How Will Folks View Your Photographs?

[rybolt]

First version-CS2 full version came with my Epson 1200 scanner. Used on a Performa 6118.
First external storage device- Bernoulli box.

Fortunately, I have a miniscule ego and no children so I really don't care if my work is viewable after I'm gone.

 

[Bill Clark]

Beautiful web site Paul.

Like the photos of your M3 and the folks singing.

Is the Red Corvette yours?

Thanks for the link you have here.

 

[Phil_F_NM]

Teletype is way out of date but as of the time I left the Navy 12 years ago, every weather office afloat was required to have a teletype machine and tuner. Our boat had an analog/digital decoder which gave us the ability to directly input weather data into computer models. That said, we all had to learn how to work the thing and everyone in my office except me, hated it. I made that machine sing every time we had to demonstrate it for qualifications. I also used the tuner to listen to radio around the world and often tuned in to local AM stations in or near my hometown of Albuquerque, NM.
The Navy still teaches old analog methods because digital and electronic devices can and will fail often in combat. This is how I've approached my photo archive. What is digital has to be backed up on multiple drives as well as a RAID5 array. i save as much to uncompressed TIF as possible. Film is stored carefully and as long as I do my part, can always be optically or even contact printed.

Phil Forrest

 

[Godfrey]

What do you think of this?
Friend on Facebook shared with me.

It's idiotic, that's what I think of it. No one has ever handed me a piece of electronic storage media and said, "Hey look at this photograph!"

It's just more senseless hot air to display someone's ignorance and prejudice.

G

 

[oftheherd]

Here is a place I visit to look at old photos:

http://www.shorpy.com

Wow, I drive by the old GAO building every day on my way to my work. The building doesn't look so different, but the area does. The building to the left of it in the photo is now an apartment building. I don't know how much of that they preserved, but there was a firehouse on the exact corner which was incorporated into the apartment building. On the other side of that is the entrance to a tunnel for part of US 395. There are now new buildings being constructed of the formerly open part of the tunnel. I guess they will be both business, apartments, and who knows what.

 

[kxl]

I display my images via the following:

• my website and social media (for some photos)
• printed albums through MyPublisher and others
• digital slideshows on wall-mounted TV's in my house
• Aluminum prints hanging on walls in my house

 

[gnuyork]

No, both they and the JAZ drives would not accept 3.5 floppies, nor their disks fit floppies. I think I remember JAZ did have an internal drive, but both were usually used out of the parallel port.

Anybody ever use tape for backups? I did and within two weeks of installation, I had a HD failure. I was a happy person to have that tape backup.

In the US Army, we had a communications system that ran off an 8" floppy, on a machine with a Z80 chip. That was old tech when we got it. We had a location with a data base on if I recall, 12" metal platters.

I never considered CSx to be Photo Shop (I know, technically it was). I first used I believe, PS 5.5.

Lotus - Like Bob, I used a legit copy on 3.5 floppies. I think I still have it around the house. I also had legit copies of Access, Dbase, R-Base, Ami Pro, Unix, and some others. I had C on a Commodore 64. Anyone ever hear of or use Small Talk?

I wonder how many don't even know what some of that was? Ah, the good old days. 😛

As to the original question of the OP, I have both, and I am keeping them up. For those of us who tend to be smug about negatives or slides, find a secure place for them. I had several thousand negatives and slides damaged beyond practical use by a house fire.

Yes I've used a tape back up and it saved my ass once, So glad to have it back then. Also I had a Commadore Vic 20 as a kid. Radar Rat Race anyone?

 

[skucera]

The human factor is the biggest obstacle to preserving our photos. When I was a kid in the Sixties my mom started collecting all the old photos of our family's ancestors going back to the 1860's. She's now 85, and most of those photos sit in boxes with penciled notes on the backs. We also have digital records of the genealogies she spent decades putting together, so there is a resource for cross-checking names and photos.

On the other side, my wife's uncle has a box of photos from his aunt who was a nurse in the US Army in the First World War. She has photos from her Brownie of many beautiful places in France, and some devastated places too, but the names of people and locations are all shrouded in mystery.

I inherited many of my dad's slides, negatives, and home movie reels. They stretch from his hitch in the Marines in the late Fifties through some of his "camera enthusiast" years when I was a teenager and college kid in the Eighties. I'm gathering the darkroom equipment to print some of them, and to make them more broadly visible to a digital generation of my family (my kids, his grandkids if he had lived past their infancy). I've scanned a few negatives, but it is time consuming.

I imagine my photos will be gathered together and passed on, some in the form of slides, prints, negatives, and digital files. Many photos from my kids' infancy are all in the form of 2 megapixel TIFF's, the output of the Kodak digital camera I borrowed from work, or the Nikon CoolPix 950 I bought later, when digital was new and interesting. We'll see how much of that body of work gets passed to future generations. My hunch is that the few printed photos will be passed on the furthest into the future, because they require no energy to store. The slides may survive too. We'll see. I don't hold much hope for the digitized images, although they are stored very securely.

Scott

 

[David Hughes]

It's all a bit iffy, I've family photo's from 1908 and earlier (undated) that are superb and slides from the 50's that are useless.

Regards, David

 

[emraphoto]

Why do photographs need to last into the next century? Would this be considered conceit? Yes, having family pics or albums with prints of important people or family members has a place but personally I am rather thankful most of the millions upon millions of photographs out there will never take physical from.

 

[David Hughes]

Hi,

As you are talking about other peoples' photographs I agree with that but as for mine...

Regards, David

 

[xyz3450]

I agree with Keith above; digitally stored photos don't seem to be as sensitive to the requirements of storing prints and negatives long-term. And someone will likely figure out how to transfer out-of-date tech....

Maybe do both digital and print /negative storage for your most precious pictures..... Redundancy in storage helps ......

 

[Bob Michaels]

Consider the need to tightly edit what we save in the modern era of massive number of photographs.

My family's life from 1943 to 1963, including 3 siblings and everything my active parents did, is documented in around 400 photos in 7 albums. We can review everything in about an hour.

But what are most of us prolific photographers leaving for future generations? Probably a carefully archived horde but containing something like:
2,347,123 digital files
12,123 negatives
247 boxes of 35mm slides
313 packets of 4x6 prints from the photofinisher
818 individual 8x10 prints

And our successors will look at nothing but wish we had only left the top few hundred images.

 

[nikonhswebmaster]

The ten year old device is a zip drive that used zip disks. And actually that was beyond obsolete even 10 years ago.

I can't remember which Photoshop number I first used, but it was long before the CS days.

Zips were broken the day you first used it. They defined the "click of death."

 

[aizan]

I agree with Keith above; digitally stored photos don't seem to be as sensitive to the requirements of storing prints and negatives long-term. And someone will likely figure out how to transfer out-of-date tech....

on the contrary, digital photos are far more difficult to preserve long-term. someone mentioned earlier that prints and film need to be stored under certain environmental conditions. guess what? so does storage media and computer hardware. then you've got problems with all of that software.

believe it or not, digital information can become utterly unrecoverable.

anyhow, here's a good article: http://www.rense.com/general38/escap.htm