Best way to archive photos?

[Gryzor]

I was tempted to file this under "other retro", but oh well


So, a few days back I stumbled upon the family photo cache. Lots of lovely stuff in there, ranging from my mom dressed in Mad Men style for the office to war photos from Asia Minor to others ranging back more than 100 years.
So I thought, I must preserver these. First step is to get a scanner (probably this or this-rather old but looks good). But... what next?


There are quite a few photo archival/organisation programs, including the easy to use Picasa or ACDSee, but I want the outcome to be as future proof as possible. I think the best solution would be a low-compression jpg image (saving all these high-res scans in TIFF would require a new NAS addition), with a separate txt file bearing the same filename.


My questions:
-Does jpeg support description metadata?
-is there a program that supports metadata, but that can also export them to txt files?
-is my way of thinking about this totally wrong?


Cheers
T