The Most Photographed Generation Will Have No Pictures in 10 Years!

[Willie]

You must have extraordinarily unlucky acquaintances. I'm in my 50s and don't know a single person who has lost a single photograph or negative to house fire.

How do thumb drives fare in house fires?

Peter Stackpole lost a lot of his work in the Oakland Hills, CA fire.

" a 25-year career with Life after it was started in 1936. Stackpole joined the late Thomas McAvoy and the legendary and better-known Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bourke-White as the entire Life photo staff. Stackpole's work graced 26 covers of the news photo magazine. He was the first to make informal photographs of film stars relaxing in their homes, giving fans more informative images than the studio portraits they were accustomed to seeing. Among those he photographed were Errol Flynn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Alfred Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, Orson Welles and Elizabeth Taylor. In 1991, Stackpole lost virtually all of his 60-year collection of negatives in the Oakland Hills fire."

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My Uncle was very concerned about digital files for some time and finally started accepting it when a photojournalist he know was killed in 911 and his Compact Flash card survived to provide images. Most film in those conditions would have been in worse condition. http://www.billbiggart.com/911.html

I use digital as well as film, mainly large format film. Both provide enjoyment and images that I like. Framed with current Conservation framing practices helps give me a chance for the images to last their longest. I can't ask much more than that.

A "Carrington Event" with solar energy may well hit and wipe out most all of the non-protected electronic media. Film should survive - but the 1856 solar storm it is named after caused fires in telegraph office from all the juice coming over the lines. That happening might be a problem for my negatives and prints both. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

Maybe I should put tin foil hats on the computers and carry around a bottle of beer to put out the fires that might threaten my negatives?

[TXFZ1]

You must have extraordinarily unlucky acquaintances. I'm in my 50s and don't know a single person who has lost a single photograph or negative to house fire.

How do thumb drives fare in house fires?

I would think it would be destroyed just like any other physical object. Thankfully if it happened to me, I do not use thumbdrives to store my photographs.

David

[jp]

Statistically, people are more likely to lose data (nonexistant or inadequate backups, etc...) than images to a fire/flood.

I help everyday people and businesses with computers. I've seen it all, but am open to being surprised with new & stupid ways to lose data. Right now, cryptowall/cryptolocker is probably the main threat to digital data. Then failing hard drives without good backups.

Famous photographers have lost images to fire.. August Sander, F Holland Day and I'm sure many others. On D-day, Capa's negatives were melted by a darkroom worker, and d-day movie film was lost in the ocean on the return journey.

Having scans of negatives is a good backup of negatives where nothing practical or convenient existed before. I have dual offsite backups of scans and digitally captured image. Yes, media gets old and outdated and needs replacing often, but hard drives are cheap and convenient. Formats seem to change less frequently. I can still open raw files from my 2002 era Nikon D100. I can still open TIFFs and JPEGs made in the early '90s. Entirely proprietary formats should be avoided; if there is free software that can open the file, you're probably good even if the format's designer goes out of business. Those Raw files will have to get changed to something else at some point, but I expect it will be usable for quite a while.

[Lee Rust]

To transmit photos far into the future, print multiple copies of important images, label them well and send to as many people as you can. Some of them will survive for centuries.

[invisibleflash]

There is a benefit with digital that film does not have. That is the ability to make tons of exact duplicates and spread them far and wide. Of course, the electric has to be on to access them.

[invisibleflash]

To transmit photos far into the future, print multiple copies of important images, label them well and send to as many people as you can. Some of them will survive for centuries.

Yes, but many institutions reject them. They are already overloaded. Still spread them far and wide. If your photos survive and become aged, they become mare valuable. Take the 'Vivian the reclusive nanny' photos for example. Snapshots become worthwhile when they age 50 years.

Some of the film devotees admired Weston for burning his negs. It would seem those type of photogs don't really care what happens to their pix.

Online, The Wayback Machine is a good place to archive stuff.

[Lee Rust]

Yes, but many institutions reject them. They are already overloaded. Still spread them far and wide. If your photos survive and become aged, they become mare valuable. Take the 'Vivian the reclusive nanny' photos for example. Snapshots become worthwhile when they age 50 years.

I was thinking mostly of distribution to friends & family members, but local institutions would be nice.

I just finished making a photo book containing 80 shots from a recent family wedding and sent out a half dozen copies. Each of the pictures included date, location and names along the bottom so they will be identifiable even if the prints get separated from the book.

My brother has been working on a family photo history and many of the older prints from 1890-1970 have some sort of description written on the back. After that period and up through the early 2000's hardly any of the prints are identified. I'm guessing that the vast quantities of cheap color prints that were made during the mini-lab era were too overwhelming for most people to keep track of, while the relative scarcity and higher price of older snapshots, landscapes and portraits made recipients value them more.

Now that photos are digitally created and transmitted in such profusion it seems to me that hardly anybody cares what happens to social media or email images after more than a couple of days, no matter how worthy they might be. I'm fairly certain, though, that one of those wedding photo books will eventually get re-discovered inside a beat up cardboard box and some yet-unborn descendant will be able to see exactly how Granny Alex and Grandpa Jon looked on the day they got married back in January 2016.

[barnacle]

That last comment is instructive: we have family photos on three generations old that took serious research to identify: we knew *who* they were of, but we didn't know which was who... the metadata is as important as the image, perhaps.

Neil

[DrTang]

when did Kodak Photo CD's become unreadable by newer photo editing programs?

I still have a 32 bit machine somewhere, and a copy of older software that I should probably install it on to 'rescue' the images on my photo cd's

[Tin Can]

Don't know but very annoying, Kodak! I pitched them and saved the negs.

when did Kodak Photo CD's become unreadable by newer photo editing programs?

I still have a 32 bit machine somewhere, and a copy of older software that I should probably install it on to 'rescue' the images on my photo cd's