Scantlings

Here's the scoop. I have family photos dating back to the late 50's (and beyond). I'd like to scan them into a digital format, and save them in such a way that they can't get lost and can be easily shared amongst current and future family members. (I plan to throw away the originals once I am sure that they can be saved without losing the files somehow ...)

1. What resolution would people recommend for the scanning portion? (Most of the old ones were from Kodak 126 Instamatics. Later ones are 35 mm and slides.)

2. Is there a way to tag photos based on who is in them, and then set up some kind of cloud-sharing or other arrangement whereby people tagged are able to see the appropriate images? I'd hate to have to organize multiple files on iPhoto and burn different discs for different sides of the family.

Thanks in advance for any pearls of wisdom!

I use Picasa for organizing over 10,000 photos. It has a face recognition program that works reasonably well. You can then share on Google easily.
I don't know what else is out there.

I scan everything at 300 dpi, 16 bit, full colour. You can always dumb it down later, but you can't improve it if you scan it badly to start with. You can scan in 32 bit but it doesn't make much, if any, difference with old photos. If you have a bazillion B&W photos, you can scan them grayscale and it won't make much difference in quality, but you can save a lot of space.

Check reviews for scanners, they keep improving all the time. Epson and Canon both make good scanners, if you have negatives and slides you need a better scanner than if you do just prints.

Picasa is a good organizer and has facial recognition if that is important. I look like Abdel Nasser or Paula Abdul depending on the photograph and whether or not I am wearing nylons at the time.

BACK EVERYTHING UP! All the time. It's a disaster when you spend an hour, a day, or a week scanning and cleaning and have it all disappear. Get an external hard drive and back everything up every day at least. When I was doing production work I used to have an automatic backup every ten minutes.

I used to do this sort of thing for a living after analog went TU, if you want to get technical PM me.