billwassmann Loc: Emerson, NJ

Note that my title is not the future of photography, that will come one way or another. A friend was cleaning out and sent me some old photos of her and my wife when they were young girls. She commented on everything that accumulates. I countered by mentioning the cabinets and plastic boxes I have filled with slides, plus all the photos and color negs I have, plus all the black and whites I took since I became interested in photography more than 70 years ago. All this is at least tangible. Good or bad they can be held and looked at. Then I started thinking about what will happen with all the digital work we are now doing. Unless it is put on a computer it won't be seen. Even then, only those with access to that computer will see it. I had a student who said he kept the photos on a hard card because they're cheap now but how can you tell what's on a card unless you enter it into the computer? What will happen to all the photos now being made? How will they be stored and how retrieved?
Comments, opinions?

rpavich Loc: West Virginia

After shooting for a few years (I'm a noob) I thought about this thing exactly...I have tons of images on flickr, drives, and email that never see the light of day.

Contrast that with the "shoebox" that we had when I was young...we loved to sit around the kitchen table and pass those old photos around, grainy photos of our old 64 impala wagon at the California Redwoods....or those old pics of us kids at Christmas with our space helmets on about 1967....

So...I bought a dye sub printer (4 x 6) and I print real prints in addition to having my digital files.

I love having something to "handle" and "give out" when people come to visit....

Since it's dye sub, the ink never dries out...I don't have to print every week to keep things "lubed" I can print what I want when I want.

My step son just came home on a short leave (Marines) and I took a group shot of everyone hugging and printed it in under a minute and sent it with him to keep...there's nothing like it.

Morning Star Loc: West coast, North of the 49th N.

I'm almost finished sorting and putting into albums, 17 full shoeboxes of photos, dating from about 1890 till 2002.
They will also be scanned and put on 4 external hard drives, so that each of my boys can have a set. A daughter-in-law has already asked for the albums ;-)



Rather than having individual prints made (I don't do my own printing), I make photobooks (Blurb). The photos that go into the books are put on a DVD, and book + DVD to the recipient: sons, grandkids, etc. Some we even keep ourselves (holidays, our anniversary celebration).

billwassmann Loc: Emerson, NJ

I wasn't looking as much for individual ways of storage but thinking of a larger scale. For printed materials such as photos there are libraries, museums, government agencies, etc. that a researcher could go to. But what will happen digitally?

BigDaddy Loc: Pittsburgh, PA

The issue is more what is going to happen with shoe boxes full of old photo's and slides. Besides deteriorating to useless rubble, They will likely never be seen. The smart thing to do is go through them and scan them into digital, and catalog them into a good cataloging application.

Today, and in the foreseeable future, viewing pictures will be all digital. Few people today print anything. My kids, in their late 20's don't even own printers. They mainly look at pictures on their cell phones. I myself have thousands of pictures on my cell phone and often find my self showing off pictures to people when topics come up at parties, picnics, or in my favorite pub.

This Labor day, relatives came in from out of town for my wife's family reunion. At the picnic, everyone, particularly older folks were showing pictures on their cell phones. Myself, I have thousands of my pictures on one thumb drive that my 55" HD LED TV that displays with incredible clarity and vivid IQ to room full of people at a time, who can all comment and enjoy as a group. 10 times better than pre-digital slide shows. I have folders with scanned photos of her grandparents from the early 1900's that I found in a shoe box no one would have ever seen again, actually most never saw the first time, because they were buried in a shoebox. Digitally scanned, and photo-shopped into very decent photo's removing much of the deterioration of 100 years of shoebox living.

In short, other than a few pictures hanging on your walls, today there is little need for printing, great need for a good HD TV photo viewing application, along with a redundant storage method.

Digital doesn't deteriorate...

cntry Loc: Colorado

They will be lost. Even if they are saved to some sort of disc, chances are advancements in technology will make that disc obsolete and unreadable...how many can still read a 5 1/4" floppy?

We've learned so much about our history from old letters and old photos; our grandkids and their kids will have little to none of that. Email has replaced letters, no one prints them out...photos are shared digitally. As technology advances it's sucking our 'history' into a big black hole.

Swamp Gator Loc: Coastal South Carolina

Well if the internet remains somewhat similar in the not too distant future to what we have now, I feel fairly confident many of my wildlife images will still potentially be available for viewing even after I'm gone.
Doing a search now for subjects such as "alligator photos" and many bird species will bring up my name and many of my photos fairly quickly.
Besides my regular daily blog, lots of my images are on posted on various web sites worldwide so I figure some of that has to stick around online for a while anyway.

As far as family snapshot type stuff goes... Nobody besides other family members (although maybe not even them) will care about those pictures in the future anyway.
I don't think that 40-50 years from now anyone is going to be scrambling to locate a photo taken in 2007 of me and my wife sitting on a beach somewhere.

billwassmann Loc: Emerson, NJ

And how will those things be made available for historians and other researchers? There are no digital museums or lending libraries. Digitization is not a sure thing. Yes paper can be destroyed but electronic files can be corrupted. Nothing yet has been invented that will last forever, including homo sapiens.

Morning Star Loc: West coast, North of the 49th N.

My other hobby is genealogy. The photo from 1890 I mentioned in my earlier message, is one of my greatgrandparents with their ten children. I know who they are because my mother told me and I wrote the names on the back. It sure is nice to "put a face to a name."
No, my children may not particularly be looking for a picture of my husband and I on a beach somewhere, but I've made sure there are plenty of photos of ourselves and our relatives that can be used for genealogy - as my granddaughter is willing to take over this hobby when I have to leave it behind.
All I want to say with that, is that we just don't know whether or not our photos will be valued by future generations and I'd rather make sure that they have some.

billwassmann Loc: Emerson, NJ

Don't be too sure about that. My wife and I collected such photos and others have as well. Plus historians could be looking at your work and times, there's all sorts of reasons.

rook2c4 Loc: Philadelphia, PA USA

I've come to the following realization:

When I put images on an external hard drive, I tend to not look at them again, or at least very rarely ever - even with the best intentions. On the other hand, if I print out images and organize them into physical albums, I am far more likely to view these time and time again. I don't know... perhaps pulling an album from the shelf and paging through it is a more accessible and enjoyable process than plugging in a hard drive, opening virtual folders, searching through thumbnails, and opening individual images in a program on the computer. I now try to print my most favorite images, a project usually reserved for rainy weekends when I have not much to do. Certainly I retain and maintain a digital back up of each, but I have a feeling that my physical copies will eventually outlive their corresponding digital copies.

Some (hobbyist) photographers admit to not only shooting, but also saving and backing up thousands of images each year. When will they ever find the time to revisit all these images? A bit sad when you think about it.

blackest Loc: Ireland

There is archive.org, a very useful resource since websites do come and go it hasn't got everything on the internet but it does have a lot of it. My earliest website still exists faithfully duplicated within archive.org although it is a bit tough on the eyes.

The internet really is a giant library but without the selection of works which has to occur in a physical library. If you just collect your images and store them in shoeboxes, then they will eventually disappear. Either your relatives will grow tired of hoarding them or maybe the attic will leak or they will fade away over time. If you have images you want to last beyond your lifetime then publishing them on the internet probably will do that, although you as the photographer may be forgotten. Perhaps it's time to update the EXIF if you want your photographs to be associated with your name.

watchcow Loc: Moore, Oklahoma

My primary line of work for the last 18 years is computers, networks and data storage. I now work for a state agency that has to keep some records for a very long time. To say digital does not deteriorate is questionable. This is a problem that IT professionals have been aware of for years but have been powerless to do much about it. Because of entropic decay of magnetic storage media, the mission data collected for the Mars Viking and Mariner space probes is at risk and at this point it is estimated that nearly 40% of all that data is lost. This is in less than 40 years. To read the tapes they had to commission a company to build a tape drive unit because none were in production and none seemed to exist in working order on the surplus market. This project started several years ago, and is still ongoing. the movement now to keep data fresh is to keep copying it from one media format to another and just make sure to gets read from time to time. the data integrity issue is still there. if the files are not readily human readable, you can't easily tell if they are useful files or just wasted bits taking up space.

I have digital images from the 80's that are fine, the standards used to scan those images then are still readable today. i am not sure i can say that years from now. we are already seeing .jpg images being replaced by .png on the internet. JPEG replaced GIF but yet we still see .gif files quite a lot. standards aside, the issue of deterioration is a problem because all computer systems have some critical flaws. one of those is the concept of data integrity. you can look in a folder and see hundreds of files that are reasonable sizes, but unless you open each one you don't know if they are valid or not. digital images are quite fragile. it only takes a single bit error to damage a file such that it is no longer readable. to know if or when one of those bit errors has occurred whether it was a copy that didn't happen correctly or if it was a "bit rot" issue because of entropic decay of the signal on the hard drives. The software to babysit this kind of data loss is either expensive made-for-enterprise stuff, or it is something you have to use manually and it is rather complicated. Computers do make mistakes, storage degrades and is prone to errors, and you won't know it until after the fact.

Those old images in shoeboxes do bring up an interesting problem. i have photos that are over a hundred years old. they look fine. i have some less than 10 years old that look horrible. i have been in museums where they had Matthew Brady prints from the Civil War that were still perfectly usable. this points out something pretty important about analog. While it does degrade over time, that time may be a very very long time and you can still see a picture of great aunt Ethel taken in 1906, with coffee rings and cracks on the surface. degraded but usable. if that had been a digital image, all it takes is one bit in the wrong place and that image is gone. digital may not degrade, but it is all or nothing.

Our original poster posed the question, what of all the digital images we have stored around and what will those mean to historians of the future. To me, 100 years from now, the images i may have had stored on a computer or shared on the web might be searchable because of a lot of development happening now for data classification, there are essentially computers along with the search engines we use for text based searches, that analyze images. for now, it is mostly gathering exif data and contextual comments. these correlation engines are being used to assemble pictures of all kinds of things. there are also computer vision programs that will build up metatags for images that identify a horse, even if there was nothing in test that said you had a picture of a horse. as time passes this will get better and more useful. unless something happens to our storage systems, some great breakthrough in technology that speeds up both access times and increases capacity at reasonable costs in hardware and energy, we might not see progress for a while. Even though our computing power is increasing, our volume of information is increasing even faster, so searches seem to be slower and less effective than they were just a few years ago.

My shoebox with old photos in it will still be passed around to family members long after i am gone, and chances are, they will remain just as unreachable to historians as they are now.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

The future is always going to be a problem, in many ways. If you store images digitally on a computer or hard drive, how long will there be devices that can read them? they will have to be converted to another format.

NASA has a problem like that recently. If I recall correctly, they were trying to communicate with an old satellite, but they didn't have the old technology. It took a team of people months to work something out.

Zone-System-Grandpa Loc: Springfield, Ohio

Well, Sir, before I comment, I haven't taken time to read anyone else's comments, so, if I duplicate their comments, my apology to them.

For me, I merely print my favorites and keep them stored safely for posterity. Then, my wife will find them, move them somewhere else and I seem to never find them again, but someone will some day in the future :-D