How many pictures will remain in 50 years' time?

[Snowbuzz]

Hi everyone,

Over the past few years I have overheard some first-hand accounts of photographers in my country 'losing' all of their respective digital images. I kid you not. All. In one case it was a voltage spike that took out hard drives, backup and otherwise; in others it was by just plain erasing files by accident.

I have friends, family and other non-photographers who lose images routinely. The reasons for the losses are really varied: smartphones being stolen, lost memory cards, hard drive failure with no backup, broken mobile phones with no way to retrieve images. Nobody really volunteers this information, almost like it is taboo. I have to probe a bit. Then, after the admission of 'lost images' comes it is related to me with a little sigh that seems to reflect, "Well, it's a fact of life".

I was wondering how bad this 'attrition rate' of digital images may be in the long run? I know that very, very few people print digital images: prints being the only archival way of storing a digital image as far as I know (unless you are printing digital media to film like the Library of Congress is). I mean, it isn't likely that when we die, unless we're lucky, that someone will troll through our computer to salvage all those historical snapshots! Or that someone will keep paying our 'CrashPlan' subscription.

I know that the pictures of my kitties and family life aren't important on an individual level, but collectively, these pictures paint a picture of life now for future generations to look at and understand us.

Anyway, perhaps my concern is misplaced, I don't know. I just have a 'baaaaad feeling.'

 

[Roger Hicks]

. . . I was wondering how bad this 'attrition rate' of digital images may be in the long run? . . .

Probably rather worse than physical images -- but then, their normal fate was often landfill too. My suspicion is that the sheer number of pictures that end up on Pinterest and the like will mean that even after massive attrition, there'll still be plenty left.

There's also the option of making (gasp) prints. I've just made one batch for my daughter (24) and one for my father (87). Three dozen each (very different subjects, with perhaps 10% overlap), 4x6 inch/10x15 cm, trimmed deckle edge. Daughter loved hers: haven't sent father his yet.

Cheers,

R.

 

[Snowbuzz]

Thank you, Roger, for your thoughts on this. At least we can still view a print or slide in landfill! Anyway, yes, with so many images in this age a lot will survive once nothing happens to those online repositories etc. Thanks again.

 

[David Hughes]

Hi,

It depends on how careful you are and how often you do back ups and check back-ups. Most of the disasters you describe could have been avoided and the ways to avoid them are well known. It's not too hard to make two sets of back-ups, is it?

So, even allowing for accidents, a lot ought to survive. And negatives and slides can fail due to poor processing that won't be noticed until it's too late. And the dyes used in colour prints and slides can be very fugitive...

Regards, David

 

[Snowbuzz]

Thanks for your thoughts, David! Quite so, those disasters could have been avoided. My worry is how often these things happen to the 'average Joe'. Someone should do a study.

 

[David Hughes]

Hmmm, well, um, I dunno. People have been pointing out the bl**dy obvious since the dawn of time but still it gets ignored. Most people I guess have heard of back-ups but how many make them and is there any point in telling them again? Sometimes I think that only a disaster will convince some people.

Regards, David

 

[rscheffler]

Perhaps such digital disasters are another form of evolutionary-like culling. It's generally only of significance to the one who lost the work. For someone like me who wouldn't have seen any of it, life goes on in blissful ignorance of the loss.

Photographs, like any visual work, will serve as a historical record for future generations. That said, IMO, photographs are primarily created to serve short-term purposes, especially in commercial applications, and slightly longer term purposes when concerning the documentation of an individual's life. I believe this was true in the analog past and is still true today, though the timeline of such uses seem to be shorter now. Shorter term thinking may contribute to the general lack of awareness by many about suitable archiving practices and strategies, though also didn’t keep people from piling photos and negatives in boxes stored in uninsulated attics... 'Personal' images have less interest outside immediate friends, family, descendants of the photographer. For them to have broader interest, they require a degree of artistic merit (who determines this?) and/or historical value. I suppose it could be argued that any image has historical value as a documentation of a specific time and place. Some times and places will be much better documented than others, so it would also be a matter of how unique or rare the content of an image is.

Beyond the interests of the photographer and immediate friends, family, etc., I suspect the huge 'pool' of digital images now created will result in a historical 'snapshot' from which your best kitty photo will be included with someone else's best Thanksgiving dinner photo, another's Christmas photo, etc. to provide an impression about a year, decade, generation, era, etc.. There likely will never be substantial interest among the general population for an extremely fine grained view of life of a specific period prior to our own. It will be interesting to see how this evolves as personal wearable video devices become more and more common. Maybe someday there will synthetic reconstructions of a given time and place based on these sources, providing future generations a much more detailed insight about the past.

I've come across 'archiving projects' on Flickr wherein a descendant of a photographer digitizes analog images from the photographer's archive. This is probably a reasonable strategy, yet it also hinges on the longer term viability of a commercially operated website. But for images to survive beyond the immediate generation, my feeling is they need to be held by a 'public' entity, rather than in a private collection. For such images to be of interest to others, my guess is they need to be tightly edited for only the more compelling images. If one is concerned about the legacy of one's images, it would probably be a good strategy to at some point produce periodical retrospectives. Perhaps once per decade? And distribute them among friends, family, colleagues, peers, etc. How such a retrospective would be distributed (print vs. electronic files) is another point for debate...

 

[rscheffler]

I found this extremely interesting in terms of maintaining some control over the volume and quality of one's own work:

http://kenshukan.net/john/archives/2014/02/19/8800/

The photographer revisited ~2000 rolls of film shot over roughly a decade, re-edited, and discarded ca. 95% of it.

 

[Snowbuzz]

Wow, thank you for those responses! I greatly appreciate the link. I'm at work now so I will comment further tomorrow. Thanks guys: a lot to think about!

 

[Wills]

As a new member to this forum I have often considered the above problem. I use both digital and film cameras the latter only being recently as I still have my film cameras from the past but that's another story.
Just as it's easy to take digital images there is always a payback with these things, it's just as easy to loose them.
I back up all my images on an external hard drive purchased for that reason alone as the images I have are really the only important files I have on my PC.
I have no idea what will happen to them in fifty years time and I would imagine that the format they are kept in now might have been replaced by something totally different............and that is the problem with anything digital. Negatives are negatives, tangible and touchable they have been around a long time!

 

[Snowbuzz]

Yeah, that's my thinking exactly. Keeping the digital files 'alive' requires active input at frequent intervals by backing up, replacing hard drives, migrating data across drives and updating file formats when necessary. Things can and do go wrong. This activity requires a person to carry it out, while with negatives, well, no input necessary. The more laborious it is to archive something will likely guarantee it won't be, imho.

 

[Spanik]

Good question. I know that my niece has lost all the photo's of her wedding and honeymoon, the only cd of them being unreadable. And my boss had his HD fail after he copied 5 years worth of photo's on it and erased the originals. So it isn't that rare to loose digital images.

On the other hand I do know of family photos that are lost because trown away. So I don't think it is very different.

But my guess is that when you die, then if it are physical photos an album may survive because someone will take it home out of nostalgia while photos on a hard disc or even in "the cloud" will be lost. Nobody is going to be interested in that 300GB usb drive with some important photos on it. It isn't worth anything, there is a disconnect that it might contain unique family history.

 

[Aristophanes]

Trillions and trillions (in my best Carl Sagan voice).