¶ A few weeks ago my Great Uncle Jack passed away aged 94. He was an amazing man who lived his life to the full right until the end. Uncle Jack was a businessman, a Rotarian, and a district councillor devoted to the Hexham area of Northumberland where he lived his entire life. He was a brilliant and accomplished engineer, and vice chairman of the Bullnose Morris Car Club, having renovated three vintage (1920s) cars from rusty carcasses to showroom condition. His crowning glory was a replica 1924 Morris Bus which he built from original parts (making those he couldn’t source). But it is Uncle Jack’s fondness for his local area and community that revealed his most important quality – that of an archivist.
Throughout Uncle Jack’s house were neat, organised piles of documents (including his bus company accounts from 1943) and stacks of photos. On the back of every single photo could be found hand written notes detailing the people, place and date. As a record of local and family history, it’s fascinating stuff.
But what would happen when I’m 94 and dead and buried? I will have taken many thousands of photos by then. Photos from my early life – the first thirty years – will be prints and slides that hopefully won’t have faded too much. But everything from then onwards will be digital – this could prove to be either an archivist’s dream or a nightmare.
Since March of this year, any photo I consider to be of interest to me, the outside world or my family and friends, has ended up on Flickr. The great thing about Flickr is that it encourages annotation – titles, tags and description, with a date and time attributed automatically. In the not too distant future latitude and longitude will also start appearing automatically as GPS gets built into more cameras. And then there’s the community aspects, particularly with groups and pools, adding a further wealth of information.
But what of my great nephew? In sixty years time, will he be able to browse through my photos as easily as I did my with Uncle Jack’s? I know it’s symptomatic of the web as a whole, but it seems to me that photo sharing websites like Flickr have an enormous responsibility to future generations. Centralised depositories such as these may actually be a our best bet for the future of everyday photos, as the portable storage media we use evolve and become defunct so rapidly – I know I’ve lost photos already.
What will happen to all our photos and data in the future? Flickr says it will never delete our photos but what happens if Yahoo! collapses – what would the administrators do with all those server hardware assets? Will the data still be around and accessible in 60 years time? 160 years time? 600 years time?
Comments
1
Pick the best ones, and print them…
2
I would never rely on an online service for my archiving purposes.
If anything is worth keeping, put it on to CD or DVD (or print it out as Mark points out). The disc formats should be safe for the future, even if you need to keep a current DVD player in storage to plug into any future TVs.
3
Aren’t CDs and DVDs supposed to last about 10 years ? I wouldn’t rely on them either.
Nor would I rely on a company to keep them. So… I guess they will vanish, before or after my death.
Even if you take precautions or a 50-years hosting contract somewhere, nothing is sure. Perpetual graves in cemetaries last at best for 99 years around here, so the 600 years time is far-fetched.
Why not learn engraving or sculpture on stone ? :)
4
Perhaps expecting data to be stored on internet servers in 600 years time is far-feteched, but it it is still important that history is preserved.
Storing digitally is probably not an issue, but the storage media does remain in question. I still believe that storing data centrally stands a better chance of being perpetuated than on portable media such as CDs and DVDs. I really think it is naive to expect those media to be intact in 60 years time, let alone readable by anyone other than specialists.
That is still the best bet for longevity, provided one can specify long-life ink and paper.
5
I think the best bet to maintaining our cultures, media, languages, etc. would be to avoid going to war. However, looking at the short history of humanity, that’s even more far-fetched.
6
I’ve thought about that before. It’s kind of sad when you think of it but you know let’s take it a bit further.
What about 10,000 years from now? Or 2,000,000 years!? Or even more.
Two problems:
1) Every day new sites are born, more pics published, more articles generated, billions of pages created. Who is going to re-read these things after eons? I guess it won’t matter any more.
2) It is a fact that but the earth is going to be devoured by the sun after some billions of years so…
Enjoy the ride, and the hell with our pics on flickr :-)
7
It can’t be done.
Paper and ink won’t last for sure (unless stored away in a vacuum).
Technology nowadays, in my opinion, still prohibits the storage of digital photo’s for the remainder of the existence of earth. I have to agree with the fact that flickr-based companies will one day be gone.
I guess we have to rely on future technology to come up with a way to store the pics forever until indeed the sun will burn us up and no one could give a shit.
8
Well, sometimes I get the impression that we are going to suffer image overload. People have so many photos now. The only thing I am going to do for the time being is try and ensure that all my photos are always on at least 2 hard drives (possibly 3, one being always off-site). The only person you can rely on is yourself!
9
What would happen to those photos if Yahoo/Flickr etc collapsed in…
60 years time – They’d burn it to a few dozen shiny discs
160 years time – They’d burn it to a couple of shiny discs
600 years time – They’d not have to burn it to anything as the data would “live” in the conscious global optical net. It would thus be available instantaneaously through a small handheld device… for free.
10
Nevermind the photos themselves, what about file formats? Will JPEG files be readable in 50 years? Are we going to have to change formats every 20 years or so, just like we’re doing with music (Vinyls to 8-track to cassettes to CD’s to MP3’s…)
11
I agree – the biggest problem is digital formats. An optical photo on film only risks being destroyed by external influence (oxidation, fires, sunlight etc). The photo is still “readable” by the eye even if it’s faded.
Most (all?) photos on Flickr are stored using the JPEG format, which is a compressing (read “destroying”) format. A JPEG is a raw image with all the “unnessecary” bits taken away to save space. So just by putting a photo on Flickr you’ve already destroyed much of the photo yourself.
Then there’s the problem with bits getting lost during transfer and copy of digital formats. When you upload and download a file some of the bits tend to get lost on the way. This is no major problem during ONE upload – the photo can still be read back in – but after a few hundred uploads/downloads/backups enough of the bits may have been lost to make the photo unreadable in fifty years, even if there still are computers around that can interpret the JPEG format by then.
A good rule of thumb for life expectancy of formats is 4–5 years for a hard drive, 7–8 years for a CD/DVD and ~100 years for optical film.
12
On a side note: I read somewhere about a project by the USA government to preserve important data for the future. Their best solution for now is to store everything as bits engraved in pieces of glass (which lasts about 2000 years in the right conditions) and to format the bits in such a way that they can be deciphered using the information in them. Like a self-solving crypto (why would our current alphabet be around in 2000 years?).
Pretty neat.
13
As an employee of a photolab, I’ve seen way too many corrupted memory cards/sticks. Recently my roomates hard drive crashed, destroying all of his digital images. I’ve seen whole weddings lost, pictures of children erased, and since past family members removed “accidentaly.” To me digital imagery is just as fleeting as it is easy to blast away 100 pictures in minutes. Can you really trust a 3rd party to store your pictures/memories indefinitly without a hiccup? I myself have 1000’s of negatives, archivally stored, and without question they will be around long after I’m gone. Besides, I love the smell of fixer in the morning, and who doesn’t?
14
As for negatives… well, I’ve stored mine under a table on which stood a potted plant once. Overflow ensued, and some of them are badly damaged.
I’m sure they’ll last longer than CDs, but in case of a fire in my home, the data is duplicated somewhere else… the negatives will burn. Duplication might be the interesting word here.
15
Stop worrying, folks. You’re chasing your tails. Technology continues to get ever-more powerful, capable and widespread, so I’m not too worried about jpegs being readable 2,000 years from now. There will very likely be a free “FileWidget_x9t” that opens anything and everything.
I don’t own a digital camera (wish I did – maybe Santa?), but I DO have about 30 rolls of undeveloped film. What does that say about me? Dunno.
But as I determined yesterday, if we’re all responsible for being forward-looking to benefit future generations, the pilgrims (here in the states) would have selected something simple, like a grilled-cheese, as the centerpiece of our nation’s annual feast – as opposed to the ridiculous endeavor that is cooking a turkey.
16
What about some software like a cross between SETI and Subversion (CVS repository) where you submit your data and it is then split up in some trackable way and stored all over the web on different peoples meachines – obviously you would have a little chunk of your hard-drive dedicated to the storage app too.
Need to work on the details….
17
Personally i make copies of all my pictures on dvds. I used to burn cds but they are too small. So with the new generation of media – dvds i reburned all my images to dvds and kept cds too. When blue ray dvds will become available i reburn my dvds but still will keep them. So i hope that my collection will be safe that way. I also print all the important pictures to me. It’s up to you to take care of your stuff. You can’t trust others to do so. Of course companies like yahoo have enormous responsibility. But in case of some failure or some new business plans they wouldnt think twice. They even have it in user agreements. All companies are for business here. They try to make impression that they really care. But when it comes to money they’d prefer to save money rather than your pictures. But with new technologies I think storage is getting more and more affordable. So we should be pretty safe.
18
Sorry to say this but- let’s face it nothing is 100% reliable: anything physical degrades with time, including the digital hardware that stores data.
Paper is good, but looking ahead how much is preserved? 100 years old material you can still find a lot of it about, but 300, 400 old…
I like the zen philosophy of detatchment, because permenence is a fantasy, accept reality: everything’s transient – man, I’m sounding wordy today.
19
Do it the old fashioned way. Print out the pictures and put them away in your basement (clearly marked, use nice frames which reflect the current century). Pray that your house stills stand in 100 years time and the future occupants appreciate your beautiful collection.
20
yeah, everything degrades with time, but the beauty of digital photography is you can make a copy of a copy and it is exactly the same as the original. With analog storage, everytime you make a copy, some quality is lost.
21
It’s all gone – so much pixilated smoke. There’s going to be a HUGE gap in the human record – at least where it’s not on paper, stone, metal, or wood. No dusty trunks or shoe boxes stuffed with letters to explore. Such a shame – all this effort. But such is the impermanence of human endeavour
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