Looks like Film may win over today's Digital Photography in the long run.

[p.giannakis]

I use only RAW files: that's in 21st century terms. I used to call them slides and negatives.

May take the chance and remind to the people who were involved with computers in the 90's: Can you open your .LBM pictures that were so popular in the 90's? .PCX files are the same, although they are still supported by photoshop (let's see for how long). These were the most popular image file formats in the early-to-mid 90's until jpg came along.

Converting maybe files into a format which will be popular in the future? A digital archive of 40.000 pictures (if not more in some case) is not a simple task...

 

[RattyMouse]

Are you just assuming these 'many families'? I personally have never heard of anyone dumb enough to do that. It certainly doesn't seem as common as a dead hd. Not enough to make someone appear 'lucky' that it didn't happen, as if it were a narrow escape from a common problem. Ko Fe was just telling us the firmware and hardware of cloud storage hard drives was getting corrupted after only 4 years. Nice.

Spot on! I too have never heard of anyone dumb enough to throw away boxes of negatives. I seriously question that this is commonly done.

 

[RattyMouse]

You were lucky. There are many families where the negatives are unceremoniously tossed away after their owner dies.

Film is no cure for utter stupidity.

 

[JP Owens]

I've been the guy who other family members have decided should be given the old negatives and photos of my grand parents and great grand parents. I'm 64, so these photos reach back to the very early 20th century. I got them, honestly, because no body else in the family wanted to deal with them. And I've tossed most of them. Why?

Because I have no idea who most of the people in those photographs are. And nobody else remembers them. The people who did remember them are now dead. And in a couple generations, nobody will know who most of the people in my family photos are.

I simply see no value in preserving most of these photos. And that is even more true today, when the visual culture of the early 21st century is being "preserved" in billions and billions of photos each year. If only one tenth of one percent survive, we will have more a visual record of our time then of any time in history.

This all seems much ado about nothing.

 

[CMur12]

You were lucky. There are many families where the negatives are unceremoniously tossed away after their owner dies.

I have seen this. Non-photographic family members may hang on to prints, as they can sort through them more easily for photos of interest, but they often won't bother with negatives. Even prints are subject to being culled.

When going through all the belongings of a deceased relative, people are usually trying to work quickly, and they keep what is of interest to them personally - not so much what was important to the deceased.

- Murray

 

[Keith]

How do you define 'win' in such a scenario?

When people (average family types) all those years ago shoved a box full of negatives into a chest in the attic or similar they weren't thinking about image survival ... they were getting something out of the way to make room where they needed it somewhere else in their lives. Now we can store image files on external hard drives and if we care about their survival take the trouble to transfer them to a new drive when necessary. Very few film shooters would have been contemplating what may happen to their little pieces of celluloid fifty or a hundred tears from now and make provisions for extending their life. It really is a case of apples and oranges IMO and I don't believe there will be a winner as such.

The trouble with this place (RFF) is that it's populated mostly by digital migrants who don't have the faith in current technology that the digital natives possess.

 

[Ranchu]

They had a glass plate negative portrait of a guy and his son at an antique store I was at a few months ago. Just a regular picture, not a professional picture.

 

[majid]

I have seen this. Non-photographic family members may hang on to prints, as they can sort through them more easily for photos of interest, but they often won't bother with negatives. Even prints are subject to being culled.

When going through all the belongings of a deceased relative, people are usually trying to work quickly, and they keep what is of interest to them personally - not so much what was important to the deceased.

Curating them (editing down the number of photos to a manageable level, e.g. a handful of photo albums, and putting useful captions) would increase the chances of it surviving. That said, modern American families have such astronomic quantities of stuff it is simply overwhelming for survivors to cope with.

 

[Michael Markey]

Are you just assuming these 'many families'? I personally have never heard of anyone dumb enough to do that. It certainly doesn't seem as common as a dead hd.

I can`t speak as to whether throwing away negs is a common activity but in addition to the stack of MF negs which I`ve had dumped on me I have also had two lots of boxed K64 slides.

All had been stored in a damp garage and most was affected by fungus.

So effectively they had been discarded.

I was for a time involved with a local village historical society and again, on a number of occasions, they had to try and retrieve stuff from the local tip (landfill) .

On at least two occasions that I recall they were too late.

It may be actually more common than you think.

The biggest danger is that most people I speak to under the age of twenty don`t even know what film is or indeed what it contains.

 

[David Hughes]

... The biggest danger is that most people I speak to under the age of twenty don`t even know what film is or indeed what it contains.

Exactly, if I gave a box of negatives to my grandchildren they'd not know what they were and wouldn't know what to do with them. And as no one I know has a darkroom or enlarger or slide projector you can imagine the rest...

BTW, I like the theme running through this that one day JPG's will be obsolete and unreadable. So when they announce the replacement will all the computers in the world switch on and then delete all the jpg's and software that reads them? Or will they go on existing and being readable?

I guess I must be the only person in the world who isn't still using his first computer. Meaning I know how to take pictures off of the old one and put it on to the new and I've done it several times but I guess no one else has, ever.

Personally I doubt if more than a handful of my photo's would be f any interest to them. Just the odd one showing people as kids and then adults...

Regards, David

 

[bobbyrab]

The point is not really about what's possible, but wether anyone will make the effort. Say in the future someone says to you, "I have this old drive of a keen photographer, but it's 40 years old". The question is will anyone take the time to find the hardware that will read the USB/FireWire connection, and what are the chances of a 40 year old drive not having any issues with mechanical failure or corruption. You'd have to be pretty sure it contained something worthwhile to begin with.
With prints and even negatives, you can assess if they are worthwhile immediately.
Cloud storage works as long as you're paying the subs, then what. If you want to keep it print it.

 

[Highway 61]

How do you define 'win' in such a scenario?

When people (average family types) all those years ago shoved a box full of negatives into a chest in the attic or similar they weren't thinking about image survival ... they were getting something out of the way to make room where they needed it somewhere else in their lives. Now we can store image files on external hard drives and if we care about their survival take the trouble to transfer them to a new drive when necessary. Very few film shooters would have been contemplating what may happen to their little pieces of celluloid fifty or a hundred tears from now and make provisions for extending their life. It really is a case of apples and oranges IMO and I don't believe there will be a winner as such.

The trouble with this place (RFF) is that it's populated mostly by digital migrants who don't have the faith in current technology that the digital natives possess.

Wow ! This is exactly what - time gap explains, Keith an I being living at the opposite ends of the planet - I was about to write...

During the 60s, 70s and 80s my father shot lots of film ; I haven't personally taken care of them (they were his) and now that he's entering his own eighties my guess is that they're lost (for several reasons).

As for myself I continue shooting film for personal reasons (mostly : pleasure provided by handling old film cameras and the B&W home processing chain) so I'm accumulating analog archives in folders and storage boxes. But - I'm an amateur photographer and I doubt that any museum or gallery would be interested at gathering them (as good as they are). And I really don't know what my son will do with them when I'm out.

Not everybody will be the next Vivian Maier...

 

[F6Roger]

What I can't get my head around is that technology and new systems are not going to change overnight, so there will be plenty of time to relocate those loved photos. Or am I missing something? (it happens to us ol' farts now and then!)

 

[robert blu]

Select, select, select. 1:10, 1.100 0r 1.1000 depends on how much you shoot. Than print, print, print only the selection. Than from the prints make another selection...and out of that make a book as suggested...not perfect maybe, not definitive but at least is something...
robert

 

[majid]

BTW, I like the theme running through this that one day JPG's will be obsolete and unreadable. So when they announce the replacement will all the computers in the world switch on and then delete all the jpg's and software that reads them? Or will they go on existing and being readable?

JPEG/JFIF is an open format that has open-source implementations, JPEG files will never become unreadable, unlike the proprietary formats like PCX is is incorrectly compared to. Proprietary RAW formats are another story, hence the need for DNG.

Same happens with image formats. If someone said today that the new revolutionary image format is JPG-2015 and everyone should use it, then it maybe needs 10 years until the number of new files in the old format is at a really low rate and new applications might stop offering the option to write that old format. But the option to read the old jpg will be there for a very long time.

JPEG's successor-to-be, JPEG-2000, has failed to show any traction whatsoever in the last 15 years. Google is now trying to replace JPEG with WebP, based on their VP8 video codec, but it isn't likely to gain much adoption either.

 

[thereabouts]

By the way, anyone (who has a Mac) and wonders if tools are available to read old and weird graphics file formats, should do a search for a tool called Graphic Converter.

Edit: Here we go...
http://www.lemkesoft.de/en/products/graphicconverter/key-features/import-and-export-formats/

 

[Mcary]

Can't say what will happen with my digital image files once I'm gone or that anyone will even care. For now I can take certain measure such as updating HD/storage media on a regular basis, currently about every 3 years. Which means I'm due to update/replace my 2 external HD some time this year and will likely spend the extra $$$ to get SSDs. Note also have them back up on the cloud.
The way I look it is just because 99% of the digital files in the world may be lost due lack of action by the individuals or agencies that own or are responsible for them doesn't mean that I should throw-up my hand and say well guess I shouldn't make any effort.

 

[zuiko85]

All you guys and gals are missing the simplest solution.

Just be a crummy photographer like me. Then nothing you do will be worth saving anyway.

 

[Texsport]

My real life experiences agree with the OP.

My wife recently lost hundreds of digital images from her iPad as she followed live telephone instructions from an Apple "expert".

I regularly scan, print, and gift 100 year old 6 X 9 film negative images from my grand parents.

I win, she lost!

Texsport

 

[raid]

This is an interesting point for debate. I see my options as being unclear. If I fade away one day, then whatever I leave behind with the latest technology will still be retrievable. Very old photos may vanish (maybe not). Will I leave behind only images or will I by then have created or affected something that is useful to others?

As for the technical challenges, I believe that millions of people with "highly valuable" souvenir snapshot images will jointly demand for ways to preserve whatever has been created over the years.