Shoe box versus Cloud Storage

[Graham G3ZVT]

Will our parents and grandparents be credited with doing a better job of preserving family photos, than we or our children will?

This thread is intended to collect stories of lost irreplaceable images,
best practice for preserving digital media for future generations,
and what future technology and changing attitudes might bring in improving the survival of our photographic endeavors.

Or will history conclude I had nothing to worry about?

[russell_w_b]

Originally Posted by rambo1152

Will our parents and grandparents be credited with doing a better job of preserving family photos, than we or our children will?

Time will tell. I have a box of opto-chemical images (a.k.a. 'negs') from as far back as the 1930s. I can scan them and obtain a good image today.

I think the only answer in the times of unproven (to the extent of eighty years) technology is not to put all your eggs in one basket. Duplicate amongst HDDs and when full, put away in a drawer or a box with the PSUs for them, away from big magnets and extreme temperatures. Then buy another HDD and do the same. Maybe a SSHD will be reliable enough? You're at the mercy of degradation of plastic and the complexities of the electronics that allow those strings of ones and noughts to be clocked out and formed into an image on what will be the visual display of the day.

I also keep backups of HDD image backups on DVD, but am mindful of the time the silver foil just peeled from a Tevion (Aldi) disc I had prepared. Then it's into a big plastic box in the boxroom, in the dark, household humidity and about fifteen degrees celsius.

Next to the negs in their cardboard box!

[russell_w_b]

It goes without saying (although I'll say it) that you need to keep an eye on whatever format supersedes what is current and transfer from old format to new format accordingly as-and-when. Whilst still keeping hold of the old format.

There'll be a limit to backwards compatability. Dictated, no doubt, by market forces.

[evingar]

Originally Posted by russell_w_b

There'll be a limit to backwards compatability. Dictated, no doubt, by market forces.

In terms of mainstream I agree. However, it never ceases to amaze me the tenacity and skill in specialist and hobbyist communities ..... and the length the latter especially are prepared to go to.

[russell_w_b]

Originally Posted by evingar

However, it never ceases to amaze me the tenacity and skill in specialist and hobbyist communities ..... and the length the latter especially are prepared to go to.

I expect you are correct. I would like to think that eighty years hence there'll be a forum of vintage technology enthusiasts keeping things alive from today. They'll no doubt be asking the same questions as are being asked now!

[G6Tanuki]

For me the big thing is having multiple physical copies of whatever it is you want to keep, and storing them in different locations as far apart as possible.

Example #1: me and a relative regularly swap encrypted hard-drives containing 'important stuff'. He lives in Australia.

Example #2: a 'tar' archive of a lot of my stuff is regularly uploaded to someone in Switzerland; they do the same in the reverse direction.

My big worry about all this is that there may be formats of documents etc. that become unreadable because nobody has the relevant platforms any more: I've got a copy of the graphics for my undergraduate thesis on a "DECTape" somewhere - the content is deeply output-machine-specific and I doubt there's a surviving Stromberg-Carlson SC4020 anywhere in the world.

[Graham G3ZVT]

I'm reminded of the time when (forgive me if I've got the details wrong) you couldn't copyright a motion picture film, so paper prints were made, as they were regarded as documents. Very fortunate, given what happened to all the nitrate film.

[dave walsh]

Many previous threads on this-long before the "cloud" appeared in the sky even. Any one can record pretty much anything these days but that seems to be a transient activity in itself now ie all those people holding up their mobiles at any sort of event. Presumably it's a digital "I was there post card". Even if you do want to archive material, some sort of real effort/motivation/organisation is [currently] required. I think we may still at the stage were a few old fashioned hard copy printouts in a shoebox might be better than hundreds of images on a device you've lost or thrown away... and clouds can drift!

"It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all" Joni Mitchell

Dave W

[emeritus]

The need to file a positive paper print with the patent office to get copyright protection applied to the United States until their law was amended circa 1910.

[ThePillenwerfer]

I honestly can't see why there's this obsession with loosing stuff in digital format.

I've had a PC for thirty years and have lost very little in that time but REALISTICALLY how likely am I to wish to refer to things produced years ago? I'm I really going to want to look at a letter I sent to a bank about a long closed account or an e-mail to or from somebody I haven't been in touch with for years. It does rarely happen but if this lot did go up in a puff of electrons I'd be no worse off than I would have been in the pre-computer age as I doubt I'd have made and kept carbon copies of trivial correspondence. However, any documents that I do regard as important get printed.

As for old photographs I too have boxes full of them going back to the nineteenth century of unknown people. I expect they'll get binned when I shuffle off this mortal coil.

It will be interesting to see how well things do keep long term. I've got a couple of albums of colour photographs from the 1970s that have faded so badly as to be pretty near useless. Not all of them: it must have been down to the papers that were used in that lab at that time. At least with digital it's likely to be perfect or utterly gone.

Actually I am more concerned by the difficulty of destroying digital content than preserving it. It's quite a simple matter to rip up or burn physical photographs, prints and negatives, or documents but a different matter if they've been on a cloud server never mind posted on Faceborg or something like this forum.

[russell_w_b]

Originally Posted by ThePillenwerfer

As for old photographs I too have boxes full of them going back to the nineteenth century of unknown people. I expect they'll get binned when I shuffle off this mortal coil.

Nooooo! That's the trouble... There's always someone who'll be grateful for old photos. If mistakes of the past are forgotten, we're condemned to repeat them. Just think... If those young producers of period dramas had visual evidence of contemporaneous apparel worn or chattels on display there'd be fewer people ranting at the telly and fulminating about the incorrect radio on the sideboard during a showing of 'Foyle's War'.

I've got a couple of albums of colour photographs from the 1970s that have faded so badly as to be pretty near useless...

Think you'll find that if you scan your 'near useless' pics in Photoshop or whatever and apply auto colour correction, the fading, being a uniform colour applied to all pixels will be stripped off leaving something worth working with. But you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

[tealandsilver]

Interesting thread. I've played around with various means of archiving my digital "stuff". Main problem being that I have ended up with back ups of back ups. Most of my requirements centre around digital photographs. Technology today allows us to take numerous images, so many that I lose track of them as I only use a very basic filing system. Then along came the cloud storage systems so I now have prints, smart media cards, SD cards, CD's, DVD's, HDD's and stuff in the cloud! Recently I've gone back to every so often printing out a photograph (usually of a family event) and sticking it in a shoebox! Hope that the "compatible" ink that my printer uses for these prints stand the test of time...

[ThePillenwerfer]

Indeed you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear but you can make a perfectly good leather one.

I have tried manipulating faded photos in Paint Shop Pro but don't really know what I'm doing. I have found I get a fairly decent black and white version of them though. It's something I ought to have another fiddle with.

[dseymo1]

Experts in the area have opined that it's not the preservation but the cataloguing of images that presents the greater problem these days. Exponential growth in the volume of images stored since the advent of digital photography means that in future a desired image will probably be archived somewhere, but finding it might be almost impossible.

[russell_w_b]

Originally Posted by dseymo1

Experts in the area have opined that it's not the preservation but the cataloguing of images that presents the greater problem these days.

You're not kidding... I now take the time to give ALL my pictures a meaningful name so I have a sporting chance of turning one up when I search for it. Other than that, it's view as large icons and scroll away, but it's still easy to miss the wanted pic.

I keep all my 35mm slides on A4 sheets and I can still miss images from there when I hold them to the light box: it doesn't take much. It's a time-consuming exercise!

Originally Posted by tealandsilver

Recently I've gone back to every so often printing out a photograph (usually of a family event) and sticking it in a shoebox! Hope that the "compatible" ink that my printer uses for these prints stand the test of time...

I'm led to believe that images produced on machines at the likes of Boots or Colab or wherever are more resilient and will not fade like those produced on an inkjet printer. But any photograph will fade in direct sunlight - just a matter of time.

[bikerhifinut]

back in the day, and within recent living memory, Photographs were recorded on a finite stock of recording medium (film). You could only carry (or afford) so many rolls of film around with you and thus you thought pretty hard about what you took a picture of. This includes holiday "snaps".
Thus pictures taken prior to the advent of cheap digital photography were for the most part worthy of preservation.
The issue now is that we are inundated with low value imagery that is not worth preserving and the tricky task is sorting out the wheat from the chaff so to speak.
I lost interest in photography as a hobby when cheap digital took over, although some camera club members seemed to spend inordinate amounts on the latest camera/lens/scanner/ expensive official software etc etc, as it exponentially advanced in sophistication, and for me the hobby lost the plot a bit. Sure there were always those sporting the latest in expensive titanium bodied necklaces ooops leicas, but as often as not some kid with his dads old Zenith or Praktica would produce an image as good as any other, but the point is that we took time about what we snapped and then further edited what we printed or had printed which gave a better quality to the account so to speak.
So I agree with those who say the issue is what is worth keeping in that great cloud in the digital firmament. I feel that .jpg or .bmp etc files will always be decodable and the nature of the "cloud" seems to be that nothing is ever lost to posterity as it will evolve alongside storage technology.
Not sure if its a good thing though so I am hanging on to the filing cabinet full of old negs and packets of truprint snapshots.......

A.

[joebog1]

I have a largish record collection, no CD's!!.
I have a large collection of film cameras!!
I have a digital Canon EOS10D with all the lenses from 450mm down to 28mm. Speedlite flash and its 6.5 megs photo size. All up it weighs 7 kilos. The camera and all its gadgets were a gift from a relative, all up $13,000 australian, so about 10,000 quid in english money.

Its baised blue, I dont care what settings you change its blue!!! It has wonderful resolution at 6.5 megapixels, so you can make enlargements up to about postcard size before they depixelise and fall apart. All the lenses have grown fungus. The camera itself still works and can take 9 frames in one second, then "rests" for about 20 seconds while the processor, processes the images. It has a depth of field of at least one inch regardless of aperture!!
I dont use the setup any more so I dont store any images.

I have boxes ( yes, cardboard ) of all my film photographs. Mostly 120 film or 6X6 format, but also thousands of 35mm slides all on Kodachrome 25 with some Kodachrome 64 when I needed the speed. I have an Ex Snowy Mountains Authority Rolliecord that is still in perfect condition. WITHOUT fungussed lenses!! It can take one photo every 30 seconds or so. It has a completely adjustable depth of field from an inch or so to infinity. All the Kodachrome film is still perfect after 55 years or so. More modern films which were cheaper ( as more kids were born ) have all disintegrated in some form or other, mostly fading but some actually falling into little bits of wrongly coloured plastic.

I bought a little scanner thingy from that site and scanned all my pics into digital format, took me months. One massive lightning strike later and they were all gone along with the computer.
Do I use the cloud? No, there is no point. I draw and print ALL my electronic stuff, paper lasts at least my lifetime, when I am pushing up daisies, I won't care what happens ( although I am horrified at the thought) when I am gone.

Even deaf as a post, like I am, I can still tell the difference in sound from an LP and a CD, although more modern CD players seem to make a somewhat better hash of it, while processing some now and some later ( except Philips), and managing to join the signal back together so its not too noticeable.

Digital has its uses but so far I don't trust it enough to dedicate important stuff to the cloud. I did post a few pics to Photobucket, but miraculously they just disappeared and no amount of emails even raised an answer.

Valves and vinyl, Photos in slide form, so far outlast everything digital.
I am trying to remember how many thousands of dollars I have spent on computers over the years .

Just my rant for the day

Joe

[russell_w_b]

Originally Posted by bikerhifinut

back in the day, and within recent living memory, Photographs were recorded on a finite stock of recording medium (film). You could only carry (or afford) so many rolls of film around with you and thus you thought pretty hard about what you took a picture of. This includes holiday "snaps".

And therein lies the paradox... Everyone has a camera and takes photos of everything and anything but there's a lot of chaff and not so much wheat around now. I used film long into the digital age and still have my Pentax MX though I sold all my lenses bar one - the 'standard' 50mm - to fund a transfer to a DSLR.

But at around 36 pence a pop you think before pressing the button, and there's none of this 'continuous' malarkey! Although motor drives were an option for film SLRs. And Kodachrome is no longer made. It was a different chemical process to E6 and was more resilient in storage. My slides from the 1970s are as fresh now as they were then. But watch out for 'Newton's Rings'!

[Refugee]

The trouble as has been said in many posts is that digital photos cost next to nothing to take.
You just keep seeing things that one day you might just want a photo of so you just point the camera and take one.
Storage is just so cheap that you can't be bothered about it.
You can't back the lot up any more quickly than than the time it takes to earn the money to pay for the media you are saving it to.

Give some thought to a bodge and see a bigger bodge and then out comes the camera

[Graham G3ZVT]

I think my mum threw out all the Ektachrome-X transparencies that my late father and I exposed. Exposed twice of course, once in the camera and once again in the developing tank.