Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251212-why-your-early-2000s-photos-are-probably-lost-forever

In the early 2000s, the world made a sudden and dramatic transition from film to digital photography, but it took a while before we landed on easy, reliable storage for all those new files. Today your smartphone can zap back-ups of your photos to the cloud the second you take them. A lot of pictures captured during that first wave of digital cameras aren't so lucky. As people hopped from one device to another and digital services rose and fell, untold millions of photos vanished along the way.

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I thought this was an interesting read

I read this and found it very interesting also. Fortunately I backed up almost everything to an external drive and avoided losing too much, and there are even printed pictures in albums. I probably need to back up that drive again…

That transition to digital was magic for the casual snapper. Just an explosion of pictures everywhere, and it was so cheap and easy. Then one random day they could be lost to a hardware failure, or a site closure, or something else unforeseen. Just… gone. I don’t think we have experienced anything quite like it in our lifetime.

One issue to consider: the D revolution let people take billions of snapshots casually and with minimal extra cost. Many (most?) never purged of did quality control. Many stored their files on whatever storage medium their computer used at the time. A friend who ran a photo store said some customers did not understand how to transfer files. They bought new camera cards when the existing one ran out of space. Is there a real loss if these billions of snaps disappear? Does anyone really care? What is the downside? Will their descendants ever review the hard drives if they were saved?

Anyone have Kodak Photo CDs? (PCD)

For quite a long time, many casual early adopters used digital for quick shots (late 90's until around 2008 or so) but would also take film shots 'just in case' so not much lost there.

The 'gap' happened in the early iPhone days as folks did not really consider the output to be 'photos' that needed preserving. Folks using 'real' cameras were more circumspect and started to look into long term preservation.

How many of those early experiments on the iPhone were actually deserving of preservation is another question, one that certainly is even relevant today with machine gun photography on the rise.

Pieter12 said:

Anyone have Kodak Photo CDs? (PCD)

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Yes, and one day I'll extract the files. It's a bit clumsy but works:

https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2023/07/abandoned-early-digital-technology.html

Kodachromeguy said:

Is there a real loss if these billions of snaps disappear? Does anyone really care?

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Yes, there is a real loss. I recall myself and several family members taking a number of photos that I wish I could see now. It's also a missing part of the historical record.

Brilliant article - thank you. A cautionary tale about uncritical adoption of the latest big tech product.

Ardpatrick said:

A cautionary tale about uncritical adoption of the latest big tech product.

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Well. Had I not done so, the photographs I shared earlier this year with my former classmates would have been lost forever and nobody would have even remembered them. They were taken on film and printed on paper, but the originals are long lost. What survives are the digital scans I made some time in the mid-1990s and that I 'found' with 3 clicks in the folder I saved them in 30 years ago. Since they're digital, they simply replicate onto whatever next medium I use for digital storage. As said, the originals (supposedly much safer/more robust) are lost, destroyed or God knows what might have happened to them. They're gone, in any case.

This problem of a gap in people's archives is not the fault of the technology involved or the companies behind them. It's the lack of attention, recognition and discipline of the owners of these data. These data weren't lost because the technology was flawed. People were careless. It's the same reason why there are so many albums of faded color prints while the original negatives were chucked, and that's only in the cases when people even bothered to put photos in albums (or even boxes) instead of just piling them up waiting to be incinerated after the next Spring cleaning.

Let's be fair here - this is not a technological problem. It's a psychological one.
Also, plenty of people don't even care/mind that they lost some photos. On this forum we're preoccupied with photos and preserving them. We're biased. Personally, I couldn't care less about some (to me) anonymous family's lost photo archive. It was their responsibility and insofar they cared, they could have elected to preserve their data. Whether or not they did, is not my beeswax. As a result, I don't quite get the lamentations in the linked article. Yes, sh*t happens and luck favors the well-prepared. Nothing new there.

Now queue the exclamations of "blasphemy!!" Go on, have at it.

koraks said:

Let's be fair here - this is not a technological problem. It's a psychological one.

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Pretty much. I had a digital camera starting in 2002 and I still have every photo that camera took. I have several digital copies of them, actually.

Yet, those photos are mostly potentially "lost". Not having an independent existence (i.e., not printed), they are very unlikely to ever surface anywhere if I suddenly cease to exist. I'd have to do something to make it so they continue on. No one should ever have any expectation that their unsorted archive will survive them - digital or film. No one in their right mind would bother with the thousands of negative strips I have, either. Glance at some out of bland curiosity, maybe.

Most photos do not and will never occupy a very significant place in the world. There's not actually much reason to act like they will. It's understandable that we, being somewhat obsessed with photography, find all these photos significant and worthy of preservation. But the rest of the world couldn't care less. Ultimately, the most significance photos I have taken will be of the family members that eventually sort through them. Those will be the ones I ensure will be readily accessible and preserved.

Koraks said "Let's be fair here - this is not a technological problem. It's a psychological one."

Don_ih said "Ultimately, the most significance photos I have taken will be of the family members that eventually sort through them. Those will be the ones I ensure will be readily accessible and preserved."

Knowing that most folks are not interested very much in preserving photos or anything else for others in the future (including most in my own family) I am relying on the probability that a small album or two of photos of family and events which are properly identified will likely survive long after me.

The album needs to be identified, and well protected (boxed) and readily viewed. That leaves out digital.

koraks said:

Well. Had I not done so, the photographs I shared earlier this year with my former classmates would have been lost forever and nobody would have even remembered them. They were taken on film and printed on paper, but the originals are long lost. What survives are the digital scans I made some time in the mid-1990s and that I 'found' with 3 clicks in the folder I saved them in 30 years ago. Since they're digital, they simply replicate onto whatever next medium I use for digital storage. As said, the originals (supposedly much safer/more robust) are lost, destroyed or God knows what might have happened to them. They're gone, in any case.

This problem of a gap in people's archives is not the fault of the technology involved or the companies behind them. It's the lack of attention, recognition and discipline of the owners of these data. These data weren't lost because the technology was flawed. People were careless. It's the same reason why there are so many albums of faded color prints while the original negatives were chucked, and that's only in the cases when people even bothered to put photos in albums (or even boxes) instead of just piling them up waiting to be incinerated after the next Spring cleaning.

Let's be fair here - this is not a technological problem. It's a psychological one.
Also, plenty of people don't even care/mind that they lost some photos. On this forum we're preoccupied with photos and preserving them. We're biased. Personally, I couldn't care less about some (to me) anonymous family's lost photo archive. It was their responsibility and insofar they cared, they could have elected to preserve their data. Whether or not they did, is not my beeswax. As a result, I don't quite get the lamentations in the linked article. Yes, sh*t happens and luck favors the well-prepared. Nothing new there.

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I think this article was not written by someone in your age group, so (hoping I'm assuming correctly and not offending you) someone who's slightly older, might have already been a settled professional in the early 2000s, and someone with the know-how and/or discipline and/or time to methodically backup their media, whether digital or film. Somebody perhaps prepared for the 'watershed moment' (mass analog>digital + mobile phones doubling as capture devices) or having the time/desire to prepare.

I think who wrote this article is in my age group, a late millennial who in the early 2000s would perhaps be at University, or rushing to finish it, or hunting for their first job, flat sharing, moving often and possibly far away from being settled and having the time to think about storage and backup. This digital revolution hit us like a train in a very busy and confusing period of our lives, and many people were simply to busy to readjust to the deluge of media. Does that make people 'careless'? I like to think people need time and have priorities.

In those years I was moving from shared flat to shared flats, I was stressing about exams, theses, job hunting, girlfriends, leaving friends behind due to a move, and the article touches a nerve: where are my early digital pictures from those times? I do remember I owned a lot of CDRWs (I remember we'd buy them in stacks of 100 or so at the time, or was it DVD-RWs already) and that I probably burned most of my images on that kind of physical media at the time - the question is where are those CDRWs? They are probably lost in one or more of the boxes I filled with my stuff during my nth move, hopefully I can still find them.

But I agree with you in one thing - at the time in spite of having switched to a digicam like many, I still held onto my Nikon F100, which had been my first prized teenager purchase (and what a disappointment it was...) and I shoot a lot of (then cheap) Sensia slides. I had a film scanner I'd bought new (a Minolta) and the mounted slides still survive, as well as some of the scans I uploaded to Flickr when it became a thing (I think 2006 or so).

koraks said:

Let's be fair here - this is not a technological problem. It's a psychological one.

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Yup. The article isn’t wrong, inasmuch as there were (are!) many who never kept a backup of their archive, so when the sole hard drive harboring those photos fails, they are gone forever.

I guess I’m one of the relatively rare few that always maintained redundant drives of those archives, and always copied them onto new drives every few years, so that there are always multiple devices with my photos. To this day I use rsync to make a mirror copy of my main Lightroom SSD drive, synched at least once a month. I’m betting most folks aren’t nearly as diligent, since few place as much value on their photos as I do.

I can still find the folders full of pictures we took the year we adopted two kittens from our veterinarian (2005). There are probably a dozen hard drives in the house that contain those images, including my current Lightroom drive. I suspect most of the people reading this discussion have made a similar effort to protect their photographs.

I never went digital. I have however B&W negs of my two girls (in the baby bath) from late 1950s.. Their ages now are 66 and 67 yrs old.

I have most of those pictures and have been going thru them for two years (I'm slow) to make a photo book with Blurb. Many of them are 4MB files, manyu 8MB. They're actually very good for small prints in a book.

AERO said:

I never went digital. I have however B&W negs of my two girls (in the baby bath) from late 1950s.. Their ages now are 66 and 67 yrs old.

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Do you not digitize your work to share online??

albireo said:

In those years I was moving from shared flat to shared flats, I was stressing about exams, theses, job hunting, girlfriends, leaving friends behind due to a move, and the article touches a nerve: where are my early digital pictures from those times?

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Sure, life gets in the way. You prioritize and the priority isn't with archiving photos. I lost some of my rolls of film from the 1990s for the same reason. For the life of me I wouldn't know where they might have gone. The stuff I digitized back then (not because of archival purposes, but because I happened to need a digital version back then) I still have. The physical stuff, well, some of it survived, or at least scraps, and some of it is lost in time. I never lost any sleep over it. The point is that it's not a question of technology. The issue is a more general one - we accumulate and generate data over our lifetimes, and generally speaking we're just not really good at archiving that data. Arguably, that's not much of a problem unless you're a historian with a specific interest in certain people or families. For the most part, all the diaries, love letters, folders of bank statements, shopping lists and indeed most photos don't survive their initial makers/collectors. That's nothing new. Most people from a few generations ago, even the (plenty) ones who were literate and did write or record things, haven't left a written trace. You'd be surprised how many people from even the recent past are virtually 'wiped out' except for perhaps a single family snapshot and a collection of fading memories in those who survive (or were told by those who survived).

What is relatively new is that since this so-called "digital dark age", it's presently relatively easy to maintain digital archives without spending much thought to it. That's one reason why I find the article somewhat unfortunate. I think the "digital dark age" is an inaccurate misnomer. Just because we seem to be in the (long, arduous and complicated) process of a digital enlightenment doesn't mean that what preceded it was a 'dark age'. We have the actual Dark Ages (an era chock full of innovation, both of technical and social nature) to prove this.

retina_restoration said:

I guess I’m one of the relatively rare few that always maintained redundant drives of those archives, and always copied them onto new drives every few years, so that there are always multiple devices with my photos. To this day I use rsync to make a mirror copy of my main Lightroom SSD drive, synched at least once a month. I’m betting most folks aren’t nearly as diligent, since few place as much value on their photos as I do.

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The author of the article was in her early 20s in the timeframe she describes.

What were you backing up in your twenties, daguerrotypes on a punch card mainframe?

retina_restoration said:

Do you not digitize your work to share online??

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Nope.

retina_restoration said:

Do you not digitize your work to share online??

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Well I don't. If by work you mean "taking photos" then like AERO, all of it is on negatives and a lot of it on prints which people I know well enough are free to have a look at. There may be a case for sharing a negative on a forum for discussion if you have a processing issue which you can't resolve by yourself after asking some questions but other than that very limited need to share "online" I see little point in sharing with a world of absolute strangers anymore than I see the point of stopping a stranger in the street and asking him if he'd like copies of my prints which is in effect what you are doing when you go "online" in my opinion anyway

pentaxuser

pentaxuser said:

Well I don't. If by work you mean "taking photos" then like AERO, all of it is on negatives and a lot of it on prints which people I know well enough are free to have a look at. There may be a case for sharing a negative on a forum for discussion if you have a processing issue which you can't resolve by yourself after asking some questions but other than that very limited need to share "online" I see little point in sharing with a world of absolute strangers anymore than I see the point of stopping a stranger in the street and asking him if he'd like copies of my prints which is in effect what you are doing when you go "online" in my opinion anyway

pentaxuser

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QUITE.

In the years 2000-2005 where I lost the most photos, those are the years of my first digital camera. 2005 marks the time when people were starting to post online without the trouble of having to build HTML from scratch or limit their storage usage.

Though physical backups existed in those days, they tended to be slower. A lot of people were burning CDs as backups. Today, it's much faster, and sometimes even automated and in the background. Back then, you usually had to remember and be intentional about doing it.

The result was my father who was still using film cameras during those years and going to 1 hour photo labs still has all of it in nice boxes of 4x6. Me who spent all my time playing video games might have a few pictures if I dig hard enough but most are lost. This was pretty normal for someone in their teens.

pentaxuser said:

I see little point in sharing with a world of absolute strangers anymore than I see the point of stopping a stranger in the street and asking him if he'd like copies of my prints which is in effect what you are doing when you go "online"

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Yet, you appear to have a keen interest in exchanging thoughts with people on photography in the online realm. It's not so far-fetched that some extend this to their photography. In fact, it's much the same. You can expect absolute strangers to have just about the same interest in your opinions as in your photos. I think it shouldn't keep someone from sharing if they so desire.

pentaxuser said:

I see little point in sharing with a world of absolute strangers anymore than I see the point of stopping a stranger in the street and asking him if he'd like copies of my prints which is in effect what you are doing when you go "online" in my opinion anyway

pentaxuser

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Wow. Should I point out the irony of the fact that you freely share your opinions on this forum? That's not much different from the sharing of other things you create.

What an empty place the Internet would be if everyone had that opinion. I think of all the work I have encountered on Flickr over the past 20+ years and how it has influenced my ideas about photography. (In good ways)
The Internet is the one gallery that everyone has access to. You don't need to convince some snooty "art professional" that your work has merit and deserves to be seen, you can simply present it for others to view. By choosing not to share what you do, you rob yourself of opportunities.

I'll quote Picasso:
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”

pentaxuser said:

I see little point in sharing with a world of absolute strangers

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Luckily, Shakespeare and Picasso and Cartier-Bresson and Mozart and thousands of other people didn't agree with you.