In article , Ken Hart
wrote:

https://petapixel.com/2019/03/04/the...cos-photo-lab/

(Minor correction: the author of the article is female, so the subject
should be "Gal is right...")

The article misses the point that Costco is not the only option for
printing digital images, so Costco photolab closing probably should not
be considered a harbinger of doom.

it's a major lab that processes a lot of photos for a lot of people,
and they're not the first to see a big drop in demand.

The "Costco" referred to in the petapixel cite was a local store
minilab, similar to the minilabs in CVS, WalMart, etc. The output from
these minilabs is usually small prints. The Costco 'major lab' does the
specialty items, such as photo books, wall enlargements, etc.

they're all seeing a falloff. many camera stores have closed because
their main source of revenue was film processing and reprints.

photobooks are a different category entirely.

the trend is *very* clear.

Many of these minilab locations are shutting down, but the main/big labs
are still in operation, and will be for some time.

only because they're big, however, their volume is shrinking. people
don't want prints anymore. it's just how it is.

Check with vendors of
darkroom/lab products; they offer more variety than ever.

except that stuff doesn't sell in any appreciable quantity anymore.

i went to a photo swap meet a few years back where someone had darkroom
equipment free for the taking, including a bessler 23c enlarger. nobody
took.

And I haven't
had a back-order issue in years. Of course, I buy my chemicals in 25
gallon size, and my photo paper in 200+ feet rolls. The trend that I see
is *very* clear, and opposite your trend.

it's not my trend.

https://www.omnicoreagency.com/facebook-statistics/
350 Million photos are uploaded every day, with 14.58 million photo
uploads per hour, 243,000 photo uploads per minute, and 4,000 photo
uploads per second.

and that's just facebook.

instagram is also very popular:
https://www.omnicoreagency.com/instagram-statistics/
Number of Photos & Videos uploaded per day: 100 million+
€ More than 50 Billion photos have been uploaded to Instagram so far.

and then there are the usual photo sharing sites such as flickr, as
well as those who simply text photos to each other.

But I agree with the point that printed photos can be more easily
maintained and enjoyed by the unwashed masses.

it cannot, for a lot of reasons.

Are you familiar with the term 'unwashed masses'? It is a reference to
every-day people, who do not have an understanding of the latest and
greatest technology. For these people, people who don't have a computer,
physical prints are easier to enjoy.

i know quite well what it means and your claim is absolutely false.

the unwashed masses take photos with their phones, upload them to
facebook, instagram, etc. and/or text to their friends and family
and/or show photos stored on their phone. they don't want to deal with
prints anymore. prints take up physical space, whereas one phone can
hold hundreds of thousands of photos and an unlimited number in the
cloud and slips into a pocket.

("Backup? what's a
backup?" "Stored in the 'cloud'? So if I want to see them, I can just
look up in the sky?")

technology is amazing.

In fact it is. I've seen a lot of it change since graduating from
college. At that time, the school I attended was proud of the fact that
they had not one, but two DEC PDP-8 computers, each with 4K of mag-core
memory and a teletype/paper tape reader.

too bad you don't avail yourself of any of it.

My mother was the family 'snap-shooter'. She usually had double prints
made from her film. One print went in an album of the event, the other
prints were handed out to family and friends. Her years of negatives
filled a couple shoe boxes, and her albums filled a bookshelf. Those
photos, some 50+ years old, are still easily viewable and in reasonable
condition.

'reasonable condition' means degraded.

Somewhat degraded, but still easily viewable. The paper may be yellowed.
Black & white images may suffer from 'silvering'. Early color images may
have color shifts. Color photos using the RA-4 process (1980's? onward)
have much better color stability.

it may be viewable, but it has degraded.

in some cases, film fading is *really* bad:
https://www.shorpy.com/node/3926?size=_original#caption

digital images do not degrade.

Ones and zeros will not degrade, but the medium the digital data is
stored on may have suffered or be obsolete. Do you have a paper tape
reader around? No? Pity, because I've still got some programs I wrote
from college! Or maybe even a 5" or 8" floppy drive? I do have a machine
with a 3" floppy, but I haven't used it lately.

do you have a pdp-8 to run them on? no? then it doesn't matter, does it?

and in the off chance you do, the tapes are very easy to read:
https://hackadaycom.files.wordpress....jpg?w=798&h=53
2

If the digital images are not routinely transferred to a current storage
medium, their degradation is substantially more than paper images,
perhaps total.

if the film images aren't properly stored, their degradation can be
total. one match and game over.

(Kodak's Endura color print paper is rated for 100 years on display, or
200 years in the dark.)

one match shows that to be false.

same for a hurricane, wildfire or tornado. or a cat peeing on them.

in fact, digital images improve with time because the image processing
software gets better as do the displays.

there are also no backups with film. if the house burns down or is
destroyed by a tornado or wiped out in a hurricane, all of those photos
are *gone* in a flash.

film copies are second-generation (or worse), very time consuming and
expensive to do, in addition to being completely impractical for all
but the most important photos, so few people bother.

The "most important photos" will likely exist in multiple original
('first generation') copies at multiple locations. That's why they were
important.

there is only *one* first generation copy. period.

there can be multiple second generation copies, but the reality is that
nobody does that except in very rare situations.

If the images are truly important, the photographer will take reasonable
precautions to preserve the negatives. Mine are in a cabinet that's
two-hour rated for fire and secured to the structure around it.

that cabinet or its installation wasn't cheap.

if the images are important, the photographer will take steps to
preserve them, no matter what medium.

doing that with digital is *much* easier, *far* less expensive and
unlike film, has zero degradation with each copy. also, geographically
diverse storage is trivial and can be entirely automatic.

copy images to a server, and within hours or perhaps a day, multiple
offsite backups, all without any generational loss, now exist. that is
*not* possible with film.

digital images can be backed up an unlimited number of times in an
unlimited number of locations with each copy being *exactly* the same
as the original, available to view at any time from anywhere, and in
the event of a disaster, nothing is lost.

So long as the medium used to store those images is still extant. But
hard drives fail without warning, both in use or in storage. Cloud
services have gone out of business without warning, taking the stored
data with them to /dev/null.

fire, flood, hurricanes, etc., have turned the *only* copies of film to
nothing.

the power of digital backups is that it makes absolutely no difference
whatsoever if a hard drive fails or a cloud service shuts down. replace
it if necessary and it repopulates without any effort.

Backup strategies require ongoing effort.

far less than film, to the point where it's effectively zero.