DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I have about 30. There are a large number that may be from that era but there is no annotation so the people are unidentified. My earliest family photo is from around 1860. Of course I have no idea how many there were to begin with.

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

How many billions have been lost?
Especially today all those color prints even in the dark will be pretty worthless in 50 yea.rs

RodeoMan Loc: St Joseph, Missouri

Subtraction tells me that you are discussing paper prints from around 1870. I would say that there are hundreds of thousands prints still extant from that era and probably millions worldwide. The age of Kodak with every person being their own photographer had not yet arrived. This would explode the number of paper images. Still in the decades following 1870, the number of studio photographers would increase exponentially. I collect images made by photographers operating in St Joseph, Missouri from the time of the Civil War to the present. There are fewer images from the Civil War ear and after, but by the 1880's the numbers are increasing rapidly reflecting more images being created. It is difficult to know what the future holds, but looking forward to 2170, I wonder if people interested in their family history will have the same opportunity to view people from their past as we have had. It seems to me that everything has to fall into place, not only now but continuously into the future for this to happen. Images will have to be moved off SD cards. There mutiple millions of images existing on the back of cell phones that will never see the light of day. To be sure many, if not most of these, are of no consequence, but some are of consequence and tell the story of the family that in predigital days would have been printed. Either you or Dirt Farmer made the point that the cloud was good only for as long as the fees were paid. Other storage devices or viable only for as long as they are being supported and people have the skills to access them. The point is not whether Big Daddy has the wherewithal to identify, digitize, place in files and leave them for his no doubt computer literate progency to make use of; no, for me the point is will his great great grandaughter when she is grandmother be able access these images with the same probability as she would have had the images being printed and stored in shoe boxes or photo albums.
There is a wonderful book which I commend to you by George Howe Colt: The Big House, A Century in the Life of an American Summer House. Colt and his family spent their summers at the house and the book is about coming to terms with both the house and the ability of the Colt and his siblings to continue to care for the house. The house is full of decades of accumulation of his family. There is a passage where Howe is poking around and discovers a collection of family photographs dating from the earliest years of the house. My point in telling this is will digital storage offer the same opportunity for serendipity that that an old box gifted to George Howe and that old photo albums and shoe boxes provide countless other folks.

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

Prove it.

RodeoMan Loc: St Joseph, Missouri

I am not sure just what it is you want me to prove but 2020 minus 150 equals 1870; 2020 plus 150 equals 2170. I don't have the Colt book before me, but I could find where he discusses finding the old photographs. I admit that I can't prove that there is a better chance of paper prints surviving decades and centuries into the future. I do think that things will to fall perfectly into place for that to happen. Of course whether we are talking pixels or prints, there has to be a commitment to care. If we are negligent with whatever storage method, then all bets are off. I could probably show that the number of studio photographers increased during the latter years of the 1800's but I only know what I have observed during my years collecting images from my hometown. I can't prove that Big Daddy's distant descendant would have a better chance of viewing images he sent forward digitally than she would have had he entrusted the images to print form.
I guess the only way to know would be to stay alive until then, not a likely scenerio. Probably the most judicious course of action to ensure images that we deem important enough to send forward into the future would be to employ both digital and print technology, but I can't prove that either.
Just an observation, I have been in other internet discussion forums, but I have never been in one where there are so many folks with chips on their shoulders as this one. But I can't prove that either.

BigDaddy Loc: Pittsburgh, PA

Well the answer is no, digital storage will not offer the same opportunity that those old shoe boxes provide. It will offer magnitudes more opportunity. If you can't wrap your head around the massive advantages to digital photo storage, know that virtually every archival site has spent huge amounts of time and money converting the old stuff into digital, and they've done it for all the reasons I already covered. Anyone today can achieve the same thing with their digital photos as the National Archives, or Getty Institute or any of them with the very little effort or investment. The same cannot be said for photo prints that require massive efforts and great expense to preserve. The software to view digital jpgs will never go away with trillions of jpgs stored and in use now. IfranView or Lightroom may well disappear, but absolutely and for sure, whatever replaces them will be able to view any jpg created since 1994.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

It is true that digital storage has advantages over physical item storage. Ease of duplication, ease of searching, ability to add metadata, data persistence....

But it is also true that physical item storage has advantages over digital. Unless digital is duplicated, dispersed and maintained, losing digital data is easier than losing physical items. A line surge will do it. And duplication and dispersion alone won't keep digital accessible. Maintenance is necessary to keep it viable.

Of course maintenance is also necessary to keep a physical item viable, but if you get one small part of a physical item destroyed (torn corner on a print, fungus spots, burn marks...), the rest of it is still there. Corrupting a digital file may destroy the readability of the entire file.

Digitize, but don't throw away the original.

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind