Will Your Photos Last Until 2130?
Dad has weighed in on the photo storage debate with an interesting point about longevity of the storage medium.
In his email was this photo of my Great Great Granddad, Solomon Howlett.
He was born in 1871, which, assuming he's about 19 when it was taken, makes the photo about 120 years old. As he pointed out, it would have spent some time out on display (as to have a photo of oneself back then was quite something) in sunlight but has spent most of its life in a tin somewhere. Either way it's survived two world wars.
Dad's point being - will my digital photos be around in the year 2130!?
It's a good question and one I can only guess at. Who knows where technology will be by then?
The other point he raised is storage costs. A photo in a tin for 100 years costs the price of the tin (free?). Using Dropbox for the next 120 years would cost me $12,000!
The easy answer is always "I'll be dead but then, so I don't care". But I do care. I want my great, great, great (etc) grandchildren to be able to see their ancestors. Something tells me printing photos and keeping them in a sealed tin (buried in the garden) is the best bet?
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Sorry Jake, but that question doesn't make much sense.
In 1985, a mere 26 years ago, a 5MB Harddisk (yes, 5 Megabytes, enough room for 1 photo of an el cheapo cam today) would have cost you around 400 Euros (would be 540 US$ today, don't know the exchange rate back then). That's 8 million Euros or 10.8 million dollars for your 100GB Dropbox if it was local storage. And Marty McFly, who I believe is due to visit us Back in the future next year coming from 1985 would have asked you what that internet is that you keep talking about.
So I think yes, your photos will be around if anyone wants to keep them and the storage will probably be even cheaper than your tin can.
Thomas
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Some time ago my grandma ask me about the internet and in particular about emails. What is it?
After some explanation, she raised up and left the living room, a few minutes later she returned with a post card, send by her daughter some 50 years ago.
The text on the card said: "I call you this afternoon.". So my grandma could be ready at the phone which she and granddad shared with the other families in the building.
Back then the postman came twice a day, now we are lucky to see him twice a week. And I'm pretty sure none of my emails will exist in 50 years from now. Especially not the phone messages.
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One difference between the longevity physical photo and digital is that if the digital version of an image does manage to survive for 120 years then it is going to be exactly the same as it was when it was taken. Data stored in a computer can't 'fade'. So if you want to preserve your great great grandads photo as it is now then do a high resolution scan and store that online.
This certainly isn't true of a digital photo printed using a desktop inkjet printer, they will start significantly changing only a few years after being printed.
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Sometimes I want to print photos out just so they *do* fade. Seems odd to me that the next generation will look at photos from now, which could have been taken a day before (apart from changes in fashion being the obvious giveaway). I love the look of old faded photos.
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The big issue with digital storage of photos isn't file integrity - you can beat that with a good backup plan. The problem: file formats. If the industry moves on from .jpeg to something else, will there be anything that can read that file format in a hundred years? This is a real-world problem - I've still got a few WordPerfect files in my archives that I now can't open... not a big deal as the information there isn't that critical, but the story would be rather different with priceless family photos.
The same thing can bite you with respect to hardware - the other day I was rooting around in my closet and found a box of 5 1/4" floppies. Is there anything important on there? I doubt it, but I have no way of finding out - I no longer have any 5 1/4" drives in the house, and even if I were to come up with one, I'm not sure where I'd get a driver for it.
Of course, paper has its pitfalls too - unless you're careful to print on archival (acid-free) paper and store it correctly, your printed photos will crumble before 100 years go by.
The bottom line is that long-term storage of photos is a tricky problem, and it's not obvious to me what to do about it.
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Other points to mention:
THAT photo survived 120 years, but how many didn't?
Also, it didn't cost *nothing* to store that photo. It did take up space somewhere, it may have had to be moved to new locations, and it needed someone to remember where it was stored. (None of those issues are magically resolved with digital media, but they have different solutions.)
Obviously the format issue is of concern. All I can hope for is that as long as it's digital, it can be quickly migrated to newer standards if necessary. Printing and storing important pictures is probably not a bad idea, to date that seems to be s the only format that doesn't need any translation/device/technology to be viewed.
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Yeah, I guess there are *so* many JPEGs about (billions!?) that the format won't die off in a rush and, if it does, there'll always be plenty of ways to migrate/view them.
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I know a lot of people have addressed this by combining the approach. Take and store lots of digital photos. Print and physically store only the ones that matter most (in tins, frames, albums, or scrapbooks).
With digital cameras, we can take a large quantity of pictures. But 100 years from now, I don't think my great-great-great grandkids will care if they don't have all 15 poses of me with my new car, or every single landscape shot from my vacation. A few really good shots should do fine. (Putting those into a acid-free scrapbook with some handwritten explanations would be even better...but we can't all be Martha Stewart.)
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A question on which you can only speculate. I would not be worried about file formats since we have moved on from physical information carriers to the cloud. The problem with the cloud is, it is owned by private corperations that come and go. Trust me, Facebook or Dropbox will not exist 120 years from now, maybe not even 10 years from now.
The absolute and only way be to be sure that your photos are preserved is by owning and managing your own content. In practice I figure this means storing digital copies in a physical place in as many formats as possible.
This solution is actually based on optimism, as all kinds of doom scenarios could ruin the preservation, including wars, natural disaster of self destruction of our species.
I wonder if you are actually considering the state of technology in such a huge timeline. Hard to imagine now, but it is likely that you can preserve your very virtual being within a few decades. It would look like you, speak like you, think like you, like the things you liked and more. I know, it's very sci-fo but Scott Adams has a cool blog entry about it:
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/your_digital_ghost/
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"if you are actually considering the state of technology in such a huge timeline".
I wouldn't even like to take a guess at what the future will look like.
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Another point is what media to put into the tincan for your great great grand children to find. In 120 years from now they probably wont read USB dongles / SATA discs or DVD's!
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I was thinking of actual printed photos, rather that digital media.
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Digital formats aren't the ideal for single, long-term storage. As someone pointed above though, you can just keep moving to the latest format etc. the point with the photo though, is that you didn't have to - it just sat there and can be easily 'read' by your eyes.
Look at the number of media that just can't be read nowadays, even what we think of as recent (the floppies above) - Look at the panic surrounding the Doomsday Disk, which I'm sure you remember playing around with as a kid..
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Sorry, Domesday Disk - always get that wrong!
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