That statement, while it contains elements of truth, is misleading. Most people also do nothing with paper photos, and never did. Because they CAN'T.

If you have a paper photo or slide, it's rather difficult to do much more than nothing with it. You have to organize a slide show, build a photo book, etc. and then find an excuse to reach your constituency. If you can't get booked at a railfan convention, lurking around steam excursions in a trench coat is probably about your best bet.

With a digital photo, there are lots of opportunities to get your photos in front of your constituents. Lots and lots and lots of them. If people don't avail themselves of them, well that's them, not the tech.


Blog.

Flickr. Picasa. iCloud.

Google Earth if it's a place.

Facebook. Twitter.

railpictures.net. Trainorders. I rag on them for charging for a forum, but mainly they're a photo sharing site.

For me, I have my digital photo archive in some fairly old photo software that I ought to update. The new version directly talks to blogs, facebook, Flickr, Twitter etc. and the cloud, which would save me some hassle when I want to post. My other option is to use my iPad, which has apps for all that stuff and blogging etc. and I can pluck photos out of my iPad library, which is very smooth except the search function sucks. So I usually work off my computer.

Start iPhoto, 8 seconds. Type a term into the search box, 2 seconds. Get term wrong, try different term, blam. Looking at the pictures I want. Shift-click the four I desire, crop if necessary, hit "Export" and now copies are on my desktop. Fire up the web browser, go to blogger.com, flickr.com or wherever I'm going and go "upload pic". Huck the copies in the trash. I do this at least once a week.


Admittedly that is different. I mean essentially you've made a railroad photo book. A bit of polish and an ISBN number, and you could stick it up on Lulu or Createspace and have a product to take commission checks on.

Kindle. iBook.


Oh heck, iMovie or equivalent. Blam, off you go doing a full documentary. Three words: Ken Burns Effect. Fire up Garageband, or equivalent. Put on your best deep voice and do a voiceover, then kick up the reverb so you sound like the guy on the PBS documentaries, add the right musical accents, and polish to suit. Do it right and you can't tell it from a PBS special. And that opens up Youtube. (don't be the douche who sets a static slideshow with trite overused fades to a music soundtrack both inappropriate and stolen. You know what I do with those? I pause them, and slide the slider to view the pix.)

The nice thing about buttoning pictures up in an ebook, paper book or multimedia presentation is it's a lot harder for people to copy the photos in any kind of quality.

Even more amazing you no longer need a computer. You can do all that on an iPad. Or equivalent. You can shoot in the morning, edit in the afternoon and present in the evening. All in the iPad. Or equivalent. The only limit to using pictures and authoring content is your time to do so.

And this revolution is just getting started in earnest.

I think that much of this discussion can also apply to non-photo railroad paper material. It seems to me that it would be handy to have at least two copies of our media: one for archive and one for easy access.

I've acquired two railroad artifact collections within the past year. Both included a fair amount of paper material including passenger tickets, telegrams, envelopes, train orders (some on fragile carbon copy paper), and the like. As I am working on completing my four year degree, majoring in "Digital Technology and Culture", I have decided to see what I can do to preserve these artifacts, using both digital and analog means.

I am currently working on an online museum which will include photos and possibly video of the artifacts, which will allow anyone with internet access to view the artifacts. I really like robertmacdowell's suggestion for the PBS-style documentary. I'm thinking about giving that a try.

I am also working with archive-quality scrapbook materials to store and display the original paper material in. This will (hopefully) help it to last as long as possible.

In addition to preserving the originals and making digital copies, there are two other options I am also considering:

1). One option is arranging the photos from the online museum in a shutterfly-style book, which will allow the artifacts to be viewed without actually opening up the scrapbook with the original artifacts.

2). The second option is, rather than taking photos and putting them in a book, is to make a physical replica of the object. Granted, this would make more sense to do with tickets or telegram cards rather than photos. Some museums have original brochures and other paper material sitting out in public view, in open air. Yes, it's cool to see, but if there's a window nearby, the paper will be damaged. How hard would it be to scan an original telegram card or brochure into a computer and print out a new, fresh copy for the display table? With some free photo software, any discoloration or stains on the original could be fairly easily "photoshopped" out.

And here's another idea. What if my online shutterfly "artifact book" was filled with creative commons images? A photo or scan of an artifact isn't usually going to be considered an "artistic work", so I would be probably be fine with allowing others to use it for nonprofit uses. We could take it even further and make a series of books that would be available online for museum gift shops to order, print, and sell in their gift shops. A lot of us volunteer our time and talent restoring museum equipment. Why couldn't the photographers among us make a series of books of our photos and artifact collections that any rail museum could legally download and sell? I recognize that not everyone would want to do this, especially for free, but it would be an interesting way to help financially support any rail museum in the country that is willing to sell your book.

Food for thought, I suppose. What do y'all think?

That's actually a heck of an idea. The books could even be offered online, using book-on-demand.
Lulu, Createspace... well, you know how to get a photo book printed. Kinda the same thing except available to the public.