Organise

I shoot more photos in a year than my Dad did in his life. There are more photos of my son's soccer team than were ever taken of my grandfather. (As of 2008 there are 2 billion photos on Flickr, and FIVE billion on facebook).

Until recently the challenge was to get enough data to adequately record the family history. Now we have the opposite problem, an embarassment of riches.

As of very recently, storing it is cheap. Finding something to put it in is now affordable, with home disk drives in the hundreds of gigabytes.

The challenges are managing it, and making it useful.

Modern file formats can seem enormous (video, high-resolution photos, sound recordings). Should you store these big files or compress them? It all depends what you want the file for.

For example image resolution can vary widely and so does the file size. Image resolution is often measured in ppi or pixels per inch, also called dpi, dots per inch. If you want to view images on screen, then 120ppi is fine (or even less), but print really needs 300ppi for a nice clear picture.

You can't beat a paper book as an accessible record that people can browse. Never has this been easier to do.