Where will our pics be in 100yrs?

GraphyFotoz · December 17, 2005

With the Digital age now here....where will the Digital pics we take today be in 50-100yrs from now?
From what I understand CD's are only good for 10yrs or so and photo paper companies CLAIM that the photo's you print will last 100yrs....but will they really?

This should make for a interesting thread!

Share your thoughts on this.

Andy · December 17, 2005

GraphyFotoz wrote:

With the Digital age now here....where will the Digital pics we take today be in 50-100yrs from now?
From what I understand CD's are only good for 10yrs or so and photo paper companies CLAIM that the photo's you print will last 100yrs....but will they really?

This should make for a interesting thread!

Share your thoughts on this.

Mine will be on SmugMug, I hope! And as far as local copies - yeah I use DVDs and CDs but only as tertiary backups. I'll just keep migrating my hot files from one external media (like today's firewire drives) to the next new technology. More critical is eyeballing the software formats - making sure that files will be able to be read in the future. DNG is promising... worth looking at seriously.

3rdPlanetPhotography · December 17, 2005

Man them CD's will last as long as you take care of them. I have some close to 20yrs now. But I must agree with Andy! Mine will be on SmugMug. I also use the external drives. I use USB but it's the same. As far as format... well where ever we end up I'll a "convertin".

KC7DJI:D

ginger_55 · December 17, 2005

You could scrap book prints of your faves. Give the scrapbooks to your kids who may keep them out.............for awhile. Then a shelf, then a closet, finally the garage........until the place burns down, floods, whatever.All of mine before 1989 flooded out in a hurricane here in the Charleston area. I did manage to get a few prints back from relatives who still had them, in their garages, attics, etc.So, send them prints, ..........also, for PC crashes, smugmug has saved me. Now if they crash, maybe my stuff won't.Just like 100 and more years ago, some stuff will last and some stuff won't. (Don't let your brother take them for safe keeping to his storage in Colorado. They might be safe, but if your brother is like my brother, he will be too busy to ever let you see the photos again.)ginger

GraphyFotoz · December 17, 2005

Well........
I dunno I'm kinda skeptical about this electronic age.

I never trust anything to the web ya never know what might happen.
(Before most ppl had CD's I lost about 1000 pics on a online site that folded outta the clear blue)
Maybe we put to much trust in such things? (Sattilites....the web...ect)

As for CD's.....I'm sure that one day they will formulate a CD that will last forever and be scratch proof ect. I think this is close now?
I'm sure that the printers and photo paper they make today will continue to evolve and you will be able to do you own prints as good or better than a lab. If they aren't to that point already?

I still say that the 35mm film days are about to become past history VERY soon!

rutt · December 17, 2005

100 years is much longer than it used to be.

Barring the collapse of civilization, in 100 years there will be mountains, planets, universes of images stored online. This is already true, but multiply by a billion or more. I think that every day people take more pictures than they did in a whole year in the 60s. Expect that trend to continue. And there will be pictures that nobody took, images from surveillances cameras teleconferences and the like.

And none of it is going away. Or very little anyway. Storage prices will continue to plummet. Maybe not steadily but on average. 100 years from now, jeez it's hard to even get my mind around it. Here is a little back of the envelope thinking. In the last few years the price of a given amount of disk storage has halved about every 2 years. Or the same amount of money buys twice as much every 2 years. Not perfect, but close enough for government work. 2 to the 50th power is about a quintillion, a million billion, so to speak. So a rough guess is that whatever passes for $100 will buy 100 billion million billion bytes of storage. That's a number which is starting to be enough to store all the information in the universe, so we know it isn't exactly where we are going, but suffice to say we'll have enough memory to store all the pictures we can take and actually decide to keep, back it all up a couple of thousand times, and not notice the cost.

So what's the real challenge here? Not actually storing the information or even making it available (as similar argument to the one I just made about storage can be made about connectivity). The real problem is going to be figuring out what to do with all those pictures. What do they mean? Which ones are worth looking at and when? For example, we'd like to be able to ask google (or some search engine) to find all the pictures of a certain person. Or that same person in a particular place. Or that person looking happy. We'd like to be able to ask for all the images taken by Andy that have centered composition. We'd like to train the search engine and ask for all the dgrin pictures from 2005 that we would find interesting. All the visual puns. You get the idea.

None of that has happened yet or is even close to happening. The storage will be there. But what about the ability to make intelligent use of it?

wxwax · December 17, 2005

Interesting points, Rutt.

I think in more mundane terms. Format is already, and will continue to be, the biggest pain. It's the price we pay for technological advancement.

I fear we're facing a future where we're regularly re-saving our images to a new, better format - only to see that format superceded by one that is even better yet. Already there's a 3-D hologram format in development (and limited use) that dwarfs the future capabilities of DVD. It will be an endless game of leapfrog.

Allen · December 17, 2005

I'm happy to hear that in 100 years I'll still have my pictures perserved
to look at.

Let's see, I'll be 162, maybe eye transplants to be able
to see them.

The question is, who is going to carry on this preservation after you're
gone? Have you talked to your family about this? It would be nice if your
pictures were available for your descendants to see. Is someone going
to pay Smugmug each year? Can the account be transferred to another
person each generation? Smugmug could allow you to enter in your
profile one or two names/email addresses of who would be acceptable
to you, kinda like a beneficiary. Then upon your passing they could
contact Smugmug and transfer accounts.
Just some random thoughts.
AL

rutt · December 17, 2005

Allen wrote:

The question is, who is going to carry on this preservation after you're
gone?

That's exactly the opposite of the problem we will have. Who will be able to get rid of any of it? The unflattering, the incriminating, the stuff that actually didn't even happen, but was just photoshopped into existence. All of that will be around somewhere and replicated zillions of times. Even if you or your descendants could find it, how would they be able to expunge any of it if they wanted to?

Just storing data and making available online, well that service alone will be pervasive. Just to take a picture will be to have it backed up and made available online. As I said before, the real problem will be culling, privacy, and finding what you want.

GraphyFotoz · December 18, 2005

rutt wrote:

the real problem will be culling, privacy, and finding what you want.

I think the real problem will man made.
Say like we go into a depression or some nut job comes up with a virus or the like that will devistate the web.

I wouldn't depend on the web to keep track of things for 100yrs.

Basically what I meant about where our photo's would be in 100yrs.....historical events and family history typa thing.

I realize that many family memebers have just basically tossed prints in a box somewhere. With technology as it stands there will be no reason for that. Also back as little as 30yrs people only got double prints before that singles. So that's what many family pics were lost in floods and the like.
No reason for that now.....you can make several copies with a computer and a printer. Every person in the family can have a copy now thus less chance of Family history pics being destroyed or lost.

colourbox · December 18, 2005

I don't think anything's going to change. In every family there's a certain percentage of people who don't take very good care of family photos and there may not be very many good ones left after 100 years. I'm thinking of the friends and family who might put the snapshots in self-stick page albums and lose track of where the negatives are. Not because they are bad people but because no one's ever told them. Those are the same people who will fill the home computer with precious digital snapshots yet never back up the machine. Then one day...

Then there are the minority in every family who are a bit obsessive about family records and have the negs in sleeves in a safe deposit box. These are the same people who now burn 2 copies of the Raw files of the pics of the new baby and have a data migration strategy and for the rest of their life they will ensure that the photos will always be migrated to current media. If they can get someone else in the family to maintain that system (or still be alive 100 years from now thanks to future medical technology), in 100 years they will be able to find and view any frame in that archive.

So digital won't really change how human nature works with photos. Except for one thing: In the film and paper world, it isn't easy or cheap to back up the entire archive. With digital, you really have no excuse not to safeguard photos with a backup.

I just bought a book that I haven't quite read yet but at first glance it looks to be a good reference for anyone actually wanting their photos to last 100 years. I don't know if it's been mentioned here already but it's:
The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers

It talks about strategies for keywording, archiving, and migration, and is centered around DNG as the archival format. (I ordered it when I ordered that Margulis LAB book everybody's talking about.)

Where will our pics be in 100yrs?

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