs in a separate building off-site. Print up your own calendars with a calendar program, years in advance, and then actually schedule the CD backup for a decade from now -- otherwise, you'll forget in ten years' time (and you may not be using the same time-management software in ten years, so it probably wouldn't work to set a TODO in such a program for ten years from now). And in ten years, when you make the backup, that's also the day to print up your new calendars for the next ten years and to write-down your next CD backup action item for one decade from that day -- or, again, you'll forget.
Have I done any of this? Of course not. Real soon, though. Preacher, practice what you preach.