BBC: Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever

[lynnb]

Both analog and digital images can be lost. The difference is in how they are lost. The beauty of digital is that it can me copied endlessly insuring a freedom from loss that analog cannot. My two cents.

This is why I scan my film, printing any significant pictures. Also, digital files can be more easily catalogued and therefore found.. if you can’t find something you have effectively lost it.

I label my negative sleeves and slide mounts, but those labels can’t describe the subject of every frame like Lightroom can. That creates another problem: what happens when Lightroom or whatever DAM software no longer exists? The best protection is for all the tags and keywords to be platform-independent. Storing digital files in folder/categories is a good idea but not as efficient as key-wording. An image that fits into more than one category creates a problem within the folder heirarchy.

In the end I want my kids to be able to identify and access the pictures that are important to them. Digital files are easier for them to work with. Every so often I give them copies of family pictures on their portable hard drives. I give them prints of the ones they like.

 

[Alpsman]

If I cut a negative in half, I can still see what's on it.
If I cut a hard drive in half...

Of course, I scan all my negatives. Why wouldn't I use this technique?
And everything is stored on three hard drives. In case two of them fail...
. . .
(Only the paranoid survive)

 

[TenEleven]

I would actually argue the problem is two-fold. Let me explain.

When I was a student I could not afford to shoot film because my part-time summer job barely covered the tuition. (The parents pitched in.) So I shot digital for quite a while with only the very occasional roll of film in between. (On a Minolta SR-T101 with a 50/1.7 or something. Nothing expensive or fancy.)

This continued a while after I got a job. It took the gift of a Olympus rangefinder from my partner's father to re-ignite my love for film.

So, problem one - I have almost a decade worth of digital pictures. Many of which I took before Lightroom or any other such organizing software existed, or at least I was not aware of it. As a result - despite backing up religiously a lot of these digital files (no RAWs because again that did not exist in 2001) have been lost "in the cracks" of a jumble of various ambiguously named folders, that are nested in other folders. This makes it exceedingly hard to keep track and because especially early on I shot a lot (of the same thing) there are so many different files and images. I also stupidly saved the edits in the same folder. It's an absolute mess.

The other problem (two) is as the BBC article notes, digital rot and not keeping backups, which of course in my case is exacerbated by my digital messiness.

The nice thing about film, longlivety which has already been mentioned aside, is that being a physical medium occupying physical space it basically enforces you, past a certain volume, to introduce systems to keep track and store and file your negatives. As a result my digital (camera) files and my film could not be any more different. The film is sleeved, sorted by format (135/120/LF) divided by BW/Color with each roll numbered and filed. On my hard drive (which is backed up in triplicate) I have scans which have the same number which makes it easy for me to find and retrieve the film for wet printing.

I do not think of myself as particularly organized, but because film is physical and takes up space it forces you to eventually address "the problem". Conversely with digital files you can chuck the SD card contents into folders into your desktop and then if the desktop is full chuck the entire thing into another sub-folder (I know who you are!) indefinitely - it's not tangible - the mess is only annoying until it vanishes into another virtual folder.

 

[joe bosak]

"Probably lost forever" sounds like the typical media scare-mongering, with a dash of the BBC's we-know-better-than-you attitude and recycling-what-you-already-know thrown in because we-need-to-legitimse-our-existence and aren't-we-a-great-national-service. Next it'll be that scientists have discovered something that means people were wrong to believe something that scientists told them in the first place.

 

[Godfrey]

This is why I scan my film, printing any significant pictures. Also, digital files can be more easily catalogued and therefore found.. if you can’t find something you have effectively lost it.

I label my negative sleeves and slide mounts, but those labels can’t describe the subject of every frame like Lightroom can. That creates another problem: what happens when Lightroom or whatever DAM software no longer exists? The best protection is for all the tags and keywords to be platform-independent. Storing digital files in folder/categories is a good idea but not as efficient as key-wording. An image that fits into more than one category creates a problem within the folder heirarchy.

In the end I want my kids to be able to identify and access the pictures that are important to them. Digital files are easier for them to work with. Every so often I give them copies of family pictures on their portable hard drives. I give them prints of the ones they like.

Once you have finished the rendering of an image in LR, export it to a finished JPEG or TIFF file. That way all the keywords, location data, etc, are embedded in the final image file metadata as EXIF and IPTC metadata ... Since both EXIF and IPTC have been standardized formats for many years now, that's the best you can do for photos that have been digitally processed and stored in digital form. This also works for scanned film images if you are good about including camera data, etc, as part of your rendering/management process.

(I have been doing this since 2004 when LR came out: I have two main catalogs, "In Progress" and "Completed Work". New material is always imported into In Progress. Once I am finished with rendering, it is exported to TIFF and JPEG forms, and that is imported into Completed Work. If/when Lightroom ceases to exist, everything in Completed Work will be accessible to whatever image management/processing software then exists and all the finished work will be accessible with all relevant data.)

G

 

[lynnb]

Once you have finished the rendering of an image in LR, export it to a finished JPEG or TIFF file. That way all the keywords, location data, etc, are embedded in the final image file metadata as EXIF and IPTC metadata ... Since both EXIF and IPTC have been standardized formats for many years now, that's the best you can do for photos that have been digitally processed and stored in digital form. This also works for scanned film images if you are good about including camera data, etc, as part of your rendering/management process.

(I have been doing this since 2004 when LR came out: I have two main catalogs, "In Progress" and "Completed Work". New material is always imported into In Progress. Once I am finished with rendering, it is exported to TIFF and JPEG forms, and that is imported into Completed Work. If/when Lightroom ceases to exist, everything in Completed Work will be accessible to whatever image management/processing software then exists and all the finished work will be accessible with all relevant data.)

G

Thanks Godfrey. I have been exporting processed files to TIFF/JPG, but wasn’t aware that keywords etc are stored in their metadata. A big relief to know that! Also thanks for the “in progress” and “completed work” idea. At present both my new and processed files are in the same folders (organised by subject). You’ve given me some useful work to do (which will have to be done in LR so that it can keep track of the processed/unprocessed versions).

 

[rick oleson]

If you want people to know that your digital media contain photographs, label them.

Again you miss the whole point. It's not me that cares, but it could be the person finding them decades after I'm dead. That's what's lost, not my ability to preserve my favorite images.

 

[Erik van Straten]

Not my oldest picture, but the oldest one I still print from time to time.

gelatin silver print (nikkor h auto 50mm f2) nikkormat ftn

Amsterdam, 1973

 

[Duofold RF]

Some my 2000’s Mac PS files were unreadable, have to use third party software to convert them. Photos, like other items, such as cameras or lenses may just ended up in trash or Goodwill.

 

[Godfrey]

All of my storage drives have been through three or four connector plug changes over the past decade and some. It just means "buy a new cable" in most cases ...

G

 

[Benjamin Marks]

I have lost or had some negatives irreparably damaged. I have every digital photo I’ve ever taken.

This. I wonder what the average RFF'er's response to that article was. In my case: "Not me..."

 

[mtnbkr]

I have 10 computers (mostly laptops but a couple desktops) in my house. Every single one supports USB-A, as well as USB-C in several cases. Every external hard drive I've purchased in the last 20 years has supported USB-A. I have a couple in the rotation that are 13-15 years old and my newest one is about 5 years old (it's connected to the server in the basement as my network backup).

Chris

 

[mtnbkr]

This. I wonder what the average RFF'er's response to that article was. In my case: "Not me..."

I think that's because we're photographers, not merely people who take pictures like much of our friends and family.

I know plenty of "people who take pictures" who leave them on the device used to capture the image and don't properly curate and store the resulting images. Those people will lose everything when a device or storage card fails (or have lost in the case of some folks we know). For many of us on RF, that would be an inconvenience, but not a catastrophic loss.

Heck, on one of our trips to Disneyworld, I knew my wife and kids were going to be taking a lot of pictures with their phones (back before unlimited data that allowed you to email pics to yourself or upload to the cloud), so I found a USB memory card adapter that supported all the major USB standards and Apple's Lightning plug AND came with backup software for Android and Apple. I was backing up their pics daily to a 128gb card in case their phones got lost or stolen. Now I just encourage them to email their favorite shots to themselves so they're effectively backed up in Gmail and such while on vacation.

Chris

 

[Archiver]

I lost thousands of photos in 2008 to a crash of the hard drive that I had saved them on. The entire year of 2007 disappeared. I managed to recover some from 2008 that I had copied in multiple places. I back everything up on a separate drive now, even though most of them are random junk.

My digital photography started in 2002, and I have almost everything I've shot since then backed up on numerous hard drives, with the exception of a few things:

- a production crew set up in my street some time in the mid 2000s to shoot a TV commercial with real cows and artificial fog. It was for a milk commercial; I was told that the cows' feet were held together with fishing line to keep them in place, and it was removed prior to shooting and the cows would stand in place until moved after that. I shot a lot of images, put them on a CD and gave them to a neighbour, but for some strange reason, I didn't save those images for myself.

- my usual practice is to have a working hard drive that contains the images of the past three years, and multiple redundant storage drives for everything prior. Every so often, I back up the working drive to a separate drive. But things got away from me in 2020, and I had not backed up 2018, 2019 and 2020, and that drive developed an inexplicable read error. It is no longer accessible. On the plus side, shooting in raw and storing raws on separate drives means I'm able to recover 90% of what I shot in those years. The remaining 10% is video and audio recordings. Delightfully, I still have all the photos and video taken with my phone from those years, so almost everything is reproducible.

But what about storage formats and interfaces becoming obsolete? CD drives are gone from all but antique computers like mine, the USB system keeps evolving, changing, adding new connectors and obsoleting others, connections are going wireless. What will someone do with my portable hard drive in the future when there is nothing to plug it into any more?

Until we have truly affordable and secure cloud storage, we will be at the mercy of the movement of technology when it comes to the longevity of our data. Do we really want our data accessible decades after we are gone? And is it possible that our descendants will move our data to contemporarily accessible platforms in the future, the same way we are digitizing old photos and negatives now?

 

[mrtoml]

Maybe the only way to really preserve photographs is to print them and store them.

My mother in law passed away a couple of days ago. She was 88 and had been a refugee twice (escaping from the Nazis in Berlin in the 1930s and then from Pinochet's Chile in 1974). But the thing that struck me is that she still managed to keep a large archive of old photographs going back to the 1920s of her family (which is now dispersed across 3 continents). She had no digital photographs. My daughter is going to scan them to share with the rest of the family.

I was talking to my wife about how in future people will not have these boxes of prints to remind them of their family legacy or of previous relatives now long gone. I have an archive of digital images going back about 25 years, but even if someone from the family could access it they wouldn't be able to use it (there are over 50000 images in there). There are also thousands of negatives going back to around 1990 when I started photography.

I have decided to start printing the most important images from each year and storing them in labelled archival boxes. At least then when I am gone there will some physical legacy left behind. I don't think there is a safer way than this at preserving family history. Even these will fade over time. Digital allows for easy access and sharing to those with the appropraite technology but it is not a substitute for physical media.

 

[Freakscene]

Maybe the only way to really preserve photographs is to print them and store them.

My mother in law passed away a couple of days ago. She was 88 and had been a refugee twice (escaping from the Nazis in Berlin in the 1930s and then from Pinochet's Chile in 1974). But the thing that struck me is that she still managed to keep a large archive of old photographs going back to the 1920s of her family (which is now dispersed across 3 continents). She had no digital photographs. My daughter is going to scan them to share with the rest of the family.

I was talking to my wife about how in future people will not have these boxes of prints to remind them of their family legacy or of previous relatives now long gone. I have an archive of digital images going back about 25 years, but even if someone from the family could access it they wouldn't be able to use it (there are over 50000 images in there. There are also thousands of negatives going back to around 1990 when I started photography.

I have decided to start printing the most important images from each year and storing them in labelled archival boxes. At least then when I am gone there will some physical legacy left behind. I don't think there is a safer way than this at preserving family history. Even these will fade over time. Digital allows for easy access and sharing to those with the appropraite technology but it is not a substitute for physical media.

I think it’s a great idea. I used to worry that my b&w prints were on different paper, colour ones on different colour processes etc. But that really doesn’t matter at all.

 

[Archiver]

I have decided to start printing the most important images from each year and storing them in labelled archival boxes. At least then when I am gone there will some physical legacy left behind. I don't think there is a safer way than this at preserving family history. Even these will fade over time. Digital allows for easy access and sharing to those with the appropraite technology but it is not a substitute for physical media.

@Godfrey had an excellent idea for achieving a greater photographic longevity, which is to regularly compile a photobook, get an ISBN and send a copy to the Library of Congress. I'm thinking of doing similar myself in Australia.

Printing the best/most important images for future generations may be the way to go. I think I've told this story before, but some years ago, when helping my then-girlfriend move house and settle in, I came across a stack of her old photo albums. They were the large type, bigger than a phone book, with room for three photos per page in plastic sleeves. We spent a couple of hours looking at her old photos, seeing how she had grown over the years from a child to an adult.

In the photos of her as a teenager and young adult, it didn't look like her, more like her younger sister, if that makes sense. She looked like the 'her' that I knew after she had children. Something changed in her face, it made her 'complete', somehow. I don't think we would have shared that experience if they were digital files in a hard drive or a stack of CD's.

If I start printing photos for each year, I'll also put a USB stick with each photo album that contains all those images and more.

 

[mrtoml]

If I start printing photos for each year, I'll also put a USB stick with each photo album that contains all those images and more.

That is also a really good idea.

 

[phofseth]

I take monthly security backups getting new disk every now and then,(exotic and copyrighted raw formats might be a future problem ) while my fathers negatives from the start of the 1900ds are stored in a fireproof box. Even older, late 1800 portraits just rest i a drawer, but sepiatoned copies seem to keep well although they are not exposed to bright light, Some prints made while ilfords(?) Cibachrome (?) very light resistant colour prints were available still hang on some walls here in bright light and have not faded while a B&W prit that i did not leave long enough in the fix looks like that.

p.