Losing the historic record?

[bmattock]

The largest part of my income in 2008 was from B&W images in my files from the 1960's and 1970's.

A large percentage of my income comes from working to keep digital files intact. Perhaps that's why I react strongly when know-nothings claim they're not archival. If they weren't, your bank records would be in peril - they're not.

A digital file is a digital file. They're all stored, backed up, archived, restored, and copied redundantly the same way. I know how to do it, so do millions of companies and their IT employees. It's our job to know how to do it, and to do it effectively.

So when you say that digital is not archival, you're essentially saying what I do for a living is worthless. Remember that when you take money out of the bank or pay a bill. Amazingly, it works. Even after power outages, bank failures, the year 2000, and everything else that's been thrown at it. You've never lost a penny of your money due to the bank's having lost your records - and you dare to claim that digital is not safe and archival storage.

As I said - when the buildings fell on 911, some very important negatives of the Kennedy years were lost irretrievably. In that same catastrophe, the bank and financial records that were destroyed were restored from offsite backups very quickly. Nobody lost a penny of their accounts. And yet you continue to claim that film is inherently safer and more archival. The proof of the opposite is directly in front of your nose.

Insisting that 'no one has time' to properly safeguard their digital images is simply saying "When my digital files go foom, I want to be able to point the finger of blame at someone other than myself." If you don't care enough to take the steps necessary - fine. But then you lose the right to complain, because it isn't the fault of the digital media, it's your fault.

 

[dfoo]

I think the key is that negatives, assuming they properly processed, are archival by nature. Digital files, while I agree with Bill that they are archival, have to be actively "managed" (for want of a better word). That is, unless someone actively keeps them current, the files will eventually become unreadable; and that eventually is a pretty short period of time. I have files on a 5 1/4 floppies, and tapes, that I have no way of reading. With negatives, short of physical destruction, that cannot occur in a reasonable time-frame.

 

[bmattock]

I think the key is that negatives, assuming they properly processed, are archival by nature. Digital files, while I agree with Bill that they are archival, have to be actively "managed" (for want of a better word). That is, unless someone actively keeps them current, the files will eventually become unreadable; and that eventually is a pretty short period of time. I have files on a 5 1/4 floppies, and tapes, that I have no way of reading. With negatives, short of physical destruction, that cannot occur in a reasonable time-frame.

Absolutely true about the digital. I disagree about the film.

I have film I have left out, mistreated, and otherwise not protected. It is damaged to the point of being unusable. My fault entirely. But it proves that film - by itself - is not archival. It would be true to say that very little effort is required to safeguard film so that it lasts much longer, but something has to be done.

The problem is that people who dislike digital want to argue a condition that should never happen. A file, left on a 5 1/4 floppy, to use your example, which can now no longer be read. Yes, that's true, the file is gone. And so are my negs that I didn't bother to resleeve. The point is - different media require different methods of storage. One treats digital files as archival if they intend them to be such - and surprise, they are then archival. One similarly treats film as archival if they intend them to be such - and also surprise - they are.

The difference is that no matter what you do to protect film, it will eventually degrade. Digital media, protected in the manner required for archival purposes, will not - ever.

 

[dfoo]

Ok, now we're getting somewhere. Now, which requires less effort? I would vote negatives. My parents have stacks of pictures and negatives in shoe boxes in their closet which are quite readable, despite them taking almost no effort to archive. I, unfortunately, cannot say the same about digital data.

 

[bmattock]

Ok, now we're getting somewhere. Now, which requires less effort? I would vote negatives. My parents have stacks of pictures and negatives in shoe boxes in their closet which are quite readable, despite them taking almost no effort to archive. I, unfortunately, cannot say the same about digital data.

Yes, maintaining film in an archival manner requires less effort. No doubt.

It doesn't alter the single-point-of-failure nature of film, though, and in the longest term, film will degrade no matter how well taken care of.

 

[sjw617]

Ok, now we're getting somewhere. Now, which requires less effort? I would vote negatives. My parents have stacks of pictures and negatives in shoe boxes in their closet which are quite readable, despite them taking almost no effort to archive. I, unfortunately, cannot say the same about digital data.

How many digital "formats" have you got? How many have you failed to keep updated?
In the future our grandchildren will have no idea what a negative is or how to deal with it. With things like Flicker the world in overwelmed with images that have little value. Those images will live long after the photographer dies.

 

[dfoo]

That is a specious argument. It will always be obvious what a negative represents.

 

[Andrew Sowerby]

It's a shame this potentially interesting thread went were it did. Thanks to the OP for the info.

 

[sjw617]

That is a specious argument. It will always be obvious what a negative represents.

No it is not. If you hold a color negative up to the light, can you clearly see what the picture is? Is it a street shot or a picture of my Uncle Charlie in front of his store? Remember your grandchildren will barely (if at all) have ever seen a negative and a 35mm negative if pretty small to be able pick out a familiar (?) face. Negatives will probably be thrown out and the prints saved. I think more digital will be saved since it will only be memory space on a hard drive or family server (and all viewable). Jpegs will be saved but RAW files will be thrown out with the negatives.
AND knowing what it represents is one thing, but being able to convert them to an actual picture might be very difficult in 100 years. Enlargers and film scanners will be gone.
How many photos and negatives do you have from your grandparents and great grandparents? My family has pictures from a couple of generations ago, but not one negative.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

It does not last forever. It has an upper limit on how long it will last before degrading, be that decades or centuries - no matter how well you take care of it.

Using our present as a point of reference, film will outlast digital archives if you spend the same amount of energy archiving film than if you archive digital files. If you archive film (i.e. don't read "store away", read "archive") properly, it will outlast any digital file you'll archive today.

You insist that digital is "inherently" durable, and you insist that I'm insisting on saying that film is "inherently safer and more archival". Your words, not mine.

My words are: film is far more durable than film, not "more archival". You are stuck in your assigning "durable" as a synonym for "archival" in the same concept plane of photography. It is not. It is simple physics, technology, and culture.

The culture and technology has not evolved far enough to make digital archiving "more durable" than film archiving. Organic preservation dating back to the ancient Egyptians applies to film archiving in ways no "film vs. digital" head could imagine.

The digital age is in its embrionic phase, and claiming it is by far tested conclusively for the ages is misguided.

It is far easier to treat and archive permanently film with the technology and knowledge we have now, than to actively and pro-actively playing musical digital chairs to move from one temporary holding space for digital archives to another.

Let's not lose sight of the goal, which is to maintain copies of our photos. If one wishes to do so with digital, one makes copies, keeps formats updated, and makes duplicates, kept in various physical locations. In this manner, digital is inherently more durable than film, and there really can't be any rational argument about it.

Again, confusing "durability" with "archivability". They are not the same. And archeologists 3000 years from now will agree. If somebody actually backed up this forum in an archived, permanent microfiche. 😀

 

[Micky D]

Yes, as the original poster I apologise, it has unfortunately degenerated into another pointless debate on the relative merits/demerits of film and digital.

This misses my original point that regardless of the photographic medium used or subsequent storage, it is becoming more difficult, in the UK at least, to take many of these pictures at all.

No need to apologise Chris, it's not your fault.
In your opening post you raised a valid and interesting point worthy of intelligent discussion.
It doesn't matter whether the guys photographing today will be able to hand down pictures of red pillar boxes and red phone booths in digi or film, if they are not allowed to photograph them in the first place, before they are gone.

 

[bmattock]

Again, confusing "durability" with "archivability". They are not the same. And archeologists 3000 years from now will agree. If somebody actually backed up this forum in an archived, permanent microfiche. 😀

One must conflate the terms durability and archival capability because 'digital' does not describe a physical medium, whilst film does. In order to compare the two, one must begin from intent. Film is a physical media which is organic and has a lifespan that can be both measured and predicted. Digital is not a physical media, but using physical media, it can be extended indefinitely by copying it. Film can be copied also, but with increasing degradation for every subsequent generation.

If you wanted to argue semantics instead of the long-term storage capabilities of digital photos versus film photos, you could have said that film is more archival than a CD-ROM, and I'd have had no argument, or that film is more archival than a DVD or floppy disk. Fine, no problems.

Of course, that would be an argument without a purpose, since the point is the long-term survival of photos - film or digital. How long a CD lasts is immaterial to that discussion.

 

[bmattock]

Using our present as a point of reference, film will outlast digital archives if you spend the same amount of energy archiving film than if you archive digital files. If you archive film (i.e. don't read "store away", read "archive") properly, it will outlast any digital file you'll archive today.

Even if true (which I dispute); so what? The point of archiving is to store something safely. Digital has different requirements than film. If you want to archive, you must do so according to the needs of the media involved.

If you do - the rewards are that digital does not have a single point of failure, which film does; and digital outlasts film.

And with that, I think we have reached impasse. Since I doubt you'll lay down your king, I propose a stalemate.

 

[John Robertson]

Today people are finding boxes with grandads old photos in them, them probably seemed mundane at the time but are now historically a very valuable research resource. This will happen very much less in the future, as CDs of photos or SD cards are wiped or binned. People are printing out less and less, I won't live to see the resultant dearth of stuff but my grandchildren will.
The BBC have belatedly realised this with Video tapes of shows which were wiped and recorded over and now lost forever.🙁

 

[jackbaty]

bmattock is correct, digital files are supremely archival and don't lose a thing generation to generation. The problem to me is not that digital files might degrade, but that they are too frequently and easily lost. It's a human problem.

My grandfather threw hundreds of negatives in a box. I still have them.

My father threw all of his digital files on a computer. They're now gone.

My daughter takes many fun and interesting photos with her cell phone. She's switched phones a few times and now those images are gone. She just can't be bothered worrying about it because she's young and doesn't realize how valuable those images would be.

Digital files in many cases *do* have a single point of failure, since too many folks keep only one copy. People who care about their images will no doubt make the effort to ensure they are around for generations, by whatever means necessary. That's awesome, but I'm concerned about everyone else - those who don't realize what they're about to lose.

How do we improve this? Is it simply an education issue? Is it technical? This probably belongs in a different thread, but the whole problem of millions of photos just going poof! for no good reason makes me terribly uncomfortable.

 

[Leighgion]

The towering advantage of digital files is that it's childishly simple to turn a single point of failure into a multiple redundant offsite backups, with each copy being identical in quality to the original. While film can be replicated, it's a much more time & resource intensive process that's largely only practiced by movie studios and even then, you're not looking at perfect copies, so generational loss is there, as well as simple mechanical wear on the film from having to go through the process.

And please, don't tell me that this is what makes film "special" and that all things are "meant" to die. That's got nothing to do with anything.

Granted, if you just take your pictures and toss them aside, film is going to have better odds as the shoebox full of negatives survives neglect better than the old Zip disk full of digital files. However, consider that Jacques Lowe threw all his Kennedy-era negatives in a highly secure bank vault, effectively one of the finest shoe boxes in the world. One incident later and *poof!* They're all gone. The ability to survive neglect is useless if the only copies are out and out destroyed, which is a very high risk matter for film as it's a medium that by nature starts with a single copy and isn't nearly as easy to turn into multiple copies.

Kind of makes me wonder why all of those priceless negatives were never put through high resolution scans. Lowe's work would have then had the benefit of both analog AND digital archiving and not been so completely lost. This is something use ordinary folk can do ourselves with pretty good quality. You'd think there'd have been some funding available to do it for national heritage level film.

 

[bmattock]

How do we improve this? Is it simply an education issue? Is it technical? This probably belongs in a different thread, but the whole problem of millions of photos just going poof! for no good reason makes me terribly uncomfortable.

The youngest generation knows perfectly well the ephemeral nature of digital files not protected and stored. In a very real way, I find it easier to forgive oldsters like myself who "just didn't realize" that their hard drives could and would crash and leave them with no backups than the young adults and kids of today, who have grown up with the technology and are quite comfortable with it.

Ultimately, comfortable or not, the images they choose not to protect and subsequently lose are their to keep or lose as they see fit. The alternative is to take control of their images for them, and frankly, that would make me uncomfortable.

One thing that gives me some hope is that websites like Flickr exist. Many people use them as a repository or data dump for their photos. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing.

And frankly - I find it interesting that I can now browse the text of ancient magazines online - which I might not have been able to do without tracking down a copy of the magazine in question or going to where the physical repository is.

Eastman News Bulletin, 1933

 

[bmattock]

The towering advantage of digital files is that it's childishly simple to turn a single point of failure into a multiple redundant offsite backups, with each copy being identical in quality to the original. While film can be replicated, it's a much more time & resource intensive process that's largely only practiced by movie studios and even then, you're not looking at perfect copies, so generational loss is there, as well as simple mechanical wear on the film from having to go through the process.

And please, don't tell me that this is what makes film "special" and that all things are "meant" to die. That's got nothing to do with anything.

Granted, if you just take your pictures and toss them aside, film is going to have better odds as the shoebox full of negatives survives neglect better than the old Zip disk full of digital files. However, consider that Jacques Lowe threw all his Kennedy-era negatives in a highly secure bank vault, effectively one of the finest shoe boxes in the world. One incident later and *poof!* They're all gone. The ability to survive neglect is useless if the only copies are out and out destroyed, which is a very high risk matter for film as it's a medium that by nature starts with a single copy and isn't nearly as easy to turn into multiple copies.

Kind of makes me wonder why all of those priceless negatives were never put through high resolution scans. Lowe's work would have then had the benefit of both analog AND digital archiving and not been so completely lost. This is something use ordinary folk can do ourselves with pretty good quality. You'd think there'd have been some funding available to do it for national heritage level film.

Hear, hear!

 

[Micky D]

READ THE OP, PLEASE!

The question is not about which medium will last longer, it does not matter.
You will soon be no longer able to take such photographs by any legal means.
There is the loss of record.

 

[bmattock]

READ THE OP, PLEASE!

The question is not about which medium will last longer, it does not matter.
You will soon be no longer able to take such photographs by any legal means.
There is the loss of record.

Let's ask Doctor House:

Nope, not Lupus.