Having no friends, I can't make slideshows for them. The only family I know who has a computer isn't bright enough to run a slideshow DVD.
I would have done them for the parents (mine and my lovely wife's) but they aren't alive any more. It would have been a very nice thing to do for them, but there's little point now. Memorabelia for the kiddies isn't going to work, either, for similar reasons.
I suppose I could do it just for me, or for the wife, but we have access to all our images anyway, so there's no point in wasting the time, effort and CDs.
Besides, when I was first teaching myself how to do things like this - and backups to CDs and other stuff - the discs were quite unreliable and coasters were common. Maybe it was the software, maybe both. I just got bored with moving recording media.
Anyway, I'm convinced the era of silvery discs is over. Like floppies, they are going to hang around for a few years, but the period of innovation is gone. There won't be any terabyte discs. There won't even be 100 GB discs. It is not just that Hollywood and the music industry legal support won't allow them, or will make using them and even buying them as difficult as possible, it is that we're up against the limitation of physics. SSD's can use single protein molecules to store data, CDs rely on light. We might eventually use UV lasers, but not very high frequency ones. They take more power, and erode materials more rapidly, as well as posing a danger to the users. Using low frequency, soft UV limits the rate of data transfer and the amount of little dots the laser can read and write.
Throw in the constant harping from the buggy-whip manufacturers , the film and music industry, and innovation on silver discs isn't going to be a priority.
Blu-ray was obsolete before the first disc was ever made.
My local storage is up to a dozen terabytes. At 50 GB per disc, that's a couple of hundred discs for a full backup. If nothing goes wrong. More if there are coasters. I can't see me sitting still long enough to bother with that sort of waste. Not when I can just buy more hard drives for a couple of quid and leave the backing up to the machine will I go to work. BD's are *useless* for backups. They are as obsolete as floppies.
Now, if only we could get a truly fast, permanent, reliable and capacious SSD.
Data crystals, anyone?
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