I have been following a list discussion on this and haven't seen the following mentioned. I know, that doesn't mean it hasn't been. If you have, or have access to a scanner consider this. 1- Pick out the color photos in your, or your families collection you believe will be most memorable and useful at some point in the future. This is why you should require a group photo at each family gathering. 2- Scan them as black and white photos, make sure you have extra white space at the top or bottom of each. Use at least 300 dpi resolution, more than 600 is probably a waste of time and disk space. If you arrange the photos in groups on the scanner (remember the white space) it will be easier to print them later. 3- Annotate each one in the white space with names, date, location, what is important about the photo, and last but not least who you are. The scanner software should have this capability, if it doesn't, I know that the Visioneer software does. 4- Print them on acid free paper, use a laser printer if possible, but don't give this up as a project if you don't have a laser printer. Print at least 2 copies of each. Give a set to one or more other family members who understands and agrees with the importance of your project (also consider whether they live in a flood plain or not). Other notes: ** Laser printed documents can often be recovered if wet, bubble or ink jet printed documents are near impossible to recover. ** If you have high quality, small photos that you would like to have a larger copy of, you can use MS Photo Editor and some other varieties of graphics viewing or editing software to print an image of any size as a full or near full page. The reference to "high quality" is significant, a fuzzy or indistinct small photo makes an even more fuzzy or indistinct large photo. In this case 600 -1200 dpi scanning resolution is appropriate. Glossy finished photos give the best scanning and printing results. ** I know that you can buy special paper to print photos on using bubble/ink jet printers. I didn't mention it above because I don't know anything about its service life. ** If your scanner uses a sheet feeder the grouping might be too difficult to do. There is software that you can use to create groups with after the image has been scanned and saved, but none that I know of is cheaper than a scanner. ** All the scanner software that I know of will (and encourages you) let you create something of a library of images. This is very convenient, but I experienced a problem with a particular piece of it and was unable to access any of the scanned images. After that I first save them as a .JPG file, then delete the image from the scanner library (otherwise it would take up disk space twice). If I wish, I can pull them back into the scanner library. Since I also back them up to CD or other disk, they would now survive a disk failure. ** If your interest is only in documents and you are still reading, all of the above applies except use the black and white document setting instead of the photo (AKA gray scale) setting. I'm sure I forgot something, but this ought to get you started if you're interested. Any information you can provide is greatly appreciated. I will be glad to share any relevant information. Thanks, Gene Sears