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