Storage

[nikon_sam]

My mom had a picture of her parents on their wedding day (Dated 1928) that I found after she passed...I had never seen it before...
I scanned the photo and have that copy then I gave the actual photo to my Aunt, her sister. It was an important picture to me but it meant more to my Aunt and that's why I gave it to her.
When she passes I'm sure one of her kids will keep it or possible hand it to another of my mom's siblings, eventually passing it down to the next generation...
Somewhere in the passing down this photo may not be as important to the heir as it was to someone who actually knew the people in the photo...and as they passed when my mother was 16 years old...none of us ever met them...
I feel the same way about my photos...at some point they will be meaningless to the person who ends up with them...and most likely thrown out...unless it's a picture of them...

 

[markjwyatt]

Lot of pictures will seem useless to others, but that does not matter. You record some history that may become important due to some connection you never thought of. When I was growing up there was a little chemical processing plant nearby. It is now a superfund site. I could not find a linkable image, but it is an empty field with some well units on it.

What did it look like in 1975? Like this


Chemical Plant by Mark Wyatt, on Flickr

 

[lynnb]

The more tags you add to the metadata*, the easier it will be to find the images you want in your archive and the greater their chance of being useful and surviving.

I'd assume this is standard practice for most organisations archiving images.

*assuming the metadata is preserved and can be read sometime in the future. This is why notes made on the back of a print are the gold standard.

 

[Godfrey]

I believe too many have their files backed up with redundancy or triple redundancy so they can never be lost. Yet the few hundred really worthwhile images are buried in hundreds of thousands of others so it is damn near impossible to find the good ones.

I can foresee times in the future where people ask if anyone remembers the old software program named "Lightroom" which contained the key to separate those relatively few significant images from that huge volume someone shot over their career.

Historically the methodology of archiving significant images automatically separated the wheat from the chaff. Today we have the technology of archiving everything we ever did with no distinction. I can see a time in the future when we and others wish only 1% of what we did was saved and the rest scrapped. Anyone who has looked at a closet full of boxes of 35mm slides already has experienced that.

This is not a difficult to solve problem. I did it years ago.

My 'original images' library is about 2.8 Terabytes of data now, and has 478,000 unique image files in it. Of course, there's an awful lot of dross in there that I've not weeded out or worked on.

However, whenever I work on a photo, or set of photos, and "finish" the rendering I want, I export that to a separate directory from the original image archive. This amounts to about 40,000 photographs now. Those are all the ones I've finished and sold, or posted, or used in discussions on forums like this one.

It's a heckuva lot easier to know the totality of that archive than to know what all is in the main image archive. ..

G

 

[Kevcaster]

I wonder, to what end all this archiving and storage will be useful? As a species we seem to lag a long way behind Elephants and Bees in our ability to pass on learning from the past. If we were better at this, then wars would have become historical events.
Museums are created to preserve artefacts and, in most cases, have a duty to make them available to the rest of us. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has a wonderful collection of photographs including a great many from Magnum photographers. These images can be seen on request and exist in the form of original prints. Some of these images seem important right now especially to the readers of this column. (All of these images are also available in books and online as digital files). My children may not understand the historical context of these images while appreciating the compositions and quaint social information. Their children may not care at all.
Like wine, music and cheese, all photographs are not worth keeping and most will become even less attractive with time. Even a picture of an interesting or important, long vanished, aspect of our societies that lacks coherence or articulation is useless and uninteresting to the viewer.
if we want to act like museums and preserve our pictures for posterity then let's act like museums and curate our collections, discard the majority and make a hard copy of those that we think are worthwhile. The simple act of fashioning hard copies will almost certainly act as an editing process and we may be shocked to find that whole periods of our lives failed to yield an image we cherish.
I'm deeply cynical about the data storage proposal. It seems to serve others, is based on the fear of imagined loss and ultimately doesn't matter to most of us in our daily existence.

On my deathbed, I won't be saying "I wish I had stored more of my data".

 

[RichC]

My 'original images' library [...] has 478,000 unique image files in it [... Of these] 40,000 photographs [...] are all the ones I've finished and sold, or posted, or used in discussions on forums like this one.

Eeeep!

I've been taking photographs seriously for about 20 years, and even went to university to study it. But I've only got about 300 finished images, including family snaps! My art photography amounts to less than 200 images, of which about 100 are fully finished and on my website and 100 are in an ongoing project!

My "original images" number about 1000, which includes dross like blurry or accidental stuff that I've not got around to binning.

 

[al1966]

I have started to get a new SSD to cover the current photographs each year, the excess space used to copy another year going backwards. Along with this I now use SD cards once and store in a wallet thing and all the photographs are on 3 normal drives in the house. Amazon provides infinite photo storage with prime and another drive is stored at my dads. Alas my dad is going to have to move due to health issues so my last line of defence will have to be revisited. I have had two drives die at almost the same time one was the back up of the other, thankfully I had a third drive at the time but after that I added more lines of redundency.

 

[michaelwj]

The most interesting images of the past (outside personal loved ones) are either historical events and places. It’s nice to look at photos of what a town or place was like 100 years ago, likewise, images of the big events are great to see.
Unlike the past, these days there are so many images of everything that even if a tiny fraction of a percent survived we could still cover the globe and every interesting event from multiple angles.
Personal photos are nice, but only relevant to the participants and their families. All the other photos are all ready duplicated by everyone with a phone.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but I suppose I think an archive is not that important beyond the people involved. I’m not talking about the best art of the day, that will be preserved by the experts, and if art is residing in galleries and museums without a proper archive, then does it qualify as the best art of the day?

 

[RichC]

I suppose I think an archive is not that important beyond the people involved. I’m not talking about the best art of the day, that will be preserved by the experts, and if art is residing in galleries and museums without a proper archive, then does it qualify as the best art of the day?

The problem with this is: who decides what is best or important? What may seem worthwhile at a point in the past can become inconsequential, and what is worthless or unknown today may become important tomorrow. Contexts can change, and, anyway, there's a lot that's arbitrary, including what and who ends up in museums.

One of my favourite photographers is Lee Miller, who is rightly highly regarded. She was famous in her day, working with Man Ray, and for being one of the few female war photographers. She developed what we would now call PTSD, and gave up photography - telling anyone who wanted to republish her photos that were destroyed in the Blitz. Eventually, she got what she wanted, and was forgotten for 30 years. After her death, her son unexpectedly discovered 60,000 negatives in their attic, and it is only through her re-found archive and his tireless effort since that Lee Miller has once more become a recognised name.

Vivian Meyer, familiar to many here, was unknown in her time, and we only know of her today because of the discovery of her archived photographs.

We can't always tell what will be of interest to our descendants, so keeping archives is important. Just because we think something is trash doesn't mean it will remain so, or that others won't value it. The converse also holds true of course!

 

[Bill Clark]

I just went through some of my B & W negatives.

Didn’t count the number of rolls of negatives, at least 75, all in a trash bag.

When my mom died we put together a tag board to mount photographs to have at her service. Maybe 30 photographs.

How many do you need?

 

[willie_901]

I wish I could say I was surprised that some museums and photo organizations don't understand the basics of IT system management.

If they don't have the budget for professional IT management or knowledgable volunteers, how would administrators know any better? Also, I can imagine a new volunteer pointing out the problem and non-technical administrators refusing to allocate funds to implement a solution.