How should I permanently store digital photographs?

I too say "relax". Jpeg is not going anywhere soon. Just back up on
cd's, make sure they are good, and you'll be all set. If you got a
lot, get a tape drive. Your biggest problem was using an old MAC
format, of course it took forever to work with that dog. Buy Fuji cd's
made in Japan, they are the best right now. Don't worry about format
changes now, it's not like digital photo's just came out.

Xiaoding

writes:

So what would you guys say is the best file type, media format and
media type to use if I want them to be easily accessible for decades?

TIFF if possible (LZW compression is okay), else JPEG. I sometimes
archive PSD (Photoshop files) but *not* as the only copy; just as a
way to save the components of my work without flattening all the
layers. I always archive camera originals even if the format is
proprietary; but I don't let a proprietary format be the *only* copy
of anything I care about. Sometimes I end up with a RAW file that I
don't do anything with but also don't quite delete, and in that one
case the proprietary RAW format is sometimes the only archive copy.
But there are already multiple applications including Photoshop itself
that can read my camera's RAW format, actually.

For media -- there's no single medium you can put the files on and be
happily confident that they're good for 100 years, really. The Kodak
or Mitsui gold CD-Rs are speced for over 100 years, but that's based
on accelerated testing (obviously!) and is a better indication of
their life compared to other CD-Rs than of their *absolute* life.

Because there's no absolutely rock-solid stable storage solution, and
also to a lesser extent because of media and file format changes
possible or likely in the future, a digital archive requires *constant
attention*. You can't just write it once and forget it.

I keep all the pictures on my hard drive, and also make multiple CD
and DVD offline copies, some of which live outside my house. I try to
check up on their state fairly regularly (which is easier now that my
mother's computer has a DVD drive in it).

While in the long-long run of course media and file formats will
evolve, I'll point out that CDs have been around for over 20 years,
and that I can still buy a turntable for their *predecessor* medium at
mainstream audio stores; and that all DVD drives I've seen can read
CDs. And that JPEG and TIFF have been the obvious archive file
formats since pretty darned early. I'm not terribly worried about
file format problems, at least, in my lifetime.
--
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/

"Joseph Meehan" writes:

wrote:

...
So what would you guys say is the best file type, media format and
media type to use if I want them to be easily accessible for decades?

As you have noticed there is no one best solution. I will suggest a few
ideas which you or other may or may not have considered.

Let's face the fact that a good archival quality print is going to last
100 - 300 years and will not require any technology other than our eyes to
view it and it can be copied by many different technologies now an in the
future.

What medium are you going to make this good archival quality print in
to get that kind of lifespan? The only choices for color prints I
know that approach those numbers are dye transfer, and perhaps
pigmented inkjet prints.

Digital storage of digital images maintains the most data, even
more than a good print. However every time you change formats, you
loose some of that data.

That is not true. I can go from jpeg to tiff to png without *any*
loss of data. And I can go from hard drive to CD to DVD without any
loss of data.

Digital storage is not forever. CD's and DVD's are long lived.
Well at least the commercial ones are. Home burned disk are not the
same. Some last longer than others non meet the 100 year test, at
least yet. and as you have noted, it may well be difficult to find
something to read them with 100 years from now.

There will be no *sudden* loss of the ability to read CDs or DVDs,
though.

Actually home-burned ones are probably *longer* lived than pressed
ones, if kept out of bright light (their one weakness).

Making new copies is always a good idea, and if you keep up with
changing technology with each new copy reading them should not be a problem.
However if you are like me, you just will not keep up.

Yes, exactly. A digital archive does require constant review and
renewal as necessary.

Note: if they are really important, you need to make two copies
and keep one on site and another at a distant off site location.
Things like floods can cause damage within a large area.

And that's something you can't do with an analog original -- well, you
can, but the copy is degraded relative to the original.

I back up to a second computer on my LAN. That gives me two
copies. About every two or three years I try to get around to
making a few CD's and sending them to out of town relatives.

I get my off-sites updated multiple times a year, at least. But not
monthly or anything *really* good.
--
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/

Aerticulean Effort writes:

There is a wonderful consumer product that can accommodate 100 DVDs or
CDs or a combination of both.

It will fit on a desk as the disks are stored by order without the cases

What's its archival permanence like? All the studies I've seen on CD
archiving say they must be stored *in jewel cases* and upright (as
well as in decent temp and humidity, and in the dark) to last a long
time.
--
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/

Jim Townsend writes:

wrote:


While recording medium is advertised to last a century, I've had CD-Rs
that was readable immediately after recording and went unredable a year
later. Recordable CD technology has been around for merely a decade
and there simply isn't a track record to validate the longevity claims
in real life. In the event the recorded data lasts three decades, I'm
not sure if there's a way to playback CD-Rs few decades from now.

So what would you guys say is the best file type, media format and
media type to use if I want them to be easily accessible for decades?

There is no 'best' media or file format..

Regular photos and negatives could be placed in a shoebox and
forgotten about, but digital images requre some upkeep. If you
aren't prepared to do that, stick with film.

And a lot of pictures from my parents, and some of mine, that were
stored better than in a shoe box, are already badly faded (only about
50 years old). I'd be willing to bet that three CD copies on Mitsui
Gold CDs would end up outlasting that by a lot (at least one of the
three).

Back up frequently. Have several copies of your images and at least one copy
kept off of and away from the computer.

Very very VERY good advice, yes.

Keep up with technology. I have some files that originally came on 8
inch floppy. They still live on my hard drive and also backed up to
DVD.

If TIFF or JPEG dissapear, then just convert the files to whatever format
is in vogue at the time.

Yes; you do have to pay attention a bit, and media and file formats
*may* change (media is nearly certain to over a long enough timespan),
but they won't change *suddenly*, so if you're paying attention you'll
have plenty of warning to convert over.

Another argument is "Who's going to do this when I'm gone". Of
course the answer is.. Whoever cares about your images. The "care"
thing is important.. because even photos and negatives aren't a
safer way to preserve what you have the next 10 million years..

Yes. Exactly.

So I'm going to make some attempts to get copies of my images into the
hands of people who might care. Friends and relatives, and also
historians; the local historical society might find uses for my
pictures from various places I've lived, etc. Clubs or club members
devoted to the same interests. School archives. Even possibly
various university collections if you rubbed shoulders with relatively
famous people in some portions of your life.
--
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/

On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 16:04:37 GMT, Owamanga wrote:

Trolling babble removed

For images of VGA resolution, the best way to store them is in a
shredder.

So they can sit next to your brain...

On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 16:04:37 GMT, Owamanga wrote:

Trolling babble removed

For images of VGA resolution, the best way to store them is in a
shredder.

So they can sit next to your brain...

wrote in message
oups.com...
You'll want to read this article:


http://www.basic-digital-photography...al-photos.html

Gary

That article really did not address archival storage issues. It was written
for digital novices.

Digital imaging presents few problems when the files are going to be
used/accessed over the short term, i.e., under 5 years. Whatever format and
media type we use will still be readable in 5 years.

The big concern is what happens to digital image files over the long term.
The OP noted that he was barely able to access his 8-year-old digital files.
It is apparent that some long-term strategy should be implemented if we want
our images to be accessible for a longer term, even if we don't plan on
their being viewable for, say, 100 years.

"David Dyer-Bennet" wrote in

While in the long-long run of course media and file formats will
evolve, I'll point out that CDs have been around for over 20 years,
and that I can still buy a turntable for their *predecessor* medium at
mainstream audio stores; and that all DVD drives I've seen can read
CDs. And that JPEG and TIFF have been the obvious archive file
formats since pretty darned early. I'm not terribly worried about
file format problems, at least, in my lifetime.
--

Here is an interesting excerpt from a report from the Council on Library and
Information Resources, which notes some of the problems with LONG-TERM
archiving of documents. The opinions expressed apply equally to
photographs.

"Digitization is not Preservation-at Least not Yet
All recorded information, from the paintings on the walls of caves and
drawings in the sand, to clay tablets and videotaped speeches, has value,
even if temporary, or it would not have been recorded to begin with. That
which the creator or transcriber deems to be of enduring value is written on
a more or less durable medium and entrusted to the care of responsible
custodians. Other bits of recorded information, like laundry lists and tax
returns, are created to serve a temporary purpose and are allowed to vanish.
Libraries and archives were created to collect and make available that which
has long-term value. And libraries and archives serve not only to safeguard
that information, but also to provide evidence of one type or another of the
work's provenance, which goes towards establishing the authenticity of that
work.

Though digitization is sometimes loosely referred to as preservation, it is
clear that, so far, digital resources are at their best when facilitating
access to information and weakest when assigned the traditional library
responsibility of preservation. Regrettably, because digitization is a type
of reformatting, like microfilming, it is often confused with preservation
microfilming and seen as a superior, if as yet more expensive, form of
preservation reformatting. Digital imaging is not preservation, however.
Much is gained by digitizing, but permanence and authenticity, at this
juncture of technological development, are not among those gains.

The reasons for the weakness of digitization as a preservation treatment are
complex. Microfilm, the preservation reformatting medium of choice, is
projected to last several centuries when made on silver halide film and kept
in a stable environment. It requires only a lens and a light to read, unlike
computer files, which require hardware and software, both of which are
developed in often proprietary forms that quickly become obsolete, rendering
information on them inaccessible. At present, the retrieval of information
encoded in an obsolete file format and stored on an obsolete medium (such as
8-inch floppy diskettes) is extremely expensive and labor-intensive, when at
all possible. Often the medium on which digital information is recorded is
itself inherently unstable. Magnetic tape is one example of a common digital
medium that requires special care and handling and has been known to degrade
within a decade, beyond the point where information can be recovered.
Magnetic forms of analog recording, such as video and audio tape, are
equally fragile and unreliable for long-term storage. In its inherent
physical fragility, magnetic tape is not different in essence from the acid
paper so widely produced in the last 150 years, but its life span is often
dramatically shorter than that of poor quality paper.

More important even than the durability of the medium is the need to keep
the data fresh and encoded in readable file formats. Ongoing investigations
into two possible ways of ensuring data persistence-the migration of data
from one software and hardware configuration to a more current one, and the
creation of software that emulates obsolete encoding formats-may develop
solutions to this problem. As yet, we have no tested and reliable technique
for ensuring continued access to digital data of enduring value, although
information stored on nonproprietary formats such as ASCII has been migrated
successfully (in the case, for example, of specific government records).
Nevertheless, migration from one software to another does not produce a new
file exactly identical to the old one. Though data loss may not necessarily
mean loss of intellectual content, the file has been changed.

Another reason that preservation goals are in some fundamental way
challenged by digital imaging is that it is quite difficult to ascertain the
authenticity and integrity of an image, database, or text when it is in
digital form. How can one tell if a digital file has been tampered with and
the content changed or falsified? Looked at from the traditional perspective
of published or manuscript materials, it is futile even to try: there is no
original with which to compare a suspect file. Copies can be deceptively
faithful: one cannot tell the difference between the original output of a
scan of the Declaration of Independence, and one that is output four months
later. In contravention of a core principle of archival authenticity, one
can change the bit stream of a file and leave no record of its having been
altered. There is much research and development being dedicated to solving
the dilemma posed by the stunning fidelity of digital cloning, including
methods for marking images and time-stamping them, but as yet there is no
solution.

Authenticity may not be important for a digital image of a well-known
document like the Declaration of Independence, in which access to either the
analog original or a good photographic image is easy enough to obtain for
comparison's sake. But anyone who has seen the digitally engineered
commercial in which Fred Astaire can be seen dancing with a vacuum cleaner
can readily understand the ease with which improbable digital occurrences
can become real because we can be made to see them. After all, the evidence
is before our eyes, and our eyes cannot detect a falsehood. It is our
cognitive reasoning that detects that falsehood, not our eyes. That image of
the suave, gliding across the floor with the functional, startles and amuses
us because it confounds our expectations.

But what if we arrive at a library Web site, for example, looking for an
image that we have never seen and about which we have few expectations. The
only reason that we expect that image to be a truthful representative of the
original is that we can rely on the integrity of the institution that has
mounted the files and makes them available to us. We transfer the confidence
we experience in the reading room of that library to our work station,
wherever it may be. We go to the New York Public Library Web site with the
full expectation that the library "guarantees" the integrity of the images
they mount. But it would be very hard indeed for a researcher in Alaska
looking at New York Public Library's Digital Schomburg site to verify
independently that any given image is indeed a faithful representation of
the original.

The problem of authenticity is far from unique to the digital realm. Forgers
and impostors have a distinguished history of operating successfully and
often long undetected in print and photographic media, although they have
had to work harder and smarter than their digital counterparts. The
traditional methods for authenticating documents that have served the
library and archival professions well until now have relied largely on
practices derived from markers carried on the physical medium itself. After
a textual examination to look for obvious differences in content,
researchers have often then examined the physical carrier itself-the book or
manuscript leaf-to see if there are any signs of modification or
falsification. From a simple examination of watermarks to a variety of
sophisticated chemical, optical, and physical tests that can verify the age
of paper, the composition of inks, and the physical traces of erasures and
palimpsests, researchers have resorted to a number of strategies to verify
the authenticity of a document. Granted, there are few who routinely insist
on that level of authentication in doing research, but that is because the
pitfalls of using books, manuscripts, and visual materials are familiar to
us and we tend to discount them without much conscious thought. We should be
wary of reposing the same quality of trust in digital resources that we do
in print and photographic media until we are equally familiar with their
evidentiary weaknesses.

As in other forms of reformatting, digital scanning has implications for the
original item and its physical integrity. Depending on the policy of a
library or archival institution, the original of a scanned item may or may
not be retained after reformatting. To the extent that a reader can make do
without handling the original, the digital preservation surrogate can serve
to protect it from wear and tear. If there is concern that the scanning
process could damage materials, one would choose to scan a film version of
the original.

The advantages of scanning for access purposes may be combined with those of
preservation microfilming by using the model of hybrid conversion, that is,
creating preservation-standard microfilm and scanning it for digital access
purposes, or, conversely, beginning with a high-quality scan of the original
and creating computer-output microfilm (COM) for preservation purposes. Work
is presently underway to articulate and refine best practices for
implementing the hybrid approach to reformatting so that it can be adopted
by libraries across the country. Of course COM, unlike microfilm created
from the original, is only a recording of digital images on an analog
medium. Though it has been fixed on a durable medium, some would argue that
the image itself, having been generated digitally, has lost some essential
information-or has at least lost its fundamental analog character-and cannot
therefore claim to be as desirable for preservation as film made by
photographing the original source.

Although this may seem a minor point to those more interested in easy access
than in that level of authenticity, it is still important to understand that
digital technology transforms analog information radically. There has to be
some loss of information when an analog item is made digital, just as there
is when one analog copy is made from another. On the other hand, there is
virtually no loss of information from one generation of a digital copy to
another. Images will not degrade when copied, in contrast to microfilm,
which loses about 10 percent of its information with each copy. Once there
is more than one copy of a digital file, it is impossible to pick out the
original, and one will never speak of "vintage files" the way that one now
speaks of vintage photographs. On the other hand, digital images are less
likely to decay in storage if they are refreshed, the images will not
degrade when copied, and the digital files will not decay in use, unlike
paper, film, and magnetic tape."

"David Dyer-Bennet" wrote in message
...

I can go from jpeg to tiff to png without *any*
loss of data. And I can go from hard drive to CD to DVD without any
loss of data.


Although I am not technically qualified to comment on this point, I would
like to mention that I did read a rather technical article that discussed
conversion of file formats. Apparently it IS possible to lose data when
going from one format to another, because not all formats store the same
amount of data. The other point that the writer noted was that it could be
a real problem if an image was migrated from, say, Format "A" to Format "B,"
and then from Format "B" to Format "C," and later from Format "C" to Format
"D." While this type of scenario might not be probable within the
photographer's own lifetime, it is almost a certainty if images are
refreshed over a span of several generations (human generations).

I was storing my digital files in FlashPix format up to just 3 years ago,
believing that it was the closest thing to Kodak's ImagePac ("Photo CD")
format. Then one day, all support for FlashPix was withdrawn and the format
died. Almost overnight. I understand that PhotoShop no longer supports
that format. What good will my CDs full of FlashPix images be in, say 25
years?

I could go on, but you surely get the picture. We just do not know for sure
what the future will bring, in terms of file formats. I understand that TIF
is now on its 6th version (Adobe acquired it from Aldus when they bought the
PageMaker program. Anyone remember Aldus?)

Lotus 1-2-3 files from version 1 (the DOS version) are not readable in the
current Windows version. When IBM bought Lotus, some of the technical and
engineering staff left, taking their knowledge with them.

If this is what we get in 20 years, what can we expect in 75 years?
Meanwhile, those old film negatives can be reprinted (and digitally enhanced
if their colors have faded or shifted) without any problem . . .