PROTIP: Print the images you want to keep and pass down.
I've posted on this topic before, but as a photographer, this is a topic that's dear to my heart, and I feel it's such an important point that it's worth reiterating. Not because I want to sell prints. I already do that. But the fact that prints are my business is not what drives my motivation to print and to urge others to print. On the contrary, my drive to print is what motivates me to have a business for it.
I fully believe that a properly printed photo will far outlast the digital file that rendered it.
I also fully believe that this generation will lose more historical data than any other because they aren't grasping the above fact.
I've gotten into this debate several times with friends and family, and many people seem to believe that the digital file itself is king. When you really break it down, however, you find that all of the best archival storage options for digital information is actually quite limited compared to a properly cared for physical print. And the best part... it takes no special equipment to view a print. It's 100% available 100% of the time. Even if we were able to find a long-term storage device for digital data, the fact remains that another reading device is required to access and translate that information before it can be viewed. So, you'd better hope that 500 years down the road, a device exists that can read the stored data for your ancestors.
Most of us already understand the key to digital storage, which is redundancy. Have copies of everything in as many different places as you can. And yes, this helps, but even still it's a constant battle to upkeep the archives and make sure they stay in a format that's relevant, resulting in the same data saved to an array of different types of media storage over the years.
Another thing to consider is how much data each medium can hold. We're reaching into terabytes with memory cards now, for example. This has created a cultural "all-eggs-in-one-basket" mindset in recent years. It's conceivable to believe that someone could potentially store their entire digital lives on 4 or 5 high-capacity SD cards. Maybe fewer.
Also relevant to this topic is this very poignant printer commercial by Canon. While humorous, it brightly highlights exactly the kind of issue we face when we don't print what we want to keep.
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Hi @winstonwolfe, this is a very good point you have brought up. I was a big fan of digital but in all fairness they get lost more easier than a print does.
Me and my wife have 1000's of images on our pc that we have not looked at in years, but yet we still get our photo albums out to have a look through them.
I feel that even though technology has taken over most things that prints are something that will last for a life time.
BTW, your reply to the iamarobot post is priceless, I found that so funny.
thanks for sharing with us.
I didn't really feel as strongly about prints as I do until my parents passed and I found myself scanning thousands of old family images. Anytime I scanned a damaged print, I wished I had the negative. And anytime I came across a print that was upwards of 50 years old, I somehow knew that if digital existed back then, these prints would surely be all that's left of them. There needs to be some form of digital storage that's more permanent than the available options, and there would need to be a reliable storage technology that is agreed upon to be the chosen format for which to produce the reading devices for at least a good handful of decades to come - the true digital equivalent of film. Even then, as I stated in the post, the fact that it needs a reading device makes it inferior to good ol' paper prints, which can be viewed simply by picking it up and putting in front of your eyes.
Sorry to hear about your parents @winstonwolfe that must have been a hard time to go through.
Maybe some time in the future there is going to be something more reliable than the storage we have now.
a few years back I used a cd to put some images to, then a few weeks later I wanted to take the images and put them on my brothers computer, when I came to using the disk it was scratch and unreadable.
I do like flash drives I think they are pretty cool, but I have bought cheap ones from eBay and found that once the data is on there and the drive goes corrupt it was pointless of buying cheap.
what do you use right now for you storage option?
I do online and offline storage. For online, I use Google+, imgur, and Flickr. For offline, I'm partial to Western Digitals "Duo" drives, which is a case with 2 hard drives inside. You can set them up any number of ways, but I prefer to use the "mirrored" mode, which is when one drive mirrors the other. This way if one drive dies, the other should still be intact. Just replace the bad one and move on. This of course doesn't address what would happen if the house burned down or if there was a lightning strike. Ultimately, the art of archiving (digital or not) is a constant uphill battle.
Hii i am robot
#upvote
Oh good! I mute robots! :D