Thank you for the tips! There are so many good recommendations, that I feel a bit guilty for pointing out things that I would do differently...

I personally wouldn't bother with the $50 laser etched pictures. That's mostly because it's difficult for me to tell what pics will be the most valuable 40 years from now, and I have thousands of pics. My recommendation is to backup your pics both locally and remotely. Locally, you can use CD's, DVD'S, external hard drives, etc. Remotely, there are online backup services that use redundant databases located in different locations on earth. You can pay about $5 per month to save many Gigabytes of data. I'm confident that method will save the pics perfectly for an extremely long time (or indefinitely) as long as someone knows about the data. In contrast, you can make laser etched photos for $50 each, but it can easily parish in a fire or whatever with the rest of your stuff.