On Thu, September 22, 2011 01:06, Philip Wayner wrote: > Digital images will only last as long as they are â??savedâ?? to the > latest > means of archiving and if there is a method of reclaiming the image in > the future.. Any break in the storage method history and the image is > lost. I describe digital archives as "brittle". If they break, they tend to fracture into many small pieces. > Think of the ways that images have been stored to date, from the > original five inch floppy to the hard floppy, Zip disks, tape drives, > early removable drives, external drives, hard drives, and jump drives, > CDs and DVDs. The problem will not be the images but rather the > problem of how to get them if the means of extracting them is not > available. > Imagine if your work were stored on a CD and in thirty years from now > one of your children wanted a family image on it, if there were no means > of reading the disk the image is lost. Not many digital images were originally stored on 5 1/4" floppies. My earliest scans came on Kodak Photo CDs -- which I can still read in my current home, work, and laptop computers, no problem. (Somewhere in the early 1990s; 93 maybe?) My earliest archive backups of my own digital captures (2000) are on CDs as well. I'm keeping my all my images online (which is less attractive for some kinds of professionals, who shoot in much higher volumes than I do). I've heard dozens of stories of people going back to wedding and portrait photographers after a decade or two, and in the rare cases where the business still existed, they were frequently unable to get reprints of the old photos, because the negatives couldn't be found. > I recently printed a sixty year old negative. Enlargers are becoming > rarer, but even if they are not manufactured any longer it does not take > a graduate engineer to construct an enlarger as many older members have > probably done in their early years. The image could still be used. I've got 40-year old Ektachrome (or other E6) slides that have faded significantly already, though. > I use digital and Photoshop and enjoy working with them, but I never > have the feeling that the Image is safe or sometimes even available. If my house burns down or is badly flooded, guess which of my images will survive? That's right, the digital ones, plus those film shots which I have scanned. -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
