SAVING PHOTOS – Regular & Digital -

As far as future technology allowing you to keep photos for generations-- Once a lot of families have lost their family pictures because of using the wrong ink and paper when they printed out pictures with an inkjet printer, there will be more inks and papers that last longer. Probably there's not much incentive to make all inks and papers last 200 years, though. What people want is a picture that looks great when it comes out of the printer. You cannot TELL how long a picture will last by just looking at it when it comes out of the printer! So a lot of people just won't realize how great the differences can be, or realize that you have to combine the right paper and the right ink to get long print life. Instead, they will just figure in 2015 or so that the pictures they took in 2004 faded because ink and paper weren't much good this year. When what really happened was that the ink and paper THEY USED weren't long-lasting. If you use the right ink and paper this year, your prints will still look OK in 2075.

It sounds like you might also be thinking that there will be some digital sotrage medium that will last. Actually, you can keep your images in digital form right now. The problem for family pictures is that every few years, you have to keep migrating them-- from one computer to another if they are on the hard drive, or from one storage medium to another. By 2015 or so, the computer you buy probably won't have a drive that can read CDs any more. Some kind of memory card-- quite likely one that does not even exist yet!) will have replaced CDs and DVDs. So, you will need to move all your data from your photo CDs to that new storage medium. Or keep an old computer around forever to read them. Just like you kept your 78RPM turntable around, and your 8-track player around-- except that you probably didn't.

Of course, those 78 RPM records and 8-track tapes didn't have your family pictutres on them. But suppose they had-- would your 8-track player still be working today? Remember-- this will happen OVER AND OVER!-- the CD replacement memory card will itself be obsolete, probably only 10-15 years later, and you have the whole migration thing to go through again. And you keep getting older and older. Eventually, migrating becomes just too much trouble for you. And there are three other inescapable problems with any kind of digital storage:

1) If something DOES go wrong with the image-- you don't know until the next time you look at the image. The CD or memory stick still looks fine. So you THINK you still have family pictures, until you try to look at them.

2) When something goes wrong, it might be minor-- or the whole image might become unreadable. You don't know that until you check, either.

3) What goes wrong might not even BE with the image. It's likely to be a problem with the last computer handy that will let you view the image. Or the last printer handy that connects to that computer. Parallel ports are vanishing from new computers, and in a few decades, USB ports will vanish too. In future what will happen is: somebody in the world can still view your images. If they are still on the discs. But YOU can't view them any more, so you can't even check to see if the discs are OK.

If you are a professional archivist, who keeps digital files for a living, and does nothing else, you can, with difficulty, keep digital pictures forever, if the funding is available to do the migration from one format to the next. And the next. And the next....

But if we are talking about family pictures, probably kept by one family member as long as they live independently-- it's apt not to work. What WILL work, more often, is real pictures. Sometimes, people even throw those out, especially if they don't know who the subjects are. That's why I advise pencilling names and dates on the back.

2. - Print those images off, using HP ink and HP premium Plus paper, and you get 73 year print life hung on the wall, under glass. Better than that in an acid-free album.

DO NOT assume that your kids and grandkids will take your digital scans and make prints from them! They will have other things to do. They may not realize that the choice of ink and paper is critical. They may think that 73-year print life means if you print it out and stick it on your refrigerator with a magnet, in bright sunlight, it will last that long ( maybe 10-15 years in that case?? How bright is the sunlight?)

What is much likelier to happen is that when your kids wantt to do this, years or decades from now, they won't be able to find your image files. How many computers do you suppose you will go through in the next `10-15 years? Will ALL those files get transferred? Every time? After you are goine, wil your kids keep transferring them? Will your kids be able to read them on the new computer? It will use a different version of Windows than your old one did. In fact, your next computer will probably use a different version of Windows than your present one does.

I don't know how long ago you got your first computer. If it was more than 10 years ago, you have a better idea of how all this works. If you got a computer in 1994, it is very likely that most of the programs you bought back then will not run on your current computer. With some of them, that may be because the storage media, the disks, don't work any more. More likely, those old Windows 3.1 programs just wan't run. And we're talking about 30 years in the future, or more, not 10 years. And computers are changing faster than they were back then.

Any pictures you want saved-- PRINT THEM OUT!! Those printed pictures will last a long time, and anyone who sees them will instantly know what they are. Take a pencil (not a pen!) and write on the back of the prints you make who the people are and when and where the pictures were taken. Do that with every picture.

You may wonder-- "Why do I have to write my son's name on every single picture of him?"

Because those pictures will probably not all stay together, as you get more and more grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc.

When they get separated, after awhile some descendant will get a picture and not recognize it. They only have one picture of this person at this age, and they have no clue who it is. If they KNEW it was their Grandpa as a baby, that picture would mean a lot to them.

Can images on storage media fade?

Not exactly, but what actually happens may be worse. They get "static" in them. You have probably seen this on old videotapes, or maybe even on a DVD. With an analog format like VHS, there are just little white dots sprinkled around all over the image, indicating missing magnetic particles.

With a digital format, what will happen with missing magnetic particles is pixelation. The image just breaks apart into pieces. This looks at first glance like what happens when you use digital zoom and zoom in too far, but it's not quite the same thing, because the pieces do not reconstruct themselves into an image if you view them from a longer distance. It's more like the blurring effect they sometimes use to hide the identity of someone on a TV reality show. But it;s totally random. What WAS a photograph is a random abstraction. Or a chunk of it is a random abstraction.

This will happen without any warning. When pictures fade, it happens gradually. A digital image will be perfect-- until suddenly, it's NOT perfect any longer. And you can't tell that this has happened without actually viewing the image. Looking at the CD in its holder won't tell you anything. If you want to know about all 10, or 20, or 100 images on a disc, you have to look at each image. 99 images might be OK, with one bad one. Or the other way around. Only way to tell is to look at every image. The count could change next week. After you find a bad digital image, there is nothing you can do to fix it, except go into Photoshop and basically repaint the whole thing from scratch. If there is enough left to make that practical. And this can also all happen because of a scratch on the disc .

This WILL happen over time to your Photo CDs! How soon depends on the recording media you used. Maybe in 10 years it will start to happen, maybe in 50. There are some discs being made that they SAY are good for 100 years. But this kind of thing is harder to test than fading under light. I don't trust that 100-year figure. As I note on my page at http://www.geocities.com/dainisjg/digital.html an equal problem with Photo CDs for long-term storage is that the odds are pretty good that 20 years from now, you will not have a computer that can read them. It will be possible to transfer the files to some more modern storage medium-- but will that happen? After awhile, if you are lucky, you will be old and feeble. After you are 95, will you still be energetic enough to get that transfer made? If not, will your children and grandchildren do it for you? Maybe. Maybe not.

Preserving Digital Photos

You may be wondering: "Why make prints at all, unless you actually want to display a particular image?" In principle, digital data lasts forever. It's always there to look at on your computer monitor. You can migrate from one storage medium to another, and from one computer system to the next, and never lose any information-- BUT...

1) If you store your images on your hard drive it can crash. And, sooner or later, you will be getting a new computer. Over 30 years, you will likely get 10 or more computers. Each time, you must move the images. If you store your images on removable media, you have to keep migrating to new storage media-- photo CD's don't last forever. And 30 years from now, your new computer won’t be able to read that format. It won't have a compatable drive.

2) Unless you make a serious effort to organize your digital image files, it will be hard to find a picture later for reprinting. By default, files store in the computer, or on the disc with a long, meaningless number as the file name. Making index prints can help. But only if those prints last. See below.

3) It ought to go without saying that you can't depend on anyone else to save your images for you. Some people put all their family pictures on a hosting service called PhotoPoint. It's now out of business, and they have no family pictures. That might happen to ANY hosting service.

4) You don't know WHEN you need to migrate images to new storage media. With ordinary photos, a glance will tell you if the image is fading, and you can do something about replacing it, or changing the storage conditions. With large numbers of stored digital images, it’s a lot harder to look at them all and make sure they're all right. If twenty color prints made at the same time are stored together, look at one of them and you know if they are all OK. With digital images, you'd have to look at all 20.

5) Image degradation of digital images is less predictable. You may get a little static-- or, if the bit that goes away is in the formatting, you can lose the whole image at once. It won't happen often, but could.

6) Think about what will happen after you are gone, and some relative is going through your things, deciding what to save. Your digital photo files will look to the uninitiated like a pile of obsolete software. Remember, some new computers already lack floppy drives. 50 years from now, even CDs will be museum pieces. Yes, it WILL be possible to take them to a service bureau and have them copied to current media, if the original storage media last. But will your grandchildren know that? And will they bother? Or will your photos be thrown out along with your old copy of Word Perfect? And WILL the storage media last? The CD-makers say they will. Others are much less optimistic. If the relative sees real family pictures, printed on paper, those are likelier to be saved.

For all these reasons, if you are taking family pictures that you would like your grandchildren and THEIR grandchildren to be able to look at, I can't recommend that you store them digitally. Digital is great for anything that doesn't need to last more than a few years. But most pictures are either totally disposable, like eBay ads, or you want them to last as long as possible. Very few people want to make pictures that will last 3 years and no longer.

If you are a professional, who values his/her images and is willing to keep transferring them to new storage media, you can very successfully use digital cameras for your professional work. But I doubt that anybody will have those images 100 years after you're in your grave.

REFERENCE: http://www.geocities.com/dainisjg/digital.html