Digital photos/videos and storage.

I know I'm not alone in this and I've posted it on my Life as a Carrot blog, maybe one of my cyber mates can come up with a good solution.  Here's the thing:

I wish there was a cost-effective way to store and display thousands upon thousands of photos that a person has accumulated over a period of a few years - and not on one of those  digital photo frames - because anyway I would need a whole wall of them and that wouldn't even begin to cover the amount of photos I've got stored digitally.   It's way too expensive to print out photos these days and most of the time they just don't print true to colour and you have to do so much fiddling about with them - on a 'puter screen they look fine and dandy but once printed out they just look crap.  

I have millions (I really don't think that's an over-statement either) of stored photos - which are on my own personal machine/s, or in cloud storage apps like Photobucket and Flickr.  I've put a lot of photo folders up on Mega. I've stored them on DVD's - yeah right, not such a great idea but I CAN still access them (I don't know for how much longer though).  A lot of people say you should never store your photos on DVD's or CD's because the surface degrades and eventually you lose that data. I suppose that's a fair enough argument.

In the olden days, you just printed out your photos (because you took twenty to thirty at a time and it was manageable- you only took photos when you went on holiday anyway, or at christenings and special occasions). I have very old photo albums that I brought with me from SA but I have taken so many photos with my digital cameras over the past ten or twenty years that it's impossible to imagine printing these out.  So what to do?  I don't want to destroy them, or let them degrade to a point where I can't access them again.  I have chronicled many important things over the course of our family's lifetime and I think a lot of these photos have great value to us as a family.  Any suggestions?