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

[Godfrey]

The best way to preserve your photos for the ages is to create a photo book of them, publish it, and register it with the Library of Congress. Provide the LoC a full digital or print example of the work for their archives.

G

 

[oldwino]

That is also a really good idea.


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.

The problem with these stick flash drives is they do not last unless regularly used (energized). Even then, the estimate is the data will start corrupting in 3-5 years.

 

[Archiver]

The problem with these stick flash drives is they do not last unless regularly used (energized). Even then, the estimate is the data will start corrupting in 3-5 years.

Another option is to burn a M Disc with the appropriate images, perhaps.

 

[38Deardorff]

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

if the link does not work, search for "Why your early 2000s photos are probably lost forever"

"If you used a digital camera in the early 2000s, there's a good chance whole chapters of your life have been erased.
A generation of photos has vanished on broken hard drives and defunct websites."

Probably true for many, but probably not so much for RFF members

are your negatives starting to look a better record of your life than digital memories ?

They always have been......

 

[Cascadilla]

Another option is to burn a M Disc with the appropriate images, perhaps.

The only problem with that strategy is the assumption that someone will have the player for that format in 50-100 years.

 

[boojum]

I have a very, very large cardboard box in my basement. In it are slides from ~1954 on. First taken with the Vito II that is my meme. Mostly Kodachrome and from there through my Army years in France and early marriage, from CT to CA. Different cameras.

But other than me, who really cares? Yeah, there may be some pretty good pics in there. We are awash in "pretty good" pics. My bit matters little if at all.

 

[rick oleson]

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
View attachment 4883487

I'll bet my Honda 500/4 would never have gotten stolen if I'd thought of that trick.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

I hate to deal with thousands of frames on strips.
How to find partucular one?
And even if I'll find particular one?

Oopsy, better with scans.
Those pesky files.

Wait, I have Flickr subcription.
No limit for files.
I have prints.
I have multiple hdd , ssd with same images.

How come single negative is better than multuple redundancy... Including analog media a.k.a. prints.

 

[Shadams]

Nope!

I have shot since the '60s. Full digital since the early 2000s. I have a 12TB RAID (0+1) set up and it sends me an email if one of the disks is failing. It's only done that once. Seamless. I pulled the offending disk and hotswapped it with a new one and.... Done. Wasn't that expensive. Not when I consider what I spent digitizing all my negatives and slides.

 

[Bolo Kukus]

Thanks for - well, not much at all, BBC. Mostly long regurgitated general information. Already well known.

My own plan to preserve my images has worked for me for many decades.

Films in archival sheets stored in acid-free paper boxes. In the dark in a (reasonably) temperature-controlled room in our house.

The lot checked every six months when I return home from my wanderings in SE Asia. So far nothing damaged or even fading, 'tho some now-ancient 91960s-1970s) color negatives have shifted to pastels and some of the basic colors have changed. I scanned all those about 15 years ago and also made B&W scans of the best ones. It's really all I can do with colneg film.

Digital stored in a 'master' Western Digital hard disk 9not one of the portables) and backed up on two Western Digital 5 TB portable disks. Two are stored at home in separate rooms. One kept in another location.

USB sticks are a potential hazard. I opted long ago to use those only for transferring documents and images or backing up writing as I finish it. About ten years ago I disposed of all my plastic Sony USBs and bought metal Toshibas, having read somewhere on one of the few reliable web sites on archival techniques that this was best. So far again no problems.

My portable disks are replaced every four or five years. It's a lot of work to transfer so many folders from an old unit to a new unit, but I sigh and grin and just do it. It satisfies some primeval urge in me to save all this material.

All this is merely anecdotal, to be sure. And of course personal. It works for me. So far so good.

Others will surely have their own systems in place to archive images. I (and many others, I'm sure) will be interested to learn about those. Please tell us how you do it.

I happen to think my photography is pretty good. A few book publishers in Europe must agree with me, as now and then they buy images for publication from me. But it's a sad truism that thanks to the internet and the ceaseless flow of posted visual digicrap photography is now so devalued that almost all personal photography means nyet to the world and has a little meaning to very few of us.

I'm under no illusion that when I've popped off to that big darkroom in the clouds, my entire life's visual work will likely go into a disposal container and get sent off to landfill. Not much by way of consolation for me, but such is life.

 

[Bolo Kukus]

I hate to deal with thousands of frames on strips.
How to find partucular one?
And even if I'll find particular one?

Oopsy, better with scans.
Those pesky files.

Wait, I have Flickr subcription.
No limit for files.
I have prints.
I have multiple hdd , ssd with same images.

How come single negative is better than multuple redundancy... Including analog media a.k.a. prints.

Well said. I could have written this!!

This month I'm editing several thousand small web images I've collected in many folders during the past decade. One folder has turned up no less than 6 times, all with new titles to add to my already overloaded level of confusion - 4 now deleted and only the original saved. How many more will turn up? Overkill, true. Overwork, yup!!

 

[Archiver]

My portable disks are replaced every four or five years. It's a lot of work to transfer so many folders from an old unit to a new unit, but I sigh and grin and just do it. It satisfies some primeval urge in me to save all this material.

I do this! Every few years, when hard drive prices go down, I buy one or two extra large drives and transfer all older, smaller drives on to the new. The explosion in AI server farms is making this 'lower cost' hard drive purchase somewhat harder. Only a year ago, I could get a recertified Seagate 16TB enterprise drive for $379 AUD. Today, that same drive is $800. So annoying.

I happen to think my photography is pretty good. A few book publishers in Europe must agree with me, as now and then they buy images for publication from me. But it's a sad truism that thanks to the internet and the ceaseless flow of posted visual digicrap photography is now so devalued that almost all personal photography means nyet to the world and has a little meaning to very few of us.

I'm under no illusion that when I've popped off to that big darkroom in the clouds, my entire life's visual work will likely go into a disposal container and get sent off to landfill. Not much by way of consolation for me, but such is life.

Let's not be maudlin about this. You might become the next Vivian Maier.

 

[Bolo Kukus]

I do this! Every few years, when hard drive prices go down, I buy one or two extra large drives and transfer all older, smaller drives on to the new. The explosion in AI server farms is making this 'lower cost' hard drive purchase somewhat harder. Only a year ago, I could get a recertified Seagate 16TB enterprise drive for $379 AUD. Today, that same drive is $800. So annoying.



Let's not be maudlin about this. You might become the next Vivian Maier.

I do enjoy the look of a Rollei TLR around my neck, but I look awful in a dress. So no go.

And BTW, my 5 TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra hard disks cost < AUD $250 each at Harvey Norman. I find those suit me as I can save the best of my digital and scanned work, as I did recently on three of those. The third HD still has ample space for all my digital work for 2026.

A 16 TB, as attractive as it sounds, would be too much for me at this time. I would be tempted to put everything on it, and if something were to happen, like one of our cats at one time knocked a 2 TB hard disk to the floor, and wrecked it, this would be disastrous.

Downloading to a new HD gives me the opportunity to cull unwanted images, which I badly need to do. But the time factor, sigh...

 

[Shadams]

Perhaps the best way to preserve some of these files is to actually turn them into prints of at least some archival standard.

For me, despite the wonders of 5k screens and the likes of Apple's retina products, a photograph isn't a photograph until it's a print. I make allowances for images in other media but ultimately it's got to be a print.

 

[boojum]

I do enjoy the look of a Rollei TLR around my neck, but I look awful in a dress. So no go.

And BTW, my 5 TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra hard disks cost < AUD $250 each at Harvey Norman. I find those suit me as I can save the best of my digital and scanned work, as I did recently on three of those. The third HD still has ample space for all my digital work for 2026.

A 16 TB, as attractive as it sounds, would be too much for me at this time. I would be tempted to put everything on it, and if something were to happen, like one of our cats at one time knocked a 2 TB hard disk to the floor, and wrecked it, this would be disastrous.

Downloading to a new HD gives me the opportunity to cull unwanted images, which I badly need to do. But the time factor, sigh...

Downloading to a new HD gives me the opportunity to cull unwanted images, which I badly need to do. But the time factor, sigh...

Cull nothing! Todays turkey could be tomorrow's peacock. It has happened to memore often than I care to admit. Storage space is cheap. But you cannot get back that deleted image.

 

[Bolo Kukus]

Downloading to a new HD gives me the opportunity to cull unwanted images, which I badly need to do. But the time factor, sigh...

Cull nothing! Todays turkey could be tomorrow's peacock. It has happened to memore often than I care to admit. Storage space is cheap. But you cannot get back that deleted image.

I agree. To a point. But duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates, quint(uplicates or test? etcetcetc. Unnecessary. Needless users up of space I can put to better purposes.

Elsewhere I wrote about finding 4-5-6 of the same folders I saved in different years on my HDs. Whatever for?!? The number of this folder turning up is now 8. Insanity on my part.

I do the same with my writing. One novel I've now finished had 1000+ folders saved over the years, all with minor changes or corrections. Being me, I started out trying to check them all, but damaged so many brain cells in the process, I finally kept the latt 2 years of saved folders and deleted the rest. Not one zapped folder was again ever missed.

(Okay - being me again, I saved them to a HD. But with any luck I will never again access those files in this lifetime.)

A friend in Melbourne has taken to AI processing with a vengeance. Specialises in family celebration images mostly done in B&W. Good imagery but boring, endless snaps of drunk relations carrying on as people do when they've had a few snorts too many. He is now reprocessing the entire lot from 1970s and proudly showing them off. Still boring.

I last showed my Asian images to friends in a slide show in the early 2000s. Several got up after the first 20-25-30 images and went out to the garden for a smoke. None returned. A good lesson learned the hard way. No more. Never again.

 

[peterm1]

I certainly have a few hard drives that I have removed from their caddies or cases because the computer or external drive case they were in failed. These are sitting in my desk draaw waiting....................I wonder what images are stored on these drives and plan (one day) to buy a dual bay docking station to check them out- these docking stations allow a "naked" 2.5 or 3.5 inch drive to be mounted and hopefully be read. I recognize though that some drives may be physically faulty with unrecoverable data or require special recovery software to be recognized and read. Hence, I am in two minds about it. Having said all of this, the thing that is causing me to want to do it more than I had before is that recently I have been using some online AI options to repair old, technically limited and frankly "sh#tty" image files and in general have had great success with it. If I can get at some of these old files that are technically poor but with otherwise interesting photos, then this is a definite incentive to try togive it a go.

 

[peterm1]

Downloading to a new HD gives me the opportunity to cull unwanted images, which I badly need to do. But the time factor, sigh...

Cull nothing! Todays turkey could be tomorrow's peacock. It has happened to memore often than I care to admit. Storage space is cheap. But you cannot get back that deleted image.

I agree Boojum. See also my post above about the incentives offered by the opportunity to use AI to remediate "dogs" amongst such stored images and fix them enough to fulfil the promise that made the photographer press the shutter button.

 

[Cascadilla]

I agree. To a point. But duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates, quint(uplicates or test? etcetcetc. Unnecessary. Needless users up of space I can put to better purposes.

Elsewhere I wrote about finding 4-5-6 of the same folders I saved in different years on my HDs. Whatever for?!? The number of this folder turning up is now 8. Insanity on my part.

I do the same with my writing. One novel I've now finished had 1000+ folders saved over the years, all with minor changes or corrections. Being me, I started out trying to check them all, but damaged so many brain cells in the process, I finally kept the latt 2 years of saved folders and deleted the rest. Not one zapped folder was again ever missed.

(Okay - being me again, I saved them to a HD. But with any luck I will never again access those files in this lifetime.)

A friend in Melbourne has taken to AI processing with a vengeance. Specialises in family celebration images mostly done in B&W. Good imagery but boring, endless snaps of drunk relations carrying on as people do when they've had a few snorts too many. He is now reprocessing the entire lot from 1970s and proudly showing them off. Still boring.

I last showed my Asian images to friends in a slide show in the early 2000s. Several got up after the first 20-25-30 images and went out to the garden for a smoke. None returned. A good lesson learned the hard way. No more. Never again.

There is no such thing as a slide show that is too short. Don't ask me how I know this.

 

[peterm1]

There is no such thing as a slide show that is too short. Don't ask me how I know this.

Yeh but to be fair NOT if you are the one showing the slides. Only for those watching! 😉 😆 😆 😆