Isn't it great looking at old photographs of your great-grandparents? There is a good chance that your great-grandchildren will not have the same opportunity. With all of digital pictures, there are very few people producing archival quality media for the next few generation. Inkjet and even digital photos from the drugstore (despite their claims) do not have the archival quality of negatives.
How about storing it on a CD or your hard-drive? Do you think your grandchildren's computer in fifty years with have a CD-ROM drive? Probably not. Most of the digital photos stored on old computer and CDs will probably be lost.
My proposed solution is a national archive of digital photographs. There have been private attempts at this service such as Photopoint.com. They went out of business. The problem multi-generation digital storage is cost. How much will it be to store a photo for 200 years?
I imagine an archival system that lets you download your photos to a database. The database would track important information about the photo such as time, location, who/what etc. You would pay a fee for each downloaded photo depending on size. Now 20-50 years from now, your relatives could download the photos for a fee (depending on the cost of maintaining the database). There are many questions that need to be answered. How would you give permission for relatives to downloads photos? Maybe in your will? How about copyright laws? At what point do the photos become public property? The archival storage would need to update the digital picture file format from the current format to whatever future format develops.
With all of the digital pictures being taken, it would be terrible if there were only a few pictures from 2004 in 2104.
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I think you have the tip of a good idea, but the problem for the future will be not a dearth of good database material but a frightening overabundance. The finality will probably be a supergoogle and the method of easy and precise retrieval might tax whatever computer power may evolve to handle it.
My thoughts are, if it is a private company, what happens when they go under?
IMO, the solution would be to keep transferring the digital files from the current backup media to the next format that comes along, the real concern being the future availability of readers and software.
Just like today's scanner companies who are making money by selling inexpensive scanners to people who are transfering their old photos to disk, the companies that make the translation/transfer from/to the media of the future will be the ones making the money. A centralized system would be overwhelmed by the shear number but a distributed DIY system will easily handle the job. And there should be enough overlap of technology that there will not likely be many cases where one medium can't be read in order to transfer it to the new medium.
Instead of trying to find a way to store the digital files for generations (which, as others have said, means either a huge government-managed database or having to reload the photos (from disk, CD, etc.) to a new medium every 10 years), I think we should invent a printing medium that is "archival quality" and make it available to the public. A few years ago I attended a workshop on preserving old photos. The problem of non-durable photos actually began in the 1950's, when color photos became the norm, because color negatives and slides don't last anywhere near as long as B&W. So we are already losing several decades' worth of family photos. The future loss of today's photos reminds me of a similar issue for verbal archives. Up to the 1950's, most long-distance communication was by letters, and we could use these letters as an archive. Then people began writing much fewer letters, because it was a lot easier and almost as cheap to use the phone. A historian in 2050 trying to research the early life of George W. Bush will have a much harder time doing so than a present-day historian researching the early life of JFK, because of this.