When we lived in Ireland, we travelled a lot. We travelled with our old but excellent Pentax K1000, and took a ton of photos. When we returned to Dublin I’d take the film in to get processed (the local camera store employed the cutest French girl), and I also got the photos burned to CDs.
One note on the CD-burning process. It always struck me as funny that if I pitched up with four rolls of film, they’d always give me four CDs. The hundred-odd photos would fit on one CD, but their system had a one-roll to one-CD model. Now I’m stuck with, like, 40 CDs, all in individual cases, when I could have done with 10 or 15.
As we sift through our stuff in preparation for the move to Malta, I’m uploading the photos on these aging CDs to Flickr. Here are a few of my favourite photos thus far (click for larger versions):
Not a great photo, but it’s a good story. It’s a house in Normandy on June 6, 2002. If I turn around, I’m looking out on Juno Beach, where fifty-eight years earlier Canadians landed on D-Day. That say I walked the 13 km length of the beach, and stumbled upon a ceremony honouring Canadian veterans.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Until I was banged on the head in my Buenos Aires, my city of birth, and most of my Pentax equipment was stolen I swore by them. The insurance paid for new cameras and I switched to Nikon F-3s and FM-2s. But I still conserve a Pentax MX so I can use its superb 20mm rectlinear wide angle that the robbers missed in Argentina. Alas! The even better 15mm was not missed.
Alexwh
http://www.alexwaterhousehayward.com/blog/2006/03/terry-fox-frank-and-ian_31.html
Great photos! I love the portrait of Julie.
The K1000 is a fantastic camera. I’ve never used one myself, but a photography teacher of mine said if he had to choose only camera to shoot with for his whole life, he’d easily pick the K1000.
We are doing the same thing–slowly but surely having all our old film digitized and posting them on flickr.
I have actually noticed that some of our old negatives are starting to show age which makes me very happy we’ve started the process.
hohohoho…. what a nice picture!
Perhaps you technical wizards can expound here a bit on the permanence (as in archival) of images stored in flickr. I have read in Popular Photography that while DVDs can store more pictures CDs are a tad less unstable.
B+w negatives that were originally fixed in fresh fixer and properly washed will be archival for at least a couple of centuries. Kodachromes aren’t too bad if kept away from humidity. But anybody who shot colour negative (and b+w chromogenic film ) are into an unpleasant surprise. The negatives (like all motion picture film) are highly unstable as are the C prints or colour prints from colour negatives.
Alexwh
Alex: Coincidentally, I wrote an essay about this a while ago, and concluded that your safest option was still paper.
I’m a big believer in redundancy in these things, so along with Flickr I’ll retain my photo CDs, plus the better ones have been printed out and stored in albums.
Darren,
Paper has its problems, too. Sometime in the late 70s they introduced a photographic paper that instead of being paper based it was plastic based. They were easy to wash and dried very quickly. The glossy version of this paper was (and is) really glossy. The most popular is Ilford’s Ilfospeed. Most of us who used this stuff for reproduction in magazines and newspapers never really bothered to wash them properly as reports at the time told us that these would fade in time,no matter what. While this was not the case I would like to show you here what an Ilford Ilfospeed print (one I had stored in a dark space for many years) looks like. I would describe it as beautiful on its way to a final fadout!The one in question will be obvious.
Alexwh
Yellow
That hyperlink did not work so here it is:
http://www.alexwaterhousehayward.com/blog/2007/02/virginia-mckendrick-art-bergmann-gore_05.html