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Dead Internet Theory: A digital file can survive perfectly while losing the names, dates, authorship, and surrounding context needed to understand what it actually is.
A searchable family archive needs stable item IDs, portable metadata, OCR or transcripts where useful, normalized people and place names, preserved masters and exports that do not depend on one proprietary application.
Large photo collections scale better with stable IDs and metadata than with deep folder trees. Preserve original order, separate masters from edits, describe people and events separately, and never let automatic duplicate or face detection make irreversible decisions.