Have prints made or loose them.
It's common for families to have pictures 100+ years old and with technology advancing the rate it is the odds of viewing digitals on equipment 50 years in the future stored on equipment we now have is slim to none. The other aspect of all this is will future generations give a damm what grand dad looked like.
Some color prints will last decades, maybe hundreds of years, but those prints are not what one is likely to get from most labs. I have color slides and prints that are degrading after a few decades. I suspect the negatives are trash by now. I do have hundreds of Kodachrome slides that I need to digitize. The slides will last many decades and maybe a century or two if stored correctly but who will be able to scan them in the future. The Kodachrome test targets for scanning are very expensive since they cannot be made anymore and there are fewer and fewer companies making film scanners...
The reason we have so many photos from the 1800 and early 1900s is that the B&W prints are silver based which can last for a very long time. Color prints, not so much. One can get special inks and printers, that if used on the correct paper, will produce a long lived print but one has to do the research. There were lots of problems with prints made on ink jets in the late 90s.
I think computer systems will be able to view JPGs for many decades to come. The format is used all over the place and will not go away. The problem will be the media storing the JPGs. Will the media still be viable in 20 years? Will there even be a system that can read the media? I recently recovered a bunch of papers and data I used in college from some of my 3.5 inch floppies. Many of the diskettes were dead but I managed to recover what I needed. Then I had to find software that would convert the old, no longer supported file formats to a modern format.
I keep my images on DVDs, two PCs, a website and multiple USB drives. One problem I will have is that my images are in a specific file format. I do create JPGs from the camera format, but at some point, the camera format is almost certain to be unreadable due to loss of software.
The other problem is the shear volume of images in the digital age. It is so cheap to take a photo and keep it that one can easily take 1,000s or 10,000s of images on a vacation. You did not do this when an image was costing you $.5-1 in film, developing and printing. Will future generations go through 100K images that grandpa took over a life time?
One of the saddest things I ever saw happened while we were looking to buy land. There was a property that had a house built in 1905 by the father. The property had numerous out buildings as well. The man selling was in his mid to late 80's and I think he was the last surviving child of the man who built the house. The seller was born in the house and the family's first tractor bought in the 20's or 30's was still working and on the place. I was looking in one of the barns and a brother had been really into photography. There were dozens and dozens of slide carousels full of Kodachrome slides. Somebody had knocked some of them off the shelves and onto to floor. I picked those up and put them back in the carousels and back in the boxes. As a photographer, it really pained me to see this guys work treated like this but I suspect that is what happens eventually, one way or the other. Those slides were a recording of the man's life and it was just left in a barn to rot. I don't know if the man had family, maybe he did not, but it still was painful to see his work treated that way. At least my stuff if it is not wanted will just slowly faded away on a disk drive. :shocked:
Image protection, film, slide or digital is a problem. Each format has their own issues.
Later,
Dan
