
Prints - jbarham
http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2014/08/prints.html
======
lmm
Data that stays "live", that people are interested in, remains accessible - if
a torrent stays seeded, it doesn't matter that it's now on SSD rather than
magnetic hard disk. And digital media makes copying really cheap. When I meet
up with my friends for a LAN party we sync photo libraries - even the most
prolific photographers only have a few gigabytes, so it's easy for everyone to
act as a backup for everyone else.

If there are some pictures you care about, save your own copy, or several
copies of them.

Pictures that no-one cares about? They may die, but that happens to any data
that no-one cares about. The same kind of "photos at the bottom of a drawer"
phenomenon can happen with digital too - I've read stories of family photos
accidentally packaged into software releases, or of people discovering
unexpected things in a backup of a backup of a backup that was just copied
around for years without anyone looking inside it. But the vast majority of
physical photos are lost, just as the vast majority of digital ones will be.

------
mstolpm
These personal memories already are often not valued by children and
grandchildren. A lot of photos, diapositives and super-8 or hi8 films end
being disposed every day after someone dies. And there is no museum or
collector interested in conserving them either. So, there is no guarantee that
physical media endures time.

I'd even argue that todays digital photos and videos capturing a "greater
value for society" are more likely to survive because they are often already
archived and published on the web.

Todays normal users are taking way too much (bad) photos and selfies nobody
will be interested in in 10 months, much less in 10 or 100 years. Some
pictures might be worth posting to Flickr or Facebook, but they don't have
enough longtime importance to make physical prints from them. And most likely
my children after my death won't browse in excitement through the 454 photos
I've taken with my phone on my latest trip to New York, nor the tens of
thousands of pictures rotting on my hard drive.

~~~
voltagex_
>Todays normal users are taking way too much (bad) photos and selfies nobody
will be interested in in 10 months, much less in 10 or 100 years. Some
pictures might be worth posting to Flickr or Facebook, but they don't have
enough longtime importance to make physical prints from them.

Who gets to decide what should be saved? Who gets to decide historical worth?
My guess would be archaeologists and historians, and how do you know what will
be interesting or useful to them 100s of years in the future?

~~~
sdrothrock
> Who gets to decide what should be saved? Who gets to decide historical
> worth?

Even if someone tries to decide what should be saved or what might be worth
something, it's really hard to figure out what will be rare/unknown in the
future -- if you can figure that out, you can probably make a fortune hoarding
something like Beanie Babies to resell down the road.

There's a collection of random snapshots that someone took in a mall in the
early 90s [1] that pops up on imgur and reddit every now and then. They were
originally taken to compare malls across America, but now they're actually
interesting from a cultural/historical perspective.

[1] [http://imgur.com/a/TkLmh](http://imgur.com/a/TkLmh)

------
enneff
This is one of the reasons Camlistore exists
([http://camlistore.org](http://camlistore.org)). Its storage format was
designed with digital archaeology in mind. If you can preserve the bits
themselves, the format of the data should be self-evident.

The trick, of course, is making sure the bits are preserved. I hope that one
day each of my descendants will keep an enneff.tar.gz somewhere in their
files—much like the shoebox in the cupboard—so that future generations can see
how cute my rabbits were.

~~~
4ad
The Camlistore storage format is self evident, however, most blobs you put in
Camlistore are not. Maybe you can reverse engineer the Matroska container you
keep your movies in, but can you reverse engineer h.264?

Even jpeg would be very hard to reverse engineer.

Presumably you can add instructions, or even source code, for decoding
pictures, sounds and movies. But then you get into technical problems and
there's no guarantee the average grand-grand-children of the future will have
the skill or time to use these information.

~~~
enneff
I doubt our great grandchildren will forget how to decode JPEG or h264. We
haven't forgotten how to read Latin.

------
jbarham
This post really resonated with me. As someone born in the 70's, all of the
photos taken of my childhood were shot on film and displayed and preserved as
prints. Over the years, my parents selected ("curated") the best of those
prints and put them into a photo album that is a physical record of my
childhood. Sure some of the older photos are somewhat faded and discoloured,
but they're still a good record of the occasion, and, more importantly, as a
physical vs. a digital artifact, my album needs no technical expertise to
store or view.

By contrast my eldest son was born in 2008 so all of the photos I've taken of
him, and his brothers born since, have been digital. Every week my wife and I
go through the photos we've taken (on our increasingly cumbersome DSLR and two
smartphones) and post the best, with brief comments, to a private family blog.
In many ways the blog is superior to my childhood photo album, but I'm also
thinking about how to best preserve it in physical form for my own sons so
that when they are my age they will have a tangible record of their childhoods
even if blogspot.com is dead and gone.

------
aaronbrethorst
I'm far more confident of the longevity of JPGs than your average inkjet photo
print. You need to spend upwards of $1000 for a pigment printer, use acid-free
fiber paper, use acid-free mat board, and place it behind UV-filtering glass
to give it a good shot at multi-generational longevity. No mean feat.

~~~
greenyoda
The problem isn't the JPEG file format, it's the media the JPEG files are
stored on. If your child finds an old CD or USB drive of yours 50 years from
now, they're not likely to be able to retrieve any data from it (just like you
can't read a DECtape today). And the on-line services that you store your
photos on today are not likely to be around in 50 years either. For your JPEG
file to survive, you'd have to actively keep on transferring it from one
medium or service to another.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
> For your JPEG file to survive, you'd have to actively keep on transferring
> it from one medium or service to another.

Or go through all of the steps I outlined above. I'm hoping to do both. Well,
actually, I need to upgrade to a pigment printer. I have Canon's prosumer
Pro-100 right now, and would love to pick up the -10 or -1 at some point.

But the images I _really_ care about are all shot on medium format black and
white film, Fuji Acros 100, which I develop, scan, and print[1] from myself.

[1] i.e. both silver gelatin on fiber in the darkroom, and inkjet on fiber as
needed.

------
columbo
>> If the images exist only as a digital image file, the answer is almost
certainly, "No".

Hrm I don't quite understand. Right now just about every important element of
modern history is being saved in raw formats, as well as jpegs, pngs, psds and
the like.

Are we assuming that a hundred years from now we'll have completely lost the
ability to view these images and videos?

London 1970s
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPIaG644jsI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPIaG644jsI)

London 1990s
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c84k4Tkj6wc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c84k4Tkj6wc)

London 2000s
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSTh80Aybjs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSTh80Aybjs)

In a hundred years we'll lose the ability to view all of this and only
physical copies will survive? How are we even supposed to store video then?
You can't print it out, and if you burn it to a CD it's just as useless.

Not being able to plug your 40 year old USB memory stick into whatever-magic-
future-technology exists is one thing, but there's no reason whatever-magic-
future-technology wont be able to run a little virtualized system that can
display it for you.

I'd say the opposite. In a hundred years 3d printers would have gotten to the
point where they could just make some sort of peripheral on the fly to view
old CDs, records, and even tape drives. In the future if you're browsing the
thrift store and you come across a pristine CD of Silpheed I bet you could
walk into your local 'maker' shop and they'll print you out a Sega CD to play
it on.

~~~
slyall
No, what will happen is that sometime in the next 50 years a DMCA request will
coming for removal of those films due to images or music on them. One is
entitled "Rush Hour" so will probably be caught up in a sweep for copies of
the Jackie Chan film of the same name.

Or youtube will go out of business (like the original google video). Or in 5
years the people who posted the videos will pull them down as their business
model changes.

If you want to see it already on youtube create a playlist of videos
especially music videos. After about a year 10% of them will have been
removed.

------
kmtrowbr
I have strong opinions about this. I think the skills needed to maintain a
"digital archive" are actually fairly advanced. For example, my cousin had
many photos of their children growing up on an old computer. The computer
crashed and, they lost all the photos. I think this is actually a very common
story.

------
rsl7
The most important point that often gets lost is to curate your photos. You
should have a collection of the best of the best, which can easily be copied
everywhere all the time. I have about 500 or so from the last 15 years of
digital photography (my kids, mostly) that rise to this status, and about
50-60 on top.

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asperous
I'm not sure this translates. If it was that important, couldn't they have
reversed engineered the format and built a new (even basic) system to read it?

Furthermore, if you have digital copies of the data and old versions of the
software, you can virtualize/emulate the software to recover it.

~~~
enneff
That doesn't help when the bits have literally fallen off the tapes.

~~~
glomph
That is an argument for better digital storage. Not cumbersome and expensive
dead tree storage.

~~~
joeclark77
I don't think it has to be one or the other. Why not both?

------
voltagex_
My favourite example of digital archaeology from recent years is
[http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/04/source/](http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/04/source/)
\- saving the Prince of Persia floppies.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnEWBtCnFs8)

------
arcticsoul
Anyway, almost nobody is actually making backups and keeping them around in
obsolescing file formats on rotting media.

They are uploading everything to facebook or google or apple, leaving all the
details of long-term storage and display to them. Where will those services
and that user content be in 20 or 100 years?

------
tatqx
We know next to nothing about the historical architecture and culture of
tropical countries because they made house out of bricks and straw, and wrote
on clay tablets. Historians lament this fact and descendants like us have
little to lean on and build upon culturally.

------
facepalm
Instead of finding shoe boxes in the attic, in the future we will run data
mining scripts that find information in the crazy wide ocean of information
out there - like our grandparents Facebook profiles.

