At last. The thread seems to have regained an element of rational discussion rather than the rancour and insults that were flying about.
Maybe I am now brave enough to offer my tuppenceworth.
I think that there is a certain arrogance about assuming that many of our photographs will hold any interest or value after we have passed on. Those that do will presumably have been incorporated into some other collection or archive, rather than just languishing in our personal shoebox of photos (real or digital). A book, a learned journal, an exhibition catalogue, a library or museum, a local history society.....or whatever.
Basically, I want to keep my images for varying lengths of time, depending upon what future personal use I might envisage for them. Anything I might think will be potentially useful for some future publication, competition, exhibition or salon, I am currently quite happy to retain as .NEF files on backed-up storage media, catalogued and accessible through Lightroom (or its successors). Most of the images I have already processed for any particular use will also be stored as either Tiffs or Jpegs exported from Lightroom and again stored on backed-up discs.
The best of them, of course, get printed and are kept as prints (although I confess to not indexing my prints very well).
Any photographs (whether prints or digital) that I think may interest other individuals (family, friends, society members, publishers, etc.) are sent to them at the appropriate time and they can (or not) store them as they think appropriate.
But, after I shuffle off this mortal coil, I certainly don't expect any of my surviving relatives to have any interest in trawling through half a million digital files to see if anything is of abiding interest. Inheriting a few hundred prints will be quite enough for them. And, if a few survive in more durable published or archived form in places outside my own control, then let the curators and publishers worry about the storage format and medium.
