I am in this situation. Our baby is turning 1 next week, and we have about 250GB of pictures and video from his first year. We are keeping them on a couple external drives, but that's not all. We are also trying to make a printed photo book every so often.
I try to imagine my kid at 18 or 30 years old. He's going to want to have his baby pictures. What file formats from 30 years ago are still readable? Are we really going to keep converting our TBs of pictures to whatever new formats come along? Maybe, but having printed books around is going to make me worry a lot less about those external hard drives over the years.
My parents kept a lot of the negatives from when I was a kid. We have never gone back to the negatives; we only ever look at the albums my mom put together when I was a teenager. I think it's pretty much the same thing.
I don't think we will have to worry too much about old file formats like JPEG, TIFF, and GIF. The formats are well-documented, and the GIF format is 25 years old this year.
I try to imagine my kid at 18 or 30 years old. He's going to want to have his baby pictures. What file formats from 30 years ago are still readable? Are we really going to keep converting our TBs of pictures to whatever new formats come along? Maybe, but having printed books around is going to make me worry a lot less about those external hard drives over the years.
My parents kept a lot of the negatives from when I was a kid. We have never gone back to the negatives; we only ever look at the albums my mom put together when I was a teenager. I think it's pretty much the same thing.