How should I permanently store digital photographs?

Big Bill writes:

On Fri, 24 Dec 2004 02:49:50 -0600, David Dyer-Bennet
wrote:

And I think that patent office director is an urban legend; I can't
find it on Snopes or as an attributed quote anywhere else right now,
though.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

-Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

A search on Google for "Everything that can be invented has been
invented" will bring up a *LOT* of referrences.

World of Quotes shows three "no source" and two "questionably
attributed to" for that one. In fact, nowhere I've found so far is
really solid on this. It probably *is* true; since it's widespread
(I've certainly heard it before) and I *don't* find lots of debunking
sites. But still, I don't have a good source for it yet.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
RKBA: http://noguns-nomoney.com/ http://www.dd-b.net/carry/
Pics: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/ http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Dragaera/Steven Brust: http://dragaera.info/

Big Bill writes:

On Fri, 24 Dec 2004 02:49:50 -0600, David Dyer-Bennet
wrote:

And I think that patent office director is an urban legend; I can't
find it on Snopes or as an attributed quote anywhere else right now,
though.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

-Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

A search on Google for "Everything that can be invented has been
invented" will bring up a *LOT* of referrences.

World of Quotes shows three "no source" and two "questionably
attributed to" for that one. In fact, nowhere I've found so far is
really solid on this. It probably *is* true; since it's widespread
(I've certainly heard it before) and I *don't* find lots of debunking
sites. But still, I don't have a good source for it yet.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
RKBA: http://noguns-nomoney.com/ http://www.dd-b.net/carry/
Pics: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/ http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Dragaera/Steven Brust: http://dragaera.info/

"Don Lathrop" writes:

David Dyer-Bennet wrote:

But I can't afford the kind of archiving that is
applied to things like the Constitution, no matter
how precious my photos are.

And you don't need to. The point was the
requirement to archive, not the cost. It
takes care and attention to archive digital
photos, not large amounts of money.

Time is money.

Also, I can take care of *my own* photos mostly well enough, I think.
But trying to make an archive to last past one human's span of
attention is harder. (There, I'm not really on the "other" side from
you; as I think we've mostly figured out.)

Actually, all cars *do* look alike today,
compared to 20 years ago. There's been a
huge amount of convergence.

Absolutely not true. I've been in the auto industry for 35 years,
and the market has never been more diverse or fractured, despite the
predictions of engineers and marketeers. Look at the Aztec, the
Element, all the bizarre niche pickups, the mini-SUVs, the
MiniCooper, the Boxster, and so on. There are literally hundreds of
specialty vehicle types on the road now.

I see three type of vehicles in significant numbers: Cars, bigger
boxes, and misc. Misc. is highly various, but small in number.
Miata, Hummer II, and such. The "bigger boxes" category covers
mini-vans and SUVs for me, including the ones you're describing as
bizarre.

But the weird thing is that *all the cars* look so much the same.
Saab and Volvo and Mercedes have given up their unique styling. Ford
and Saturn are nearly indistinguishable.

And I think that patent office director is an urban
legend; I can't find it on Snopes or as an attributed
quote anywhere else right now, though.

It's often misattributed to Charles Duell, Patent
Commissioner in 1899, who supposedly resigned
because there was nothing left to invent. In fact,
the statement was made in 1843 by investigator
Eber Jeffery in a report to Congress that, "The
advancement of the arts, from year to year,
taxes our credulity and seems to presage the
arrival of that period when human improvement
must end."

More info! Thanks very much. Interesting that Snopes doesn't seem to
have anything on this one.

But I think you got it wrong. Eber Jeffery was associated with the
debate as the author of a report in the July 1940 Journal of the
Patent Office Society. But the quote you give is attributed in that
report to Henry L. Ellsworth in his 1843 report to Congress, it's not
by Jeffery. (The extra names and phrases you introduced allowed me to
find some more articles I hadn't previously seen.)

My information, though, is from a distant source -- a web archive copy
of a Skeptical Inquirer article (at
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_3_27/ai_100755224).

Industry analysts are wrong all the time, most especially
when predicting the future. Observing that CDs *are*
the ubiquitous removable medium is quite different from
predicting that something *will be*.

Are they? Or are DVDs taking over now, and external
hard drives? They were the standard for a while, and
now their day is past.

DVDs are heavily used, but every DVD drive reads CDs and every DVD
writer writes CDs. So CDs are still the "removable medium" of
choice. They cost a *LOT* less than DVDs still. Look at the space
given to CD blanks vs. DVD blanks in the stores, for example.

XP won't go away in a couple of years, any more than
98 is "gone away" now.

Well, Microsoft tried to stop support for 98 as a legacy
app, remember, but were forced not to. I'd say 98 is
dead already, kept alive by an installed base that is dying.

I know a lot of people still running it. I'm still running one of my
own two windows boxes on it.

I haven't even upgraded any of my computers *to* XP;
perhaps never will.

And you shouldn't. At this point, the hardware wouldn't
work. You should buy new computers with XP already
installed.

"My computers" includes a new Athlon XP 2.800+ system bought new this
year. I got Win2k with it, because I won't put up with some of the
Microsoft nonsense in XP. I'm hoping I'll be able to abandon
Microsoft entirely before Win2k becomes non-viable.

I'd bet that in 10 years my backup CDs and DVDs
can be read in every computer in the house without
trouble. And all the data will still be on the (then-current)
hard drives, too.

I'll take that bet.

Yes, and that's largely a problem because of poor file-
format choices, like proprietary word process or page
layout programs.

Poor choices like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint?

Yes, exactly. Very poor choices for archiving.

Do you think you'll be able to access a Word 2 document
in ten years? Or an early PP presentation?

No. I'm not sure I can access them now; although I never had word 2
or any early PP, so I don't have the problem.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
RKBA: http://noguns-nomoney.com/ http://www.dd-b.net/carry/
Pics: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/ http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Dragaera/Steven Brust: http://dragaera.info/

David Dyer-Bennet wrote:

I was just thinking that all the albums I cared much about,
I taped when I first got them. The work of transferring
them to CD (or digital files somewhere) is about equivalent
to that. Since I did it once, I can't really go with saying it's
"unfeasible" to do it again, that's all.

Yeah, I agree and concede that point. It's just infeasible
for me at this point. I should have said, "I don't wanna."

David Dyer-Bennet wrote:

I see three type of vehicles in significant numbers:
Cars, bigger boxes, and misc. Misc. is highly various,
but small in number. Miata, Hummer II, and such.
The "bigger boxes" category covers mini-vans and
SUVs for me, including the ones you're describing as
bizarre.

But the weird thing is that *all the cars* look so much
the same. Saab and Volvo and Mercedes have given
up their unique styling. Ford and Saturn are nearly
indistinguishable.

You're describing the "pass (passenger) car" market,
which has commonized on aerodynamic formulae --
read "laws of physics" -- that dictate shape for CAFE
(corporate average fuel economy) reasons, and size
for market reasons (no. of passengers and cargo).
This is the trend that analysts thought, ten years ago,
would create a staid market and promote sales of
the same large-volume family autos that have been
the leaders for the last almost hundred years.

That isn't what happened. The "other" category you
mention exploded. The minivan and SUV came along.
Then sales of pickup trucks exceeded pass cars.
The specialty vehicles, like half-pickup, half-SUV
were developed. Instead of a few models with sales
in the millions -- the old business model for car
companies -- now they must produce a couple
dozen models with sales in the hundred thousands.
These levels in the past would get a line killed --
remember the Fiero? It was wildly popular, but
only sold a few hundred thousand, and was shot
in the head.

David Dyer-Bennet wrote:

I see three type of vehicles in significant numbers:
Cars, bigger boxes, and misc. Misc. is highly various,
but small in number. Miata, Hummer II, and such.
The "bigger boxes" category covers mini-vans and
SUVs for me, including the ones you're describing as
bizarre.

But the weird thing is that *all the cars* look so much
the same. Saab and Volvo and Mercedes have given
up their unique styling. Ford and Saturn are nearly
indistinguishable.

You're describing the "pass (passenger) car" market,
which has commonized on aerodynamic formulae --
read "laws of physics" -- that dictate shape for CAFE
(corporate average fuel economy) reasons, and size
for market reasons (no. of passengers and cargo).
This is the trend that analysts thought, ten years ago,
would create a staid market and promote sales of
the same large-volume family autos that have been
the leaders for the last almost hundred years.

That isn't what happened. The "other" category you
mention exploded. The minivan and SUV came along.
Then sales of pickup trucks exceeded pass cars.
The specialty vehicles, like half-pickup, half-SUV
were developed. Instead of a few models with sales
in the millions -- the old business model for car
companies -- now they must produce a couple
dozen models with sales in the hundred thousands.
These levels in the past would get a line killed --
remember the Fiero? It was wildly popular, but
only sold a few hundred thousand, and was shot
in the head.

David Dyer-Bennet wrote:

Currently, I'm betting against dual layer
except perhaps for people burning actual
movies onto DVD, because the dual-layer
devices are *far* behind the others in speed.

I think that by the time dual-layer standards
are agreed upon, or a marketplace de facto
standard exists, something else will come
along to replace it. Speed is an issue, as you
say, plus it isn't getting much acceptance, and
the need for a 2x improvement in storage isn't
there, IMHO, to justify replacing all the existing
burner hardware that people saved up for.

... you might want to stick to WAV to burn real
audio CDs, for example.

Space isn't an issue for me, so I don't mess with
MP3s. I don't like the i-Tunes delivery method,
all the proprietary craparoonie, either. I rip and
burn WAVs only, and don't use an i-Pod or
any other walk-around device.

... you certainly should be able to run my archived
copy of Windows 98 on the open-source 8086
architecture emulator, and then load the archived
Fuji RAW converter EX.

Right, but that requires a geekly presence. ;-)

...we'll always be able to convert the RAW files.
Besides, worst case all we need is to know the *format*;
software can be created as needed.

OK, but we're still talking a couple of decades hence, right?
Can we even assume the PC standard will remain as we know
it now? I suppose as long as there are developers, we can
assume someone will be able to kludge a converter for
existing Canon RAW to a usable application of the future
-- maybe. But look at standards like displays -- RBG --
and printing -- CMYK -- and so on. There is no guarantee
that the product standards won't change as well. Now this
is a longshot, I admit, but when you're dependent upon an
entire chain of data, converter, reader, application, hardware,
display and output, well, any major changes in those can
put a serious crimp in your ability to access today's data
in today's format. Look at how the concept of gamut is
changing as LCD replaces CRT (except in high-end
graphics workstations.)

Even in movie production, HD-Digital is replacing film,
and our concept of film-stock "look" is evolving.

Add into that mix, if it's you that will be accessing the data,
your own health and finances, which can change over time.
You may not be able to muster up the energy or money
to devote to a conversion project.

And as for the industry -- there is no incentive in standing
still for corporations selling either software or hardware.
Sales growth is only enhanced by obsolescence. It's to
their advantage to see to it that you can't use today's
equipment tomorrow, within reason.

None of that is true for archival-quality photographic
prints. You hang 'em on a wall, store 'em in a vault,
and hundreds of years later -- there they are. As long
as people have eyes and hands. That doesn't seem to
be changing, except maybe in Chernobyl.

I've already gone on record as saying *50* years
will be no problem for current JPEG format; so 16
is no problem.

I'll meet you back here, wearing diapers, in 20.

The analog transfers are problematic, yes. I hope
a lot of the 16mm is being digitized directly.

I believe so now. When I had it done, it wasn't.
That was years ago, actually before everything
was going digital. Since then, the film itself has
begun to crumble and has lost all its contrast.
It's probably unusable now.

You keep comparing to word processors and page
layout programs; but in both those cases, the market
was captured by proprietary formats. That's very
different from the case of images. The image market is
dominated by TIFF and JPEG, which are broadly
supported across all software in the marketplace.

Ah, I see where you're coming from. OK, good point.
I'll concede that. My argument then is strictly from
a technology advancement point of view, then.
Except you never know when today's open-source
item is tomorrow's patented variation. As long as
people like Bill Gates come along to glom other
folks' work and demand royalties, then take it
proprietary, even TIFF and JPEG are at risk in
the future. CP/M became DOS became Windows
and all was Microsoft. It takes time, but avarice
can destroy any community-owned property
when backed by forceful attorneys.

... we're just quibbling about whether it's
16 years or 50 years.

Yes, I agree. And I'm speaking I think mostly to those
who think they can just archive family digital photos
on CDs, stick them in a drawer, and hand 'em to the
kids for use in 50 years. That won't work.

Now, I'm 56, and have photos from my great-great
grandparents that were taken in the late 1800s, so the
time scale is not unreasonable. I have family books
that are from the early 1800s, with writings and
drawings in them that are almost 200 years old.
So I'm very, very serious about all these preservation
issues. I have two daughters in the creative arts
who are interested in keeping family archives and
are also keenly trying to figure out how to deal not only
with longevity, but maintaing accessibility as the sheer
volume of this digital detritus increases exponentially
(with no attendant increase in relevance or value?)

One of the things I'm behind on, and falling further
behind on, is getting my older color work digitized.
It's fading significantly.

My earliest color prints are from the 1950s, and some
of them have faded as you describe. I do have slides from
that period that look almost as good as the day they
were developed, and I scan them when I can -- to TIFF!

David Dyer-Bennet wrote:

Currently, I'm betting against dual layer
except perhaps for people burning actual
movies onto DVD, because the dual-layer
devices are *far* behind the others in speed.

I think that by the time dual-layer standards
are agreed upon, or a marketplace de facto
standard exists, something else will come
along to replace it. Speed is an issue, as you
say, plus it isn't getting much acceptance, and
the need for a 2x improvement in storage isn't
there, IMHO, to justify replacing all the existing
burner hardware that people saved up for.

... you might want to stick to WAV to burn real
audio CDs, for example.

Space isn't an issue for me, so I don't mess with
MP3s. I don't like the i-Tunes delivery method,
all the proprietary craparoonie, either. I rip and
burn WAVs only, and don't use an i-Pod or
any other walk-around device.

... you certainly should be able to run my archived
copy of Windows 98 on the open-source 8086
architecture emulator, and then load the archived
Fuji RAW converter EX.

Right, but that requires a geekly presence. ;-)

...we'll always be able to convert the RAW files.
Besides, worst case all we need is to know the *format*;
software can be created as needed.

OK, but we're still talking a couple of decades hence, right?
Can we even assume the PC standard will remain as we know
it now? I suppose as long as there are developers, we can
assume someone will be able to kludge a converter for
existing Canon RAW to a usable application of the future
-- maybe. But look at standards like displays -- RBG --
and printing -- CMYK -- and so on. There is no guarantee
that the product standards won't change as well. Now this
is a longshot, I admit, but when you're dependent upon an
entire chain of data, converter, reader, application, hardware,
display and output, well, any major changes in those can
put a serious crimp in your ability to access today's data
in today's format. Look at how the concept of gamut is
changing as LCD replaces CRT (except in high-end
graphics workstations.)

Even in movie production, HD-Digital is replacing film,
and our concept of film-stock "look" is evolving.

Add into that mix, if it's you that will be accessing the data,
your own health and finances, which can change over time.
You may not be able to muster up the energy or money
to devote to a conversion project.

And as for the industry -- there is no incentive in standing
still for corporations selling either software or hardware.
Sales growth is only enhanced by obsolescence. It's to
their advantage to see to it that you can't use today's
equipment tomorrow, within reason.

None of that is true for archival-quality photographic
prints. You hang 'em on a wall, store 'em in a vault,
and hundreds of years later -- there they are. As long
as people have eyes and hands. That doesn't seem to
be changing, except maybe in Chernobyl.

I've already gone on record as saying *50* years
will be no problem for current JPEG format; so 16
is no problem.

I'll meet you back here, wearing diapers, in 20.

The analog transfers are problematic, yes. I hope
a lot of the 16mm is being digitized directly.

I believe so now. When I had it done, it wasn't.
That was years ago, actually before everything
was going digital. Since then, the film itself has
begun to crumble and has lost all its contrast.
It's probably unusable now.

You keep comparing to word processors and page
layout programs; but in both those cases, the market
was captured by proprietary formats. That's very
different from the case of images. The image market is
dominated by TIFF and JPEG, which are broadly
supported across all software in the marketplace.

Ah, I see where you're coming from. OK, good point.
I'll concede that. My argument then is strictly from
a technology advancement point of view, then.
Except you never know when today's open-source
item is tomorrow's patented variation. As long as
people like Bill Gates come along to glom other
folks' work and demand royalties, then take it
proprietary, even TIFF and JPEG are at risk in
the future. CP/M became DOS became Windows
and all was Microsoft. It takes time, but avarice
can destroy any community-owned property
when backed by forceful attorneys.

... we're just quibbling about whether it's
16 years or 50 years.

Yes, I agree. And I'm speaking I think mostly to those
who think they can just archive family digital photos
on CDs, stick them in a drawer, and hand 'em to the
kids for use in 50 years. That won't work.

Now, I'm 56, and have photos from my great-great
grandparents that were taken in the late 1800s, so the
time scale is not unreasonable. I have family books
that are from the early 1800s, with writings and
drawings in them that are almost 200 years old.
So I'm very, very serious about all these preservation
issues. I have two daughters in the creative arts
who are interested in keeping family archives and
are also keenly trying to figure out how to deal not only
with longevity, but maintaing accessibility as the sheer
volume of this digital detritus increases exponentially
(with no attendant increase in relevance or value?)

One of the things I'm behind on, and falling further
behind on, is getting my older color work digitized.
It's fading significantly.

My earliest color prints are from the 1950s, and some
of them have faded as you describe. I do have slides from
that period that look almost as good as the day they
were developed, and I scan them when I can -- to TIFF!

All Things Mopar wrote:

For the pictures I most care about, maybe 20,000+ car
pictures and some scans of family photos taken before I
was born 57 years ago, I periodically backup all the
folders to CD-Rs. After the burn is complete, I run my fav
thumbnail proggie, Jasc Media Center Plus 3, on the CD-R
to physically verify that the CD can be read (at least on
that day).

For really important stuff, I'll make two CD-Rs. I store
them carefully, and make additional copies twice a year
even if the old ones are ostensibly still OK.

There's a couple of main flaws to my brilliant scheme:
there's no guarantee that 1, 2, 5, 20, 50 years from now
there will be any hardware or software to read my CD-Rs,
and, what's worse, the current JPG/TIFF standards will
certainly have been eclipsed by new standards, rendering
my hundreds of picture CD-Rs unusable even if the CD-Rs
will somehow still read.

I suspect many of us older geezers have run the gamut of
78 RPM records, 45 RPM records, 33 1/3 LPs, then 8-track
tape, then cassette tape, now DVD. And, on the video side,
I've got well over 200 Beta tapes. To get hardware to play
this old stuff, I'd have to now buy used on eBay or
somewhere, once my 10-year-old Sony finally gives up the
ghost.

I think everyone's "best" method suggestions have helped
me a great deal. For the foreseeable future, I guess, I'll
continue to back up my car pics in whatever file format I
have to on whatever media I have to, including removable
HD, which are now dirt cheap.

I won't even approach the proprietary stuff, like
PhotoShop PSD files, Paint Shop Pro PSPimage files, or any
variant of RAW/NEF/whatever. It's the proprietary stuff
that'll burn your backside every time when the company
making whatever you're using quits supporting it for the
next great version of Windoze, Linux, some other O/S, or
the dingy company simply goes out-of-business (that's
happened to me twice already).

Since being burned in the early 80s a couple of times,
I've always taken my files and images into multiple
generations and formats. Since then -- over 20 years --
I haven't lost anything of importance. But I've come
very, very close. The worst failure is my own -- to delete
or synchronize (even worse!) without knowing that I'm
overwriting or deleting an important file revision. Those
few times, I've been saved by Norton Protection. I've
also come down to my last generation backup a couple
of times -- that's a scary feeling as you go through CDs,
DVDs, hard drives, tapes and Zip disks trying to find
the one file you spent 30 hours on last week!

My current scheme is to backup everything on the hard
drive data folders to two external drives, and burn all
of that to DVD-RW and CD file backups. I don't use
"image" systems, but rely on file copies only. If I need
to rebuild a system, then that's what I do. But I like
having my backups available w/o running an image app.

Periodically, I cull through the folders looking for formats
that look suspicious. I do that once a year or so -- usually
this time of year, in fact.

Don Lathrop commented courteously ...

Since being burned in the early 80s a couple of times,
I've always taken my files and images into multiple
generations and formats. Since then -- over 20 years --
I haven't lost anything of importance. But I've come
very, very close

Me, too, Don. Like you, I had some close calls but
survived, albeit with some work finding and reloading my
backups.

My current scheme is to backup everything on the hard
drive data folders to two external drives, and burn all
of that to DVD-RW and CD file backups. I don't use
"image" systems, but rely on file copies only. If I need
to rebuild a system, then that's what I do. But I like
having my backups available w/o running an image app.

I'm with you again. Only in my case, I mirror all of my
files to my wife's PC across my M$ network with router (so
she can use my cable modem). Likewise, I mirror her files
regularly to my PC.

I'm hoping that Murphy's Law about disk crashes doesn't
happen to both PCs at the same time, although there, too,
I've had some close calls, like those mini-brownouts that
kill PCs and you get file allocation errors when they come
back up.

Periodically, I cull through the folders looking for
formats
that look suspicious. I do that once a year or so --
usually
this time of year, in fact.

I save about 99 44/100% of my pics as standard JPGs with
reasonable compression which avoids artifacts. Sometimes,
like when I'm doing vector objects or layers in PSP 9,
I'll save to PNG or PSPimage, but I'm wary of that stuff
because of its proprietary nature.

Theoretically, if I never get rid of PSP, I'll be OK. But,
when Bill Gates succeeds in getting all of us that still
want Windoze to use his new 64-bit O/S, I'll have to get
new apps. That's when a company like Jasc (which sold out
to Corel in October) is vulnerable. I could wind up with
software I can't reinstall.

My graphics needs are not nearly as sophisticated or
complex as many PSP and PS CS users get into, so I can
stay with JPG or TIFF and be reasonably safe.

--
ATM, aka Jerry Rivers