Are your photos just a zap, glitch, or virus away from being a memory?
Where will your digital photos be in 20 years? Or 10? Or even five? It’s a question those of us who are firing away with our digital cameras really have to think about. And act on.
When it comes to long-term preservation, one thing is obvious—those images won’t be on your computer’s hard drive. Even if an all-out crash doesn’t wipe them away (as happened on my image-filled laptop last year), chances are you won’t still have that computer, any more than you’re now typing on an Osborne, Kaypro, or Atari.
The diligent among us back up with CDs or DVDs. We burn them ourselves or have a photofinisher do it when we drop off our memory cards. It’s smart and easy. A typical CD can store 600 5-megapixel images; a single DVD, seven times that number.
But it’s only a matter of years until these media become what the music world’s 8-tracks are to today’s MP3s. In the future, we might have to prowl yard sales or eBay, or some other land of bygone technology, to find a machine that can handle antiquated CDs or DVDs.
It’s a far cry from the negatives or chromes we have from our decades of shooting film. And someday, when images in a shoebox turn up in some long-forgotten closet, will anybody bother to look at them? How patient do you think your great-grandkids will be with some dusty silvery plastic disc?
Those of us who are passionate about preserving our photos (whether through foresight or lessons learned the hard way) will keep pace with the changes in technology and continue to convert our files to the latest formats—hard drive to floppy disk to CD to DVD, and so on.
But that kind of diligence is rare. In fact, even getting images onto something more secure than a computer’s hard drive seems to be a major challenge for many digital camera owners.
A recent study of the digicam crowd by InfoTrends Research Group, Inc., showed that 72% of the respondents store their images on hard drives. That’s down just 4 percentage points from a survey conducted two years ago. Obviously, word hasn’t gotten out about the risks of relying on a hard drive.
The study showed that other methods are being used, too—CDs (40%), floppies (21%), prints (24%), online photo services (10%), DVDs (8%), zip disks (6%), and even memory cards (15%).
Sounds like the backup systems used by most digital camera owners are a hodgepodge, at best. And I’d guess that many digital shooters don’t have a system or any backup at all.
The sponsor of the InfoTrends study, Fuji Photo Film USA, says the research shows we’re facing “a generation of lost images.”
Fuji’s solution: Get prints. After all, prints “will never become technologically incompatible, and are guaranteed to last generations if stored properly.”
Marketing jabber from people who just so happen to sell print-making machines and supplies? Perhaps. But for most digital camera owners, until someone comes up with something better, it sounds like a pretty good idea.
Ph
(510) 435-0413 (8am - 10pm PST) | Description:
Professional Photographer specializing in family portraits and photos,
weddings, maternity photography, children's playdates, and newborn sessions.
Event photography Bay Area: Fremont and San Jose including Union City,
Newark, San Leandro, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Pleasanton,
Hayward, San Mateo, Los Gatos, Oakland, San Francisco and everywhere in
between.
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