A reawakening to film?

[georg16nik]

You sure do love to argue in the face of logic, and worse, experience. First it was about freezing film, now you think yourself not clueless on archiving? What? You print everything out and keep the prints in a four hour rated fireproof safe? The real world until recently is that most photographs were printed and put into albums, or onto walls, or into the proverbial shoe boxes.

I'll bet most photo luminaries never did much more.

Listen, "buddy," I've lost prints to fire and short of my hyperbole above - which means no one can readily enjoy them - having them on three hard drives of my own in three locations and a cloud hard drive which is RAID redundant at the site and backed up to two other sites, I'm going to need luck?

And I can still print them.

Well, the file systems available right now, 2015, are mediocre at best, the apug.org we write on now is barely walking and went thru epic failures, every player in the digital domain got f***ed. You still argue?
RAID redundant means nothing. Zero.
The entities behind the whole “cloud” thing are following the money.
AXF means anything to you or the “above” PhD proud about his filesystems?

Kids...
What are you? in Your 40's? All balls no brain?

 

[Alan Klein]

When you die, your wife's next husband will throw them all out. If she doesn't remarry, your kids will throw them out. Better to give gifts of mounted prints to relatives and friends. They and you could be enjoying them being seen now and maybe will be enjoyed after your gone. Other than that, sorry, you're not that important. No one is going to care about your work.

 

[georg16nik]

...No one is going to care about your work.

Only in America!

 

[jvo]

the beginning of the end of "our long, international nightmare" - (to paraphrase a popular sentiment)...

jvo

 

[jvo]

When you die, your wife's next husband will throw them all out. If she doesn't remarry, your kids will throw them out. Better to give gifts of mounted prints to relatives and friends. They and you could be enjoying them being seen now and maybe will be enjoyed after your gone. Other than that, sorry, you're not that important. No one is going to care about your work.

ditto...

i've been slowly going thru and giving away old prints. mail em to folks - they can't really complain, and they can put them on the wall, in the attic, or garbage - and you'll probably never know!

my negatives? well, them i won't discard - that'll be left to others... they'll do that easily because they'll have a vague idea of what they are, and even less about what to do with them! (maybe they'll struggle through the contact sheets and marvel at how great a photographer i was????!!????)

jvo

 

[f/16]

When you die, your wife's next husband will throw them all out. If she doesn't remarry, your kids will throw them out. Better to give gifts of mounted prints to relatives and friends. They and you could be enjoying them being seen now and maybe will be enjoyed after your gone. Other than that, sorry, you're not that important. No one is going to care about your work.

So true.

 

[flavio81]

Listen, "buddy," I've lost prints to fire and short of my hyperbole above - which means no one can readily enjoy them - having them on three hard drives of my own in three locations and a cloud hard drive which is RAID redundant at the site and backed up to two other sites, I'm going to need luck?

Good post. People usually think that having digital storage of the pictures mean backing them up to a hard drive (which of course will fail in a matter of years).

I think it's best to try to understand what is a "RAID" and what is cloud storage before jumping to conclusions. A good, properly used cloud storage solution will keep the data indefinitely and reliably, definitely more reliably than keeping the negatives on a safe. And I claim this based on my experience of over 15 years as an IT professional.

However, I will keep my negatives and slides with myself because it is more easy than scanning everything and then have the files spread over a file storage cloud.

 

[georg16nik]

....
I think it's best to try to understand what is a "RAID" and what is cloud storage before jumping to conclusions. A good, properly used cloud storage solution will keep the data indefinitely and reliably, definitely more reliably than keeping the negatives on a safe. And I claim this based on my experience of over 15 years as an IT professional...

yeah, right. but 15 years as an IT professional doesn't make you competent in regards to negatives or prints storage, in fact the opposite is more likely.

Given how young the Archive eXchange Format (AXF) Standard is, that “RAID” + “decades of experience” song rather entertaining.

 

[tomfrh]

I much prefer analog to digital images when it comes to raw viewing please, however I consider negatives/prints/slides very inferior to digital when it comes to long term storage. I have my grandpas old photos. Most of them are decayed and bleached. My parents' slides and print from the 50s, 60s, 70s are mostly faded. My digital images will be as good as new in 100 years. And now with the cloud, you can have any level of redundancy you desire.

I think some people confuse digital images with one particular physical analog of them, e.g. a DVD, or a thumb-drive that happens to hold a copy.

 

[Steve Smith]

I much prefer analog to digital images when it comes to raw viewing please, however I consider negatives/prints/slides very inferior to digital when it comes to long term storage. I have my grandpas old photos. Most of them are decayed and bleached. My parents' slides and print from the 50s, 60s, 70s are mostly faded. My digital images will be as good as new in 100 years. And now with the cloud, you can have any level of redundancy you desire.

More generally, the reverse is true. I bet most families have a collection of photographs going back fifty, perhaps one hundred years in not bad condition but I doubt many people can find their digital images from ten years ago.


Steve.

 

[tomfrh]

More generally, the reverse is true. I bet most families have a collection of photographs going back fifty, perhaps one hundred years in not bad condition but I doubt many people can find their digital images from ten years ago.


Steve.

Like many people I have ready access to my earliest digital photos. My earliest digital image is nearly 30 years old. It's PCX format - a thoroughly obsolete format -and is easy to read today with generic software. So the supposed threat of formats becoming unreadable is another criticism I don't understand. I have 30 year old prints which are rotten. That's not to say prints don't last that long!, I'm just pointing out that it's not true to just assert that analog photos last 100 years and that digital images are always "lost" or "unreadable" within 10.

Digital has major advantages if reliable long-term storage is your requirement, hence the existence of things like alphabets, DNA molecules and binary computer memory...

 

[Steve Smith]

Like many people I have ready access to my earliest digital photos.

Yes, but this is a forum of photography enthusiasts. I suspect the reverse is true of the general public.


Steve.

 

[flavio81]

Like many people I have ready access to my earliest digital photos. My earliest digital image is nearly 30 years old. It's PCX format - a thoroughly obsolete format -and is easy to read today with generic software. So the supposed threat of formats becoming unreadable is another criticism I don't understand.

Exactly. I can already read even more obscure and obsolete image formats as well, with my machine and the common IrfanView program.

JPEG files exist since 1992, that is about 23 years ago, and those files are still JPEG files able to be read today.

 

[DREW WILEY]

That's just a blink of an eye. My gosh, try retrieving data from punchcards, that's a better comparison. JPEG's aren't photos anyway. They're
pixelated hairballs. Fine for casual purposes like the web, but hardly suitable for anything coveted. Entire digital libraries have been lost. But who cares? Give me a real book or a real print I can pick up and appreciate. Imagine what would happen when they opened King Tut's tomb and there were just a pile of discs on the floor. Would anyone visit a museum to see them? Even pictures of ancestors with long beards and chewing tobacco stains running down the middle are more interesting than a disc.

 

[georg16nik]

Like many people I have ready access to my earliest digital photos. My earliest digital image is nearly 30 years old. It's PCX format - a thoroughly obsolete format -and is easy to read today with generic software. ...

CERN run supercomputers with the best of the best file systems you've most likely unaware that exist. They've been tru severe data loss, silent data corruption and hardware failures in the last 30 years.

While your files, and the files of a couple other IT enthusiasts on APUG are still fine and dandy, eh, hardware too?
You must be living in some parallel universe, where all is shiny, RAID never fails, data don't corrupt and it's all for free.

 

[Paul Verizzo]

I have thousands of scans that go back to the 1880's, through the last century, through 15 years of digital.

They exist on at least six different hard drives/servers from on my table to in my car to cloud backups.

I had a major loss of images in a fire in 1988. So, which is more or less likely to be around after the next fire?

For those who throw out the possibility of some nuke or electromagnetic radiation storage wipeout, all I can say is at that time I will have a lot bigger problems to worry about than my image retreivals. As in food, etc. ....

 

[tomfrh]

I have thousands of scans that go back to the 1880's, through the last century, through 15 years of digital.

They exist on at least six different hard drives/servers from on my table to in my car to cloud backups.

I had a major loss of images in a fire in 1988. So, which is more or less likely to be around after the next fire?

For those who throw out the possibility of some nuke or electromagnetic radiation storage wipeout, all I can say is at that time I will have a lot bigger problems to worry about than my image retreivals. As in food, etc. ....

On the orher hand, it was the tattered Polaroid of Sarah that got Kyle Reese through the nuclear war against skynet. Can't imagine the computer enemy handing over morale boosting piccies we have stored on the cloud!

 

[Roger Cole]

Like many people I have ready access to my earliest digital photos. My earliest digital image is nearly 30 years old. It's PCX format - a thoroughly obsolete format -and is easy to read today with generic software. So the supposed threat of formats becoming unreadable is another criticism I don't understand. I have 30 year old prints which are rotten. That's not to say prints don't last that long!, I'm just pointing out that it's not true to just assert that analog photos last 100 years and that digital images are always "lost" or "unreadable" within 10.

Digital has major advantages if reliable long-term storage is your requirement, hence the existence of things like alphabets, DNA molecules and binary computer memory...

Exactly. I can already read even more obscure and obsolete image formats as well, with my machine and the common IrfanView program.

JPEG files exist since 1992, that is about 23 years ago, and those files are still JPEG files able to be read today.

It's not the file formats that can cause the problems, its the storage media. Cloud storage may (too soon to be sure how it migrates and how good providers are about keeping your data) have an advantage in that regard.

The concern is more about having the proper hardware to read that old 5.25" (or 8", remember those?) floppy disk than it is about your computer being able to deal with the file format once the disk is read.

 

[tomfrh]

It's not the file formats that can cause the problems, its the storage media. Cloud storage may (too soon to be sure how it migrates and how good providers are about keeping your data) have an advantage in that regard.

The concern is more about having the proper hardware to read that old 5.25" (or 8", remember those?) floppy disk than it is about your computer being able to deal with the file format once the disk is read.

It's really not a concern. We're not going to wake up one day and discover that the internet and USB drives are history and no longer readable.

Similarly the stuff I had on 5.25" I transferred long ago...

 

[DREW WILEY]

Well, that damn cloud has to be stored itself somewhere, hardware-wise that is. And since so many things in a given modern economy are
useless without something of that nature, what do you think the first target in a real war would be? Photographic prints burn in wars, but many survive. But an attack involving a "shock n' awe" electromagnetic burst could cripple a modern state faster than nukes atop regular people. All it takes is a close lightning strike to fry a digital camera or even electronically-controlled film camera. I already know of people who have lost all their images on the cloud. That might have been their fault, but so what? Besides, nothing of that nature is a finished image. It's just a damn file, viewable or not. Maybe saleable, maybe not, but no expressive print either. Lost in a fog, not a cloud, as far as
I'm concerned. Maybe virtual people will look at them.

 

[RattyMouse]

The oldest photos I have of my son, taken the day he was born 13 years ago, are lost due to data rot. These photos sat on my hard drive (and printed in an album), were backed up religiously along with all of my other photos. At some point, the 15 or so photos from that day decided to give up the ghost and became corrupted and unreadable. Me, not knowing this, then one day backed up this drive which copied over the bad files on top of the good ones, thus ruining them forever.

The prints were inkjets and the ink is now well on its way to fading to obscurity.

You have to just love digital.

 

[Paul Verizzo]

@ Drew: You really hate anything new, don't you? You summarily dismiss all digital images as worthless just because of how they were made. You think your paper prints are inherently superior, but you've not experienced a fire that destroys them. I have. A household fire or flood is a thousand percent more likely than some electromagnetic flash from whatever the source. If someone has lost pictures on the cloud, as you claim, they did something stupid. Accidental deletion or maybe stored with a little startup company without redundancy. You can be sure that all of the major image storage players have lots of redundancy. I'll take that over blind luck.

My images, scanned from film or digital, exist in six different places locally and around the globe. If I had had that type of redundancy in 1988 I could have just shrugged off the damage. And if so inclined, reprinted them.

You can do both. Unless your photo religion won't let you.

 

[georg16nik]

I've already said my piece but here's something extra.

From American Society of Cinematographers, http://www.theasc.com/

Well-established, time-tested analog preservation practices do not apply to digital holdings; digital materials are fundamentally different from motion picture film and other analog materials. Suitable long-term preservation and access mechanisms for digital motion picture materials have not yet been developed. (my boldface)
And until they are developed every motion picture image that exists solely in the digital realm is at risk—just as are our personal iPhoto files on our laptops and iPhones… Have you lost any files or photos? “Future-proofing” in the digital world is just a slogan, not a reality.
........

 

[RPC]

In 1988, one could have made analog copies of any analog photographs and stored them at six different places locally and around the globe. In fact it could have been done anytime during the 20th century if one had really wanted to. Digital may make it easier to do but really changes nothing per se. Protection of images with redundancy has always been possible.

 

[flavio81]

Well, that damn cloud has to be stored itself somewhere, hardware-wise that is.

You really need to understand the concept behind cloud storage.

Cloud storage itself can be divided into multiple physical locations at the same time, and be assembled in such a way that the physical destruction of one location does not destroy the information.