Usually I post my Yaletown View columns on the first of the month, but in light of the previous entry about a new file format from Adobe, I thought I’d post this one a bit early:
People are taking more photos than ever before. And an increasing number of those photos are digital. In 2004, it’s estimated that 15.7 million digital cameras will be sold, compared to 10.6 million film cameras. Add to that the exploding market for cellular phones equipped with cameras, and the number of photos each of us owns has increased dramatically.
More importantly, we don’t throw any photos away. Colin Smith, a product maanger for Adobe Systems (makers of popular image manipulation software Photoshop) says, “people keep every photo they’ve ever taken, and that’s only gotten worse with digital photography.” I have one friend with over 20,000 photographs on his hard drive.
Organizing these photos is a complex problem. Generally, the software that comes bundled with your digital camera provides some basic photo management functionality. Companies like Adobe and ACDSee offer robust applications that enable you to edit, manage and annotate your images in digital photo albums. Flickr, a Vancouver startup, provides the same sort of functionality on the Web, simplifying the process of publishing photos for public consumption.
While all of these solutions work for today and tomorrow, they ignore a bigger, longer-term issue: how will we share and store our photos in 50 years?
If there’s one thing that consumer electronics has taught us in the last twenty years, it’s this: formats change. How useful are those audio tapes and floppy disks these days? How useful is video tape going to be in 5 years? Even the recordable CD is past its middle age, being replaced by recordable DVDs.
For our digital photographs, the problem is two-fold. Not only do we have to worry about the storage medium (whether that means your hard drive, library of CDs or website), we have to worry about the format of images themselves. As you may know, most photos are stored in a file format called J-PEG. It’s been around for a while, and history teaches us that there are new formats–one is called camera RAW–on the horizon that will eventually usurp it.
The computer industry isn’t strong on backwards compatibility. If you found an old 5-and-a-half-inch floppy disk and wanted to view, copy or print out the contents, you’d have quite a hassle doing so. And that’s only 10 years after the demise of the medium. If your grandchild dug up that floppy in 2054, it might be practically impossible for them to access it. The same principle applies to your digital photos.
So what’s a consumer to do? Frankly, I’ve got no idea. Your safest bet is actually to go with the most reliable, future-proof technology available to humanity. It’s got a proven track record and very low storage requirements: it’s called paper.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I broach this topic from time to time as it relates to future generations. Assuming our future generations (at least the first) will be able to view our digital media, there is going to be a vast understanding from our offspring of their history before memory. When I look at my pictures as a baby, there aren’t too terribly many. There are a lot by today’s expectations I suppose, but what about my son’s collection of 1,200 some-odd photos just from the last year and a half?!? When he’s my age, he’ll get to see himself in vivid color photos and videos (digital, of course). He’ll take it for granted, but I wonder how this will impact our generations to come.
Actually, as far as storage goes… an 80gb harddrive is much smaller than a comparable number of paper pictures. I’ve already got way too many boxes full of photographs… harddrives are much easier to store. 🙂
And, every time I buy a new harddrive, I move all my pictures along to it. I see it the same as dragging those boxes of photographs along with me every time I move…
1. Use a standard format (e.g. JPEG). If it looks like a new standard has completely replaced JPEG, do a mass migration forward while there are still conversion tools.
2. Periodically increase your storage and migrate all of your photos forward.
3. DO NOT trust your photos only to CD-R. The bits are rotting on your CD-R even at this moment.
For #2 this is pretty cheap.
I bought a 30GB or so Firewire external hard drive a few years ago, now I have one that is 120GB or so. I just copied all the data forward.
Eventually most people will have central storage RAID arrays at home for their digital information.
If you want a scholarly understanding of this topic, the area is digital archiving.
http://www.google.com/search?q=digital+archiving
Libraries have been thinking a lot about this problem.
One proposed solution to the problem of data loss and corruption is the “multiple copies everywhere” idea, e.g. LOCKSS
http://lockss.stanford.edu/