What format do you store your images In..

D.Rodgers

As usually I was reading info on the net and came across an article referring to raw vs jpeg,I know you heard this before.
I'm most interested in a paragraph,stating that if you store in raw what happens years down the road when you have moved on to another software and handling format and your software has been out dated.


Now this made me think of a Sony 2mp that i had that stored the data on a floppy disk.Now what good is that now I cant find a floppy and the 2mp files are useless

Here I go looking at my external Hard with thousands upon thousands of NEF files thinking I really should convert these to jpeg or tiff to be safe.
You never know It could happen,I might start shooting in another format one day and not have the software or support for my old NEF files.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this ..

claudermilk

I've participated in many of these "discussions." crazy

First of all, when a manufacturer decides to end support of a particular format, your software that you havebeen using will not instantly cease to function. So, you have time to deal with the situation. Also, with RAW formats, there are many 3rd party developers supporting the formats in addition to the manufacturer and they are far less likely to pull the same thing. So I don't forsee this being a pressing issues for many, many years (unless, of course, you are using some really oddball format).

For the hardware, first, you will need ot keep on top of where the industry is going with storage technology. Right now, IMHO, using SATA hard drives is the best bet. It's the newest twist on standard hard drives, and looks to last as long as the old IDE standard (which is still going strong). You just need to transfer the data from older, obsolete media to the newer media. You also have ebay and used equipment suppliers that will continue to supply used gear if you really get into a bind locating equipment to read the media.

As an example, I still have a functioning TRS-80 Model I that I can access old data on if need be (though that data is so old that it's now useless). There are emulators I can load onto my current PC to run the old software if need be as well.

Asfor how I store data, I shoot primarily RAW can retain all my CR2 files. For the best images, I convert to JPEG and save those as well. Files go on several redundant SATA drives, and JPEGs also largely go on my SM account (have used that for recovery once. :whew)

Hindsight

If .NEF (in my case) becomes obsolete, that is to say if it becomes unreadible I don't even want to be alive to see why. It's the digital age. We're not talking about mechanical slide projectors or microphish machines, but rather digital image formats. Name any format that's become obsolete.

Okay "unusable" is extreme but what of simple compatability issues?

As was said, it won't happen overnight, no matter what. Any new fangled editing software worth its own salt will always open the top camera maker formats and likely anything in between. If not, I doubt PS, LR, A, etc will quit working within the next 1000 years assuming the human race is around. I have a hard time imagining our predecessors being completely confounded by one particular format of RAW file. Basically either civilization crumbles completely or they'll be able to deal with jpeg, TIFF, NEF, DMG, equally.

The important question is the media type.