Hi Malcolm...

OK, here is my take on this - if you are a professional photographer and wish to sell your wares, there are plenty of routes for this and read no further. Here I address the needs of the non-commercial photographer who does not wish to make money from their work, but sees it of cultural value and would like it to persist in the event of their demise or otherwise cessation of involvement in the retention process.

The options I would say are:

(1) Give the materials (preferably scanned, but maybe some would also accept prints or transparencies) to a local or national repository to curate indefinitely on your behalf. There are some problems with this approach though:

- If a small organisation, the repository may not have the resources to maintain, or make generally available, its archive indefinitely (and/or any associated web portal)

- Your materials may not be displayed (others may have a higher precedence)

- Some repositories (even or especially the British Library with its new, previously unknown Beatles tape) do not make their materials available online, or permit copying and free re-use (commercial or non-commercial). The EFDSS may or may not come into this category as well.

(2) Submit the materials, in digital form, to a public-access repository, ideally for free re-use without restriction except for acknowledgement that you are the photographer and copyright owner. This is what I do, using the "CC4" Creative Commons licences (but there are others). For this you can put images on FlickR with an appropriate licence; put topographic images (for the UK and Ireland) on Geograph, https://www.geograph.org.uk/ ; use Wikimedia Commons (my preference); or possibly other routes. I choose Wikimedia Commons because (a) it has probably the biggest presence in this area, and is maintained by a charitable, not commercial, foundation, (b) it is the principal "feed" for images used in Wikipedia articles (the pipeline for this is extremely simple), and (c) unlike Wikipedia itself, where the subjects of articles have to be "notable" according to Wikipedia's own principles, for Wikimedia Commons the requirement is less stringent, being more of a potential educational or social-historical-documentary purpose, which fits my photos pretty well: their exact wording (which has changed from time to time) is presently:

"These works provide knowledge, instructions, or information to others"

which covers it - as opposed to (for example) just pictures of yourself or your friends, or other items of a more ephemeral / non useful nature.

The Wikimedia Commons upload procedure is self explanatory is and accessed via the Wikimedia Commons Main Page (link to "Upload file" in the left navigation bar); you have to create an account first, but this is straightforward (if you already have created an account to edit Wikipedia, that one will be useable directly as the logins are shared).

Since 2016 I have uploaded over 300 of my "potentially interesting to future users" images to Wikimedia Commons, using the CC4 license and its predecessors, without problem, and now sleep easy knowing that to the best of my knowledge, these images will now persist indefinitely, can be found by others (especially with appropriate labels and tags e.g. "folk musicians from the United Kingdom"), and can be re-used as well e.g. in Wikipedia articles and therefore circulate more widely than otherwise possible.

In a few cases I have uploaded a copy of modest resolution first, then overwritten it with a better version as available, which is also a simple process and breaks no links for downstream users.

Just my 2 cents of course,

Regards - Tony