On 10-03-10 16:31 , wrote:
Alan Browne wrote:
On 10-03-10 0:50 , wrote:
Alan Browne wrote:


In 500 years, a lot ( say 0.0001% ) of the digital photography of
today will be available to future historians. It will be very well
documented in many cases. Those who preserve the data well will be
more likely to document it well.

And yes, I know common CD/DVD ROMs don't last more that 5 - 10 years,
but there are other archival media that will easily do 200 years. Some
of that will survive much longer.



If anything, MOST of the digital images shot today will disappear in 10
years or less. I highly doubt very many people do any sort of archival

That's why I said 1 in 1,000,000 surviving images. Considering the
number of photos shot today, it will still be a deluge of images.

storage and since very few people even make prints, most of the images
from this "digital age" won't be around for anyone to see even one
generation from now. At least with film people HAD to make prints and
unless you intentionally throw them away or otherwise destroy them, they
are still around many years later.

On the other hand the time period has been shorter. The documentation
of most of these prints is close to nil forcing researchers to spend a
lot of time or abandon interpretation.

You assume a lot thinking people "will document it well". I doubt any

What part of 1 in 1,000,000 says to you "a lot"?

You have to abandon the notion of "everyone" and "all data" and start
looking at the slivers.

more will document their digital images than did with film images. And
the information added to the file by the camera really isn't anything
other than camera specific things like what model and f stop etc.
Assuming someone bothered to set the date on the camera that MIGHT be
there, depends on the file format used.

First off I stated that very few images will survive. However, those
that survive are those that were the most taken care of so they would
survive. The same applies to documents of the time and by the same
author or entourage.

Again: very few survivors, but well prepared and documented.


If I had even $1 for each time I heard someone say "My computer crashed
and I lost all the pictures of my children" etc. And if you think a
computer 500 years from now will understand digital data from today...
I'd be shocked if even 50% of people have anything other than the copy
on their hard drive for a back up, much less a "200 year archival" form.

Again, as I stated above, a 1:1,000,000 survival rate is still a
deluge of information given the amount of photography taken today.

I highly doubt there will be a deluge of images from this era. It's much
more likely that very little will survive, especially family records,
childhood pictures etc. I know too many people personally who have lost

Again, 1 in 1,000,000 _is_ very little. But it is still a deluge when
there are billions of photos taken daily.

I never mentioned what kind of images will survive. You're right that
many family photos will be lost. OTOH, there are in some families
people who treasure family history and who want the record to survive.
They will prepare it to do so and out of those, some, not all will
survive for a long time.

them all for the very reasons you stated, too many pictures to archive
so none are. It's not like 1 image will be archivally kept by someone
and the rest they just put on a CD-R (or do nothing) and hope.. Thats
the problem with digital storage, it's all too likely for the whole lot
to just disappear. The only hope most have is if someone took the card
somewhere to get RA-4 prints made.

No different. My parents took hundreds if not a couple thousand rolls
of film in their non-photography-interested lifetime. I have about 300
slides and 200 prints left out of all of that. The bonus here is that I
scanned those of people I don't know and e-mailed those out - and
immediately received messages to help me identify the subjects.

The rest is gone. Nobody knows where. Some might yet turn up.

But the few that did survive, I will push further into the future along
with documents from the era that I have in hand.

http://www.archivaladvisor.org/shtml...digmedia.shtml

While some disks may claim "Archival for 300 years", until they have
actually done this, IMHO it's just marketing...

Fortunately it's not based on your opinion but accelerated life cycle
testing, a proven method of determining fading characteristics over time.

Until actual times passes, no one knows how archival these will actually
be. Especially data storage. People assumed CD-R's would last until it
was proven they don't. These other optical disks could have a failure
they aren't testing for. You can't accurately recreate everything that
can happen with age.

Who said accurately? The claim is based on accelerated life testing.
(for CD/DVD's this is heat at the limits, intense light and moisture).
Where an ordinary CD/DVD only survives weeks or months in such testing,
the "gold" CD/DVD's go for years in the same conditions. This is
extrapolated out to indicate that in benign (room temperature, low
humidity and no light) that the same media can go well in excess of 100
years.

From there, it's a statistical likelihood that some of the media will
go 2, 4, 8 times as long.

It's a certainty that ordinary media will have long since faded away and
that prints and film will do not much better than 100 - 200 years. And
even there, some, not all, will go further.

Further, while not all "archival" data will keep, a goodly number will.

It's much more likely that most won't, than a goodly number will. The
only scenarios that look even somewhat promising have to be actively
maintained. Something very few people will do.

Again, it's those that take archival seriously that will document the
most. And with the right media, this can be quite passive.

I could point to hundreds of web sites that explain this stuff but you
would dismiss even MIT as being a "hobby site", so there is not much
point in doing that. Once again, Allen has spoken against what most
places agree on and all he has to base this on is his mouth.

I never said all images will survive. Only a very small number as a
proportion.

The sites you refer to talk about carelessness. Entropy. Neglect.
Ignorance. They are right. But it doesn't apply to 100% of images.

I'm talking about deliberate care and preparation and the few who do it.
The few who do it include archivists, scientists, historians, etc. and
hobbyists too.

I'm not claiming you're wrong, just that there is that small slice of
digital information that will survive because somebody today makes sure
it does. Film (kept in benign condition) will go a long way; prints
too, but less than film.

And that small slice (digital, film, print) will still be a huge find
500 years from now and more data that they can handle easily.

Again, it's not about all of it surviving, but a very small slice of it.
And that will be an awful lot data. (See last weeks Economist).

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