Hi, I recently had a family member pass who had three kids with two husbands. This person was the designated "family picture person", and given the family structure, sharing the photos is not going to be as easy as everybody would like it to be. I want to digitally archive all the family photos they had (LOTS of hard copies, probably some negatives, and digital (iphone pics)) and make them available to everybody in the family. I wanted to know if anybody had done something like this and had what worked, didn't work, or what you wish you had done differently, etc.

My current gameplan is to:

1. Get a high-quality scanner (suggestions?)

2. Calibrate it (any tips?)

3. Scan photos, potentially negatives as well to TIFF or RAW (any special software? I'm using Linux but would get a new machine if I needed to)

4. Also grab the highest-quality copies I can find on their devices, pull photos from their social media if we can't find the original, etc.

5. Give files metadata (dates, location, people photographed, events). We'll probably get everybody together for this and try to make an event out of going through everything together, recalling as much info as we can.

6. Checksum everything

7. Save to SSD, and burn to M-DISC (along with an explanation of the archiving process, how to verify files, a family tree, family timeline, etc)

8. Give everybody an SSD and two M-DISCs.

I'd also like to create some sort of online availability. Is there a low- or no-maintenance solution here? Ideally, people could browse family photos, get a lower-res copy for sending photos over Signal or uploading to social media, and also have the ability to download a higher res version as well. Maybe a static site with a cheap provider? Any suggestions?

I'm early in the planning stage, I just want to know how to make this as easy as possible while achieving the best results. This will be "the" definitive digital archive for family photos for the foreseeable future and I'd really like to get it right.