Ask HN: How do you plan to view family photos is 60 years?

[DougN7]

As I change out a failing backup hard drive, I'm wondering what will happen to all of my family photos when I'm 80 years old? Or when I'm dead and gone?

Will my kids know where they are? If they're not technical, will they know how to keep moving them to fresher media? Will I remember to mention it to them once my health starts to fail? Will file formats, or disk formats, still be readable? I can't read anything on an 8" disk anymore.

Online/cloud might be an obvious answer now, but will I remember necessary password or email addresses in 40 more years? And will the photo site still exist? It will probably get bought and merged, and then the parent gets bought and merged, etc. Our industry is so young, it's hard to imagine any photo site lasting 50-100 years. IBM is probably our oldest example, and it is vastly different from who it was 30 years ago. Where would the photos be if they had had a storage service back in the 80s?

Though doing things on paper is hard to transmit and duplicate, it's pretty easy for it to survive a few hundred years.

[dorfuss]

A very good question. Some time ago I've heard that big libraries and archives print digital photos back to film because it is much more durable than the modern media and the picture really exists and is visible. A different problems I have with text files which would seem much less of an issue. But I have already thousands of e-mails and text, how can I be sure that in 40-80 years there will be machines or programs that could read my old text files.

[pwg → dorfuss]

> But I have already thousands of e-mails and text, how can I be sure that in 40-80 years there will be machines or programs that could read my old text files.

You actually have a much better probability of being able to at least view the contents of the text files on a machine 40-80 years in the future than if the same data was in some other format. I.e., try to find a way today to read an old WordStar, WordPerfect, or XYWrite file from the dos world. And those programs are not yet 40 years old... Yet a same age ASCII text file (assuming you migrated it off of floppies along the way) is still readable.

[jasomill → pwg]

Assuming you can read the media, it's actually not hard to read old DOS word processing formats on modern PCs: both software and services exist to convert them, and, worst-case scenario, you can still run old DOS word processing software on modern PCs through virtualization and emulation.

Wang WPS files on open-reel tape, say, or Locoscript files on Amstrad 3" (not 3.5"!) floppies, are admittedly much harder to convert, but by no means impossible. Worst-case scenario, firms exist that'll convert things like this as a service.

[jasomill → dorfuss]

"Some time ago," these libraries and archives probably already had staff familiar with film preservation, and processes in place to do so. While preserving digital photos is an inherently easier task than preserving negatives and prints — neither of which can be stored, duplicated, or even viewed without at least some amount of degradation — the skills and processes required are very different.

Professional archivists aren't simply going to stick digital media in a climate-controlled vault and assume it'll be accessible in 80 years, and, if you care about your photos, neither should you!

Putting (perfectly tractable) media preservation issues aside, most common lossy and lossless image formats have open, published specs for both image data and metadata, so I wouldn't anticipate problems reading these in the future — can you honestly imagine a non-apocalyptic future where JPEG, TIFF, or PNG files won't be viewable in 80 years? Unprocessed, proprietary camera raw files pose more interesting problems, of course.

[User8712]

I'm in the process of scanning the family's old film, photos, and converting VHS tapes. I'll save all the original scans, and digital video into a folder which will now become the new originals (old ones still kept and boxed away). This is going to get backed up off-site in case of a house fire.

First off, this is the hardest part. Once everything is digital, keeping a future copy is simple as long as people are interested. I wouldn't worry about file formats too much, just use popular image and video formats, and it'll be easy to access for the foreseeable future.

Things to keep these available...

1. I'll inform all of my siblings of the files I have backed up, and basically copy them to a large USB key or external drive and label it. If I die, they easily have another copy.

2. I'm going to issue a copy of the files to my siblings. They might not be quite as tech savy as the HN community, but they take a lot of photos themselves, and they know how to manage them, back them up on drives in folders, etc. The more copies, and more people that have them, the better odds someone will carry them on. I'll also give a copy to my parents and grandparents, simply so they can view them any time.

[gyom]

During the transition period between the old media and the new, they'll have the opportunity to transfer everything.

We had VHS tapes for our family videos. Now we have them as video compressed with h264. If that format is getting phased out, we'll just transfer to the latest format. Some degradation may occur when switching codecs, just like when transferring from VHS to digital, but that's fair.

You don't have to come up with a solution that lasts 80 years. You just need to survive 10-20 years until you transfer to the next media that makes sense for you. Keep redundant copies off-site.

[DougN7 → gyom]

That's what I've been doing, but it requires: 1. Know-how : my wife couldn't do this 2. Know where : finding digital photos is harder than a physical album, especially for a non-techie (again, my wife has no idea where photos are stored, she just uses a short cut I set up for her, if I remember to do it). Kids don't know or care right now.

[lazyjones]

I try to keep multiple copies of digital pictures and occasionally I use a Fujifilm Instax camera to take instant photos (which should last a few decades if treated properly - but it's a bit of a gamble, since noone I know has convincing arguments to support that claim).

For exceptionally good photos, I'm considering prints on aluminum. These should last 50 years or longer with a little less care than Polaroids/Instax (i.e. they can be exposed to light).

[ishbits]

My wife occasionally gets those hardcover albums printed up. I suspect that collection will require, and barring a fire will carry in.

I do pretty well and backups of our ever growing photo collection (about 100gb) now. But at some point I may hit an age or health state where I don't care. I guess I can hope one of my kids will have an interest.

Really I should trim that photo collection down to a must have set.

[jdhopeunique]

This seems like a perfect use case for print your own book services. You could create a book with a family tree, organize photos by history and have captions and titles, and have copies to give to family. One day historians may discover your family book and learn something about our time.

[tekknolagi]

A guy came into my class and talked about his product, http://liveon.com.

I haven't personally looked into it, and it looks like they are still testing, but this seems to answer your question.

[namlem]

Dropbox keeps stuff synced between drives, so my files are on the hard drives of multiple devices and on their servers. Every time I get a new device, new copies are made.

[utunga]

I'm a programmer and my wife is a qualified paper conservator. A year or so ago I registered materialsonpaper.com with the idea that it could combine our two skillsets.

I envisioned a service where we'd help you curate your digital photos (and other important documents), print them on archival paper, and box them in a way that will keep them cool and well cared for and then post back to you. We also contemplated that we might also provide storage services for a second copy.

Would anybody here be interested in such a service?

[001sky]

Consider making prints on archival paper. Although this seems "lo-tech" making 20 prints a year for 40 years would give you 8 volumes of 100 images. That would be a nice archive, not so unweildy as to be a problem, yet also readily shared and visually inventoried.

The issue of even file-formats is problematic when it comes to digital images. One has to ask are NEF and CR2 files going to be infinitely readable? Are canon and nikon themselves going to last 40 years? And if so, provide backward compatibility? and if Not, when and where and to what quality should we trandfer the information to something more archival?

It's not clear at all. So I think this is a great question to ask, consider, and ponder solutions for.

[glenda → 001sky]

Archival prints are great, and I agree that this seems like the best way to pas on your images after you die. However, I don't think there's going to be a problem with most RAW formats as long as computers can compile and run dcraw.

It seems like the most archival storage for images is to just write the uncompressed pixel data, width, height etc... to a file. Something like PPM, I guess.

[snowwrestler]

If you want paper pictures to persist for decades, you have to be careful about how you store them--a hot attic, or damp basement, can destroy prints or slides over that timespan.

So, you need to be careful with digital pictures too. Keep copies locally and remotely, and carefully keep track of passwords for hosted services.

This is not just limited to pictures. How do you manage your finances? Do you have the passwords stored in a place where your family can get to them in an emergency?

[tjr → snowwrestler]

How do you manage your finances?

An interesting, and probably useful, comparison. I would not expect to even try to set up my finances to persist indefinitely beyond my lifetime; I would hand that responsibility over to my children. If the banks I had used went out of business, they would need to take action to move the money to different banks.

I can do my best to maintain photo backups, either film or digital, but there's no plausible way to set up backups that last forever without eventually turning stewardship of those backups over to someone else. So rather than setting out to depend on Amazon or Flickr or whatever, understand what makes a backup service reliable in the short term, and pass that understanding on.