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.