“WILL BAKER’S digital camera has helped solve quite a few problems around the house. Several old PC’s that Mr. Baker would otherwise have placed in deep storage have been put to work in the capacity of dynamic photo frames or, as Mr. Baker likes to put it, “picture flippers.” Mr. Baker, a 46-year-old entrepreneur, cut holes in walls throughout his house in Corona del Mar, Calif., installed monitors and used the old computers to display slide shows of the 15,000 or so digital photos he has collected. The pictures change every three seconds. The frame in the dining room generates the most conversation among family members and guests.”
Every Picture Still Tells a Story, but ‘Family Album’ Is Redefined By KATIE HAFNER, New York Times
This is an interesting idea, though of course it works better in flimsy American houses where you can easily cut holes in the walls. Even if we had any space behind our walls, cutting holes in them would involve drilling through concrete blocks and brick. So instead I’m experimenting with one of WinOnCD’s features, making slide shows that run automatically from a Video CD disc which will play in our set-top DVD player. (A great way to embarrass our daughter at parties!)
I would add a word of caution about storing the family mementos on disc: recordable CDs will not last forever. I’ve been archiving both work and personal files on CD since about 1993, so I have hundreds of discs, containing many duplicate copies of files. Every now and then I get into a housekeeping frenzy. To reduce the piles of old stuff, I recopy sets of files from CD to hard disk, consolidating the multiple copies from various backups into one final copy of each file Then I burn a new CD.
Recopying data from old discs has been a kind of ad hoc testing, with extremely mixed results. I have the uneasy feeling that recordable CDs are not reliable beyond about five years. There are many variables, such as the brand of disc, the recorder used, the recording speed, and the drive you read it back on. But it boils down to this caveat: if a digital photograph, file, or other data is really important to you, recopy it to a fresh disc once a year or so, to ensure that you don’t lose it.
