Lengthy, but important...

Bill Pierce said:
It's lengthy, but important - perhaps the most important piece on your photography that the NY Times has published in awhile. I encourage you to read it and tell us what you think.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/style/digital-photo-storage-purge.html
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This has come up before. In terms of the Flickr mass-deletion of photos, it has happened several times with various companies in the form of digital music files. Much like digital photo storage it only lasts as long as the company - or their promises - does.

The article also touches on the relative permanence or impermanence of various forms of storage. This has also come up many times on RFF in the past. One I particularly remember was just after 9/11, when it was discovered that an important vault of negatives from the JFK era had been stored in one of the towers which was destroyed in the attack. Gone forever. So much for the permanence of single-points-of-failure.

I recently made the decision to pay for a year of Flickr Pro while I decide what to do with my 58,000+ photos I have on that service. Although each and every one of them is also on my local storage and not in peril of permanent deletion, I still don't relish the task of dealing with this, so I paid their blood money and pushed the decision off for a year. I have not yet decided what to do about it. Flickr was a reasonable platform for me when I put the effort into tagging my photos, and I sold more than a couple that way. Even got a magazine cover once.

EDIT: I recently looked at a photo trove posted on Flickr by a gentleman who served in WWII - and amazing archive. However, he was in his 90s by the time he stopped posting and he is no longer online - I presume he has gone to muster with his troops in the next plane of existence. He's not around to save his photos. When Flickr whacks them, that history, his work and contribution to the future, is gone forever. That's sad, but it was probably predictable.

What I have in my physical possession is about 1TB of digital photos and digitized film images. I have several plastic tubs of sleeved negatives and slides and some prints going back to 1979 or so.

The film is not organized, and they are not all digitized. If my house burns down, they're gone. I'm sure I've lost some here or there over the years as well.

My digital photos are largely in good shape, going back to my first foray into digital photography in 1998. I do have a rigorous storage regimen, which includes tagging, storage by date, and backups. I've lost hard drives, but I haven't lost photos. At least not so far.

Over time, I hope to get more of my film archives digitized and stored. I'll keep the film as well, of course, in case scanning capabilities get better and I want to do it again later on.

However, I also need to accept the reality of the situation. The overwhelming majority of my photos are interesting to no one . They are not historically important. They don't matter much to anyone but me. I'm not saying they are naff - I'm reasonably proficient - I'm saying they are irrelevant. When I am gone, no one but perhaps my wife will care, and she will only care about the ones important to both of us, maybe not so much my infrared experiments with dilapidated houses in rural North Carolina so much. It's ephemera of the highest order.

So we strive to avoid the inevitable, and I accept that it's a battle I will eventually lose and who cares? One of my more fatalistic observations about maintaining camera gear is that it isn't going to be 'passed on' and treasured by the next generation as one of grandpa's old cameras. It will be on eBay, or more likely in a thrift store or a garbage dumpster within weeks of my passing. It just doesn't matter.

It matters only while I'm alive to care, and I do care, so it matters - for now.
 
I've told this story before on this forum. Back in 2011 I had a small publishing client who did not have an FTP server for me to upload assignments to, so they asked me to post the images on a Flickr page they controlled. Within six months other publications were stealing the images I uploaded, so we terminated that contract. Haven't put up any images on any photo site since. As a more experienced PJ told me, "You put them up on line, you just gave them away for free."

Got many hard-drives full of images, and tubs full of negatives, and photo albums full of prints. But none of them online. For extended-family images, I used to post to Facebook, and Instagram, and still do to Twitter, but those aren't really archive sites. Those are site to share "Hey, here's cousin Joe at the wedding last weekend." which can be quickly taken by cousin Joe's family and stored wherever they please.

I never really got into the storing images on Flickr, or iCloud or anywhere else online. Not sure if it seemed too risky, too impersonal, or too "you can't get something for nothing" and the fear that somehow those internet entities would come asking for money, or giving my images away for free.

Best,
-Tim
 
The article is spot on. It is a huge problem. When someone figures it out, let me know. Presently I live in a state of photo storage denial.
 
Thr real problem is that with unlimited storage people don't edit their photos or make any effort to organize them any more . They just throw them - good, bad, and indifferent - in a big shoebox called their hard drive or the cloud, and never look at them again. Along comes Flickr and tells them that they will have to edit their photos down to 1000, move them, or pay $50/year. Rather than view this as an opportunity to cull through their images and put them in order, and throw out the photos of what they had for lunch for the past five years, they bitch and moan and pay the $3.00/month so they won't have to go to the trouble. When they die, some relative will either go though them and save the ones they want, something the person taking them didn't care enough to do in his lifetime, or most likely not fool with them. Yes there are some valuable photos there, but most of it is detritus. Really, if you don't care enough to edit and organize your photos, who should? Maybe some day there will be photographic anthropologists who will go through these orphaned archives like they go through old landfills now, trying to figure out what the hell people were thinking.
 
Timmyjoe said:
As a more experienced PJ told me, "You put them up on line, you just gave them away for free."
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Well, maybe. As I mentioned, I have sold a few photos via Flickr. I'm not a pro, I don't have an agent or shoot for clients. The photos I have sold would not have been seen by potential customers had I not put them on a service where they could be found.

As to giving them aware for free, I have discovered a few of my photos used by others. Mostly in accordance with my Creative Commons license, which permits attributed non-commercial use, but a few people have 'stolen' them.

One I found had used one of my photos for a commercial blog. I notified them of the violation and we worked out a license. I got paid, they no longer infringed on my rights. Several sites that refused to talk to me found their websites gone when I served their ISP with a take-down notice and proof of my copyright. A couple sites were in Russia and no one was able to do anything about it; they won and I lost.

One also has the option of uploading with watermarks, digital signatures, restrictive rights declarations, or simply a reduced size and quality.

Of course, you can choose not to upload. I get it. I am not that worried about it, but it's not my living I'm fighting to protect, so I'm probably not seeing it the same way you are.
 
Prints help.

When I was doing weddings, potential clients would ask me about numbers of photos. I’d review an album with them. Then I would ask, after review of the album “do you think this covers the wedding?” Usually they’d say, “yes.”. I would tell them this album has 56 photographs, a larger one maybe 75. A few were more and a few less. I’d say, “get the picture?”

Don’t need to use the camera like a machine gun.

Moral of the story, it’s quality not quantity that counts.
 
I have just less than 1000 photos on a regular non-paid Flickr account. I use it mostly for dead storage of stuff I post on various sites. I did get my own domain a few years ago and most of the newer stuff I have on line is there. That's what I plan to use for the immediate future.

I've also learned (some the hard way) to have backups, as in more than one, of any significant work.
 
Subsidized lies, indeed.

As mere mortals, we are tied to physicality, however much we want to float freely in a binary space.

I don't have much at all online really, especially since I don't have a smartphone. Most of my mementos are in the form of negatives and prints and lately photo books.

I cherish the tactility, as fleeting as that might be.
 
While I have a bit in iCloud, mostly I've moved from CD-R to DVD-RW to IDE drive to SCSI drive to USB drive to USB 3 drive, transferring stuff as the technology changes.

Unlimited, forever, I used to think that of Craftsman hand tools.....Sears was Amazon in it's day. Houses to spoons to unmentionables and everything in between.

B2 (;->
 
ptpdprinter said:
Thr real problem is that with unlimited storage people don't edit their photos any more or make any effort to organize them. They just throw them - good, bad, and indifferent - in a big shoebox called their hard drive or the cloud, and never look at them again. Along comes Flickr and tells them that they will have to edit their photos down to 1000, move them, or pay $50/year. Rather than view this as an opportunity to cull through their images and put them in order, and throw out the photos of what they had for lunch for the past five years, they bitch and moan and pay the $3.00/month so they won't have to go to the trouble. When they die, some relative will either go though them and save the ones they want, something the person taking them didn't care enough in his lifetime to do, or most likely not fool with them. Yes there are some valuable photos there, but most of it is detritus. Really, if you don't care enough to edit and organize your photos, who should? Maybe some day there will be photographic anthropologists who will go through these orphaned archives like they go through old landfills now, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
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This .

Can`t see the article because its subscription only.
 
bmattock said:
So we strive to avoid the inevitable, and I accept that it's a battle I will eventually lose and who cares? One of my more fatalistic observations about maintaining camera gear is that it isn't going to be 'passed on' and treasured by the next generation as one of grandpa's old cameras. It will be on eBay, or more likely in a thrift store or a garbage dumpster within weeks of my passing. It just doesn't matter.

It matters only while I'm alive to care, and I do care, so it matters - for now.
Click to expand...

Oh and this ...
 
Negative sleeves in binders, several hard drives and a few (far too few) binders of prints.

I find that I am printing more and more every year. My printing has increased a lot since I (subconsciously) admitted I wasn't going to be able to print everything in the darkroom. But it is still not enough.

My project for this next few months is literally to go through everything I have digitized (which is quite a lot), edit it, and load it onto hard drives for my children. I actually do have a file where copies of the images I have found intriguing have landed over the last few years. Not everything in there is worth keeping, and not everything that should be kept is in there, but it is a start.

But books still seem to be the best chance that any of my stuff will exist longer than I do. But that requires a huge editing effort on my part. But, as has been said, if I am not willing to put in the effort for my own work, who will be?

In the end no one may actually want it, or even more likely, want to maintain it. But that is something over which I have no control. I can't worry about what happens after, only what happens now.
 
bmattock said:
However, I also need to accept the reality of the situation. The overwhelming majority of my photos are interesting to no one . They are not historically important. They don't matter much to anyone but me. I'm not saying they are naff - I'm reasonably proficient - I'm saying they are irrelevant. When I am gone, no one but perhaps my wife will care, and she will only care about the ones important to both of us, maybe not so much my infrared experiments with dilapidated houses in rural North Carolina so much. It's ephemera of the highest order.

So we strive to avoid the inevitable, and I accept that it's a battle I will eventually lose and who cares? One of my more fatalistic observations about maintaining camera gear is that it isn't going to be 'passed on' and treasured by the next generation as one of grandpa's old cameras. It will be on eBay, or more likely in a thrift store or a garbage dumpster within weeks of my passing. It just doesn't matter.

It matters only while I'm alive to care, and I do care, so it matters - for now.
Click to expand...

I think I'm going to have to write an article about why vernacular photography DOES matter, historically speaking, and write a guide on family or personal digital archiving and digital preservation. :bang:
 
I don't do Cloud, I do very limited portfolios on a couple of photography sites. I have multiple copy hard drives that I intend to curse my children with when I'm gone.
 
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