What do you you do with your precious family pictures?

[Jeff S]

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I think we will come to regret this new-fangled digital nonsense in more ways than one!:)

 

So your signature quote should be the five horsemen, including digitization?

 

Jeff

[rachel@krusic.com]

Hi NZdavid and thanks for expanding on my statement.

 

Hi Pico, so I asked my husband to comment on what you said and he agreed. Actually, since he works in the VFX CG sector, what he does is make an archive on broadcast tape which is similar to what you mentioned as well as a digital copy. However more so then not, the broadcast copy which is print has been the most reliable over time.

 

Ironically enough, the film is still the best when compared to digital, for example HDCAM, etc...

 

He has actually had a recent instance were a 10TB broadcast job was lost as the digital archive failed to restore but they had made a copy to HDCAM and were able to restore from that.

 

- Rachel

[Michael Hiles]

My understanding is the a B&W silver negative is the most physically stable form of storage for images that is available (and I suppose we can project text). Digital files have the inestimable quality of being 100% perfectly copyable and easily manipulatable, but not for very very long.

[cocker]

So your signature quote should be the five horsemen, including digitization?

 

Jeff

 

No - its a by-product of Free Markets.

[Jager]

This image of my father and his Harley was from a long lost color negative from the late 1940's. It was scratched and faded and the color dyes had long since expired. There was only the tiniest hint of latent image left. A professional photo retouching firm was unable to extract any kind of usable image. I spent several hours in Photoshop and was able to save only what you see here, the sparest bit of memory.

 

 

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The archival challenges of the photos we take have always been with us.

 

The photos taken at my wedding in 1980 are quickly fading into yellowish oblivion. B&W negatives and prints fare much better than color materials, of course (with the notable exception of Kodachrome slides kept in dark storage and old Cibachrome prints) - but even they usually ended up being tossed into the proverbial shoebox, eventually to be lost, forgotten, or thrown away. Or, like my mom and dad, you lose them all in a house fire.

 

This image here, a self-portrait, was taken sixty-some years after the first one. It was recorded with my M9.

 

 

It lives on my website. More importantly, it resides - along with the full DNG copy - in my several-terabyte Drobo backup system (a raid-type device intended to protect against individual disk failure). It would be the first thing I would grab if there was a fire or some other kind of emergency. And as disk and interface protocols change, I simply continue to copy my library of files to latest-generation equipment. I've not found that to be very difficult.

 

At first glance, the sheer ubiquity of modern digital picture-taking devices suggests great difficulty in archiving and managing the resulting chaos. I think, though, that once one thinks it through - and especially if a distinction is made between 'serious' photos and 'junk' photos (I make no attempt to save the occasional image I take with my iPhone) - it's not so much that it's harder.

 

It's just different.

[Paulus]

If I looked which classical music survived the ages. I noticed that a lot of factors can be involved.

 

1. You can just store / the paper prints / slides / films on your attic/ cellar. It will be found in 200 years if you are lucy.

2. You can publish your work and it will be printed. Some prints will survive for about 100 years if you are lucky.Some prints will be reprinted and reprinted and survive 400 years losing a bit of their quality maybe.

3. You can publish digital captures on the internet and if this thing still exists in 100 years, an individual still can see your pictures.

4. You can sell your baryt photo's to galleries and individuals. The prints can be found on their attics and survive maybe 100/200 years.

5. Don't trie to keep to much photo's . A bulk can be a burden and thrown away by your successors. They may not find the pictures really worth wile.

 

I trie to do all these things.

 

The thing I realize is, that I cannot predict if one photo will be able to survive 100 years. It depends on the people who take care of it after I am gone.

[Double Negative]

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Digital clearly has the advantage of being 100% perfect from the day it was taken to a hundred years later. However... Two things generally prevent that:

 

- Your last digital copied is corrupted, destroyed or just plain deleted

- The technology to access and/or decode it is "too old to be used practically"

 

For example. I've got documents that I created on PCs dating back to the original IBM PC (and beyond, trust me). While you can still open some of them that use more "widely adopted" formats in popular programs (e.g. Word Perfect, Word, Lotus 1-2-3, etc.)... Some were proprietary and binary, created by less popular applications. Good luck trying to read those without having access to the original hardware and software that created it.

 

Of course, at this point in time, DNG and JPEG are rather established formats and will likely see accessibility extend for the foreseeable future... However... There will come a time when people laugh at them as they do BMP images today.

[Chuck Albertson]

Boxes for prints. Also, I make extra copies and distribute them to my brothers and sisters (I have several). Diffusion is critical to preservation.

[Paul Verrips]

All my negatives & diaslides are scanned some years ago by a company. But i almost never have prints from my photos. For my family i have family albums on Picasa, but i think i will make some photobooks.