news.ycombinator.com• May 25, 2026• 1 min read
Ask HN: Archiving Family Photos?Hi, I recently had a family member pass who had three kids with two husbands. This person was the designated "family picture person", and given the family structure, sharing the photos is not going to be as easy as everybody would like it to be. I want to digitally archive all the family photos they had (LOTS of hard copies, probably some negatives, and digital (iphone pics)) and make them available to everybody in the family. I wanted to know if anybody had done something like this and had what worked, didn't work, or what you wish you had done differently, etc.My current gameplan is to:1. Get a high-quality scanner (suggestions?)2. Calibrate it (any tips?)3. Scan photos, potentially negatives as well to TIFF or RAW (any special software? I'm using Linux but would get a new machine if I needed to)4. Also grab the highest-quality copies I can find on their devices, pull photos from their social media if we can't find the original, etc.5. Give files metadata (dates, location, people pho