"But digital photos, while not nearly as high a resolution as a modern pro-quality camera can take, do not age themselves quite so quickly."
This is a bit of a side-track, but most families have an archive of physical photos dating back decades, you put them in an album, and 50 years later they will still be there.
Meanwhile every family I know has decade of digital photography that was lost to broken hard-drives and corroded CD's. The only way to preserve digital information is to constantly babysit it, making sure you have two/three copies and replacing the broken disks (or outsource the process to Dropbox/Onedrive/whatever).
There is no consumer-friendly process of archiving things - you can try burning it to optical, but will there be a drive to read it in 50 years? No-one I know still has an optical drive, and that's if they last.
Also, how likely are digital copies to cross generation boundaries? When grandfather dies, a family member is likely to clean out his home, find the photo album and ask "what do we do about this?". But will that happen with his digital photos?
It's easier, isn't it? Here is granddad's old HD that still works but has pitiful space compared to modern ones. Copy, paste, now you have his photos forever.
Assuming that someone has the time and interest to go through granddad's old HD, looking for stuff. Which may be in a non-obvious place, in a HD otherwise stuffed full of horse videos copied off YouTube, or other stuff that only he had any use for. The old-school physical photo album was far less likely to be overlooked and discarded.
They might be in the cloud and never catch anyone's attention at all. I think it is much about catching interest and attention. If you don't know what is on the harddrive, chances are you will not bother.
> The only way to preserve digital information is to constantly babysit it, making sure you have two/three copies and replacing the broken disks
Yes, but I babysit all my digital information via that one process, and that's a lot of information. My collection is currently sitting at just over 3 TB. That's an awful lot of photo albums, and yet it still fits on a single hard drive (per copy of all the data).
> There is no consumer-friendly process of archiving things - you can try burning it to optical, but will there be a drive to read it in 50 years?
Yeah, probably. I can still find players for Vinyl easily enough. Mind, you'd need to burn the data to one of those fancy M-Discs; normal consumer-writable discs won't last that long.
You just skipped over all the solutions to the digital problems and ignored the vulnerabilities inherent in single physical copies such as damage or loss.
I get the feeling you’ve made up your mind already.
You seem like you already have your mind made up, and you already know what people are going to suggest ahead of time! I wish I could predict the future like that
. . .
As others have pointed out, m-disks will preserve your data hundreds of years, but I personally use a RAID array. Of course in 50 years there will still be dvd readers, don't be overly alarmist.
> As others have pointed out, m-disks will preserve your data hundreds of years, but I personally use a RAID array.
Maybe it's lack of experience, but I've never actually seen an M-Disc in the wild. I get the impression that you can't use a normal disk burner to write them, so expecting the world's Joe Schmoes to use them (much less maintain a RAID array) feels unrealistic. By contrast, just about everybody knows how to put photo prints in a physical album.
> I get the impression that you can't use a normal disk burner to write them, so expecting the world's Joe Schmoes to use them
Some burners won't work with them, but there's a decent chance whichever one you happen to have will work.
> Expecting the world's Joe Schmoes to use them (much less maintain a RAID array) feels unrealistic.
This may be true, but I think we're talking about different things. I don't know that I care so much about what other people decide to do with their photos, it's their loss. I care about what I can do and what I'd recommend to friends/family/strangers who are concerned about this.
> Just about everybody knows how to put photo files on a computer, too. The issue was how to protect against loss.
Actually, they don't. My grandparents don't even own a computer, and my parents struggle to maintain digital collections of photographs (I can't count how many photo collections we've lost over the years due to failed hard drives, broken CDs, &c.)
I think the point about fire-proof safes is an excellent one, but we're also talking about different loss models: losing your possessions to a housefire is relatively uncommon while slowly losing your digital records to hardware failure, obsolete mediums, &c. is extremely common. Put another way: I suspect the number of people who have lose their wedding photos to hard drive failure far outsizes the number who lose the same photos to housefires.
I used to have a bunch of film that needed developing. So did others in my family. Unfortunately, I couldn't always afford processing. Digital doesn't have that. I have a phone, which means I have a camera. Even if I lose photos, I've been able to enjoy them for a period of time.
As a bonus, being able to freely take photos means that I've personally become a better photographer.
That's not even moving the goalposts, that's like walking off the playing field to do something else entirely.
The people who took photos of my parents in their childhood and youth are most likely dead, so at this point not even they care anymore how good a photographer they were. I certainly don't, I care that I still have those photos.
My mum and sisters have obsessed over a photo album application with captions, family tree and password protected diary in early 2000s. The photos have survived as files. But they have given up on the apps and the data. Now mum is investing into My Heritage which she thinks will survive forever.
For most non-HN types I think the answer is FB and Instagram. but the posting has trended away from the actual 'family memories' photos many of us would want to save. Wouldn't want to bet on that being there 15 years from now though.
Yeah for people that actually know about that or care. But for like my mom, that's where she posts and stores stuff. All the grandkid photos that's the only place they exist off her phone which probably does not have great backups
So if the photos are encrypted, how do you check they're photos at all? Your solution doesn't exist because any such service offered will be immediately flooded by undesired use. It'll spread illegal content ranging from video game ROMs to child pornography. Script kiddies will use it as a command & control server.
What's fascinating is my own sense of time has been somewhat frozen by the advent of digital technology.
I'd grown up watching old clips of Pele, Carlos Alberto or Tardelli, then Maradona. They looked a certain way by the time I was 20.
Then around the mid-2000s, everything went digital and soon HD as well. You can watch the 2006 World Cup and think it was happening live. The style of shorts has also more or less frozen, so it's not as easy as looking at 80s-style super short shorts to guess the year.
Same goes with photos. My parents died and I got the family album. You can tell the different colors diffuse at different rates. Shots from the 70s look a different way to ones from the 80s and 90s.
With my kids, everything is digital. I have pics of them from almost every day, and they look just the same.
I think the fading process is actually faster than we think, as even those pics of the family from the 80s looked kinda old by the mid 90s.
This is funny to me because I've had discussions surrounding the thesis of the title with my in-laws, about building materials. Vinyl lumber is great for areas prone to excessive shade and moisture, because it's so resistant to rot. Put it in full sun though, and it eventually turns to plastic powder. Some lumber is the opposite, though: it's difficult to maintain in wet shade because it gets destroyed by fungi and moss; put it in the sun, though, and take care of it, and it can last for a long time.
It's interesting to me UV light and rot are coming up in a totally different context, as it points to the importance of these two types of decay phenomena. The other, of course, is physical force, in the form of wind or physical impact. But in the absence of that the two great destroyers are microbes and radiation.
> Some lumber is the opposite, though: it's difficult to maintain in wet shade because it gets destroyed by fungi and moss; put it in the sun, though, and take care of it, and it can last for a long time.
I wonder if that's partly because the same UV that would damage the vinyl is killing off the microbes.
Most plastics will get brittle over long time, at least the older production ones (modern plastics have better plasticisers) even when kept in good conditions. Exposing it to UV light will make the process faster. But even O2 exposure will oxidise it over time. Rubber will also dissipate over time and get brittle and crumble. All of this is usually fine from a perspective of a humans average lifespan, but a lot of artefacts from this age will not be preserved.
It's an interesting subject, and i've some experience of photographic preservation having printed in darkrooms for 20 years or so.
When considering archiving old photographs, there's quite a bit of difference between colour and B&W prints, and also colour and B&W negatives. The B&W prints and negatives contain silver, which is what makes the dark spots on the print and negatives, and it's presence stops microbes attacking the material.
For colour prints and negatives, the silver that was originally present in the material is removed with a bleach stage when processing (with a dye being activated to produce the colours you see) so you need to use some other method to protect the material from microbes. I think modern colour film stock includes a stabilizer, whilst older processing used Formaldehyde.
Seems like it was intended to be a simple and practical list of things that can be avoided or improved to reduce the process, rather than explaining the physics behind it.
But now that you mention it, this would be a nice opportunity for you to explain how thermodynamics applies to degradation of these kinds of materials mentioned.
This is a bit of a side-track, but most families have an archive of physical photos dating back decades, you put them in an album, and 50 years later they will still be there.
Meanwhile every family I know has decade of digital photography that was lost to broken hard-drives and corroded CD's. The only way to preserve digital information is to constantly babysit it, making sure you have two/three copies and replacing the broken disks (or outsource the process to Dropbox/Onedrive/whatever).
There is no consumer-friendly process of archiving things - you can try burning it to optical, but will there be a drive to read it in 50 years? No-one I know still has an optical drive, and that's if they last.