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Just a thought, but I find it odd that someone would steal private family pictures. What on earth for?

I Agree. Maybe it was an estranged family member or friend.

I just wrote an article about this for the May issue of Traditional Home. In addition to scanning in hard copies, please consider backing up all digital files (photos, communications, etc.), renting storage at a third party provider online. And not something like Flickr or Snapfish but a secure data storage site. There are nominal yearly or monthly fees, but think of it as a safe deposit box for digital records.
It's heartbreaking to lose what amounts to a family history.

shop around on the prices but pay for a professional to do it.

Not only will you procrastinate and most likely never finish it if you say you are going to do it yourself, but they know what they're doing. They are going to scan at a good resolution, give you a manageable file size and hopefully dust free (HARDEST part to manage in my opinion) scans.

I had the same thing happen to me. All our family's home movies, plus the super-8's I made as a teenager and the films my father shot of his life in Brazil in the 40's, were taken and were never recovered. I'm deeply sorry for your loss. I'm sad about it to this day, 19 years later.

I am so sorry for you, that's terrible!!

I used digmypics.com to do all of our photos. I was afraid to ship them ALL off at once incase Fed Ex lost/damaged a package so I sorted them into 3 packages and sent one at a time, as the files came back, I'd send out another. I'm weird/paranoid that way...LOL

Really hope you get your pictures back. I can't even imagine...

On-site digitizing sounds ideal.
David Pogue of the NYTimes wrote an article not too long ago about digital archiving, and told a cautionary tale of a wharehouse/scanning facility that was destroyed in a fire, along with all the photos in it that people had mailed to them.

I regularly burn off my digital photos onto CD and store them in a safe deposit box at the bank. It was suggested to me that burning them onto gold discs will last longer, as CDs can break down over time.

Pogue article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/14/technology/personaltech/14pogue.html?scp=1&sq=pogue%20digital%20photo%20scanning&st=Search

I have a Mac and have yet to find a decent on-line storage provider. I tried HP upline for my Windows netbook but HP terminated the service fairly soon after it launched. And backing any quantity of photos up into a "cloud" will take a LONG time.

If you burn them to DVD (holds lots more than a CD) and label them, be sure to use a special CD/DVD soft-tip pen. The ink in regular felt tips contain iron and will eat into the DVD material.

I keep copies at my office - on a mini-hard drive and on DVD - as long as it is off-site, it doesn't matter where it is.

If you care about the quality of the photo, or want to be able to print it to an 8 X 10, find a service that scans to TIFF or a similar format. JPEG, which is what Pogue used, is like the difference between MP3 or iPod quality and CD quality music. JPEG is fine if you plan to view on-line only.

I used www.scantodigital.com to scan my grandmothers photos. I had about 500 photos scanned for about $60.00. They had the photos scanned in about 5 days. I made copies and gave them to my brother and sisters for Christmas. I also placed a copy in my safe deposit box. Glad I did. Great idea.

David

Oh man, I hope you can get the photos back. :(

Taureg - as long as the photos are being scanned at 300 dpi instead of 72 dpi (web resolution), they'll be fine as a .jpeg for printing, as long as you're not planning to blow it up huge or anything. Nothing really wrong with .tiff, but I've produced some decent scans with my crappy Lexmark of old photos scanning into 300 dpi .jpeg. Even some of my illustrations have turned out fine on that, but given my choice, I'll scan into Photoshop with a fancy Epson scanner at the office.

I recommend storing the negatives from your treasured photos somewhere very safe. We have some really sentimental ones stored in our safe, which would have a pretty decent chance of even surviving a fire.

Back up your digital copies on DVD and a USB key, give them to two separate people you trust. :)

my dad did this himself a good ten years ago, before such services were common (he did it while he was creating a huge family tree and attached all photos to their 'branches' digitally). it was a huge task, but he really enjoyed learning how to do it properly and was able to improve the photos drastically. now all of the family members can have copies of 150 year old photos. the real things are definitely still nice to have around, but it's nice knowing there's a backup in case something happens.

Thanks for the reminder; I've been meaning to bang this drum with the family for months. After my grandmother passed, a cousin took *all* of the family photos with the intent of scanning and distributing them. Three years and one family fall-out later, still no pictures.

Taureg - sign up for iDisk, park of moblileme (formerly mac.com). It's the best thing ever - a continuously backed-up virtual drive that you can access anywhere, but keep locally mounted on our Mac. I keep everything on mine.

I scanned a ton of pics from a trip to Europe that I took a decade ago. After scanning in all the pics, I ordered simple, modern books made of the photos. I would encourage everyone to have photo albums made of their digital prints.

Also, don't limit yourself to just photos. I have scanned in theater tickets, playbills, and sundry other items.

Good post--my personal gripes with family photos is that my grandfather's second wife cut up that side of the family, and my mom's sister hoardes all the other side. I've suggested having her make digital copies, in which everyone in our large family could enjoy the memories, which is another benefit of these services. Her response was that she gave my cousin a photo of our great grandmother. What? Anyway, I've come to terms with the concept that I'll never see old family photos.

I'm planning on scanning my family photos myself, but getting a professional to do it is a great idea. I might reserve that option for very old and unique photos.

I'm so sorry about your family photos. I hope they're returned. :-(

i actually bought a photo scanner for my parents for christmas for this very purpose but admittedly have yet to scan the photos for them (that was part of the "gift"). in addition to having the files on dvd, it would be nice to upload them "somewhere" without having to pay for them. i don't think such a thing exists...

ack! i hope you get your pictures back. how nasty to have them stolen.

in addition to all old prints, i have been collecting all of the family's negatives i could get my hands on. i have a film scanner, and the results usually are better than scans from prints.
but scans from prints - as long as they are high-res - are much better than having nothing at all.
greengelato, you could upload them to photobucket, for instance.

Here is another great company that will scan photos and put them all on a dvd. In addition, they will organize all the photographs into albums. You are left with a DVD and a neat organized album

Worked wonders for me......

http://shoeboxphoto.net/