There are more photographs around than ever before and, thanks to the growth of digital photography and cameraphones, there may well be more photos taken this year than in the whole of history. But how many will still be there 50 years hence.
This may seem a silly question to ask when we are being bombarded with wonderful, easy-to-use, websites offering to store online our digitised photos at the click of a button for nothing (for a list see www.andromeda.com/cgi-bin/photo/showsites.pl). Of course, there is a danger some of these could go bust in a few years, and there is also the question of privacy. Who is responsible if a newspaper publishes your private photos stored on a public server?
A survey by McAfee has found that 68% of adults archive their photos only in digital form — because it is so easy to do. But even if our snaps will still be there decades hence, it is an open question whether they will be in a format future computers can access.
One problem is recurrence of familiar failures that have consigned much of our past digital data to oblivion: the failure of a hard disk, scratched CD-Roms or changes in storage technology, from floppy disks to external hard drives, to CDs to DVDs, to USB devices.
Second, if photos are stored in several ways, some of them could include proprietary technologies that might be superseded 20 years on. Even if you use non-proprietary formats such as JPeg or Tiff, they do not, as Jeff Schewe (in PhotoshopNews.com) and others have pointed out, provide a format for storage of the unprocessed raw sensor data of which there are more than 100 formats from more than 15 camera manufacturers. Third, if you fall back on old technology and use a photo album, remember that ordinary digital photo printers do not deliver as long a life as old-style processed snaps.
For the moment, there is not really much alternative to multiple back-ups if you want to be reasonably sure your digital photos will be there in 50 years’ time. This means keeping a copy on your hard disk, another on a CD, DVD or external storage unit or one of the burgeoning online storage sites, plus printed copies of treasured ones.
The trouble is it takes superhuman discipline to update back-ups regularly in multiple places, let alone ensure they are all labelled and dated so you are not faced with thousands of anonymous tags in future years. This may sound like a lot of hassle. It is. But it is worth doing it until all the preservation efforts around the world bear fruit — not least the $100-million Library of Congress project in the US to preserve ”a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations”.
None of this should deter people from buying cameras or cameraphones. They are getting better and cheaper all the time and offer rich opportunities to record life as never before. We now have a wonderful record of Victorian life, thanks to so many early photographs being preserved. If photographers do not think seriously about digital preservation, there is a danger that the information revolution could turn into a new dark age. But if most of the photos now being taken are preserved, it will leave for posterity, as well as our own descendants, an amazing record of what life was like in the 21st century. It would be a tragedy if much of this were to be lost because of a failure to agree a common approach. – Guardian Unlimited Â