Can the images stored today be retrieved in 2050?

[c_f_chow]

Having been playing with film cameras (what else?) for the last 50

years, I still enjoy looking at all the old pictures taken over the

years.

Now that I am at the crossroad of whether to go digital, my main

concern is that: can I still retrive the digitally stored images (in

VCD or any other means) 50 years (yes 50 years) from now. Will the

computer of year 2050 support todays technology?

[emre]

Use a standard lossless file format such as PNG now, and convert media & file format once a decade. It seems like a pain, but since storage space grows exponentially over time, you will have less copying to do with each generation.

[denisbergeron]

Short answer : No !

 

And I'm convinced about that. I am an IT professionnal, and I have some old 5 1/4 drive from 1980 in my garage, but I can't find one to buy today, and if I have old 5 1/4 disk I just have to but it in the basket.

 

An the end of the 90's the Nasa transfert all the data from the first space mission (voyager, pionner, etc.) from old tape to cdrom, it's was time, all the tape was in an stockroom, forgetted, and the last tape reader was sold to the scrap because no one can find repair furniture. Fortunately, before the reader pass the door, someone ask "Did we transfer all the data ?"

 

I have a lot of beta tape with good movie at home, can you find hardware to read it ?

 

Now, every one sold they VHS and buy PVR insteed (Personnal Video recorder whom write film on harddisk). The music industry give up on CD and began to sold mini-flashcard with music on it (you can have the reader and a mini-flashcard in ToyRus for lest than 10$). Now, DVD player can read old CD. Tomorrow, VHS, CD and DVD will be obsolete, replaced by Crystal-storage and anyother technology we can't imagine today.

 

In 1980, I use GIF to store virtual picture, the '90 decade was time for jpeg and in 2003 I use PNG! Now, a lot of company have giveup on Gif because of pattent problem, no one want to use Jpeg because of the high lost compression and no one use PNG because it's free to use and company are always a frightened by freedom.

 

Right now, I shop for a digital SLR, but none of them has all the characteristics that I want. But, if I buy a digital camera I will take a lot more picture than I take now save it on DVD in PNG and Jpeg format and i will print the good one on a no-acid paper and treat with color stabilizer and paper protector and I will ask the lord to protect my memory.

 

Sorry for my bad english.

[steve_dunn2]

<p>As the previous response said, the technologies may change, but you'll always have the chance to re-save the files if necessary. If you use PNG or TIFF today, you'll be able to read those files next year or five years or ten years from now. If some other file format renders those obsolete, just convert them. If they're on CD-ROM today and ten years from now computers start shipping without the ability to read CD-ROMs, burn 'em to DVDs instead.</p>

 

<p>It may take occasional action on your part, but you shouldn't have difficulty maintaining the readability of those images. I have some images I downloaded in the late 1980s, and I can still read them, around 15 years later. They're GIFs and JPGs, file formats which can still be read today and will still be readable in the next five or ten years. They've been on a few different hard drives, 5.25" floppies, and tapes over the years. Maybe one day I'll burn them to CD.</p>

[h._p.]

This one's been done to death. The short answer is: in theory yes, in practice no.

[gsbhasin]

You would need to ask <b><i>Terminator 4</i></b> if humans can still access electronics in 2050.

<p>John Connor is already hiding under a bunker in Mohave Desert and the electronics and computers they have in there date to 1950. GIF and JPEG were not invented in 1950.

<p>So unless human race gets access to the technology invented in 1980 you will NOT be able to retrieve the images in 2050.

[bob_finley]

"Maybe one day I'll burn them to CD". That is the problem, you may or may not. I have a box of 100 year old family photos from the back of my parents closet. If they had to remember to copy them every 20 years or so I wouldn't have those images anymore. You will maybe copy the "good ones" but what about that snap of your father's father that no one though was important until many years too late.

[peter nelson]

This is, without a doubt, the single biggest problem with digital photography. All the other ones, e.g., limited depth-of-field, long exposure noise, black and white printing, etc, DO HAVE solutions, even if they might involve more cost or complexity. But there is no digital equivalent to this:<P>

 

<B>My father</B> was a civil engineer in the 1940's and travelled all over the US on jobs and projects. He had an Argus C3 and shot Kodachrome film and the resulting slides have drifted in old shoeboxes through the attics and closets and cabinets of various aunts and uncles and children until they fetched up in my safe deposit box. The colors have only shifted and faded a little - easily correctable in Photoshop.<P>

 

<I>Use a standard lossless file format such as PNG now, and convert media & file format once a decade. It seems like a pain, but since storage space grows exponentially over time, you will have less copying to do with each generation.</I><P>

 

That's fine if you're in possession of them, have the skills and equipment to do the conversions, and enough knowledge and vision about the technology to guess what format to convert to, not to mention the time to do it. But none of my relatives who had the slides, above, would have met <B>ANY</B> of those standards so my father's slides would have been lost to posterity.<P>

 

The answer to original poster is a resounding <B>NO</B>.<P> <P>

[peter nelson]

Steve Dunn says:

<I>As the previous response said, the technologies may change, but you'll always have the chance to re-save the files if necessary.</I><P>

 

Read more carefully. The poster said he's been shooting for 50 years, which means he's OVER age 50, now. So 50 years from now he'll be over 100. The problem isn't whether HE can maintain constant vigilance; it's whether his descendents will get stuck with that task. If everyone who came into possession of my father's slides, that I mentioned earlier, had to take on that kind of responsibility, it simply wouldn't have happened.<P>

 

This problem doesn't just apply to photos. Much of what we know of history is because of all the <U>minutiae</U> of letters, diaries, shipping manifests, design drawings, census records, birth and death records, licenses, inventory records, order forms, receipts, etc, ET CETERA, that are still around from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. History is a hobby of mine and believe me: historical societies and professional historians are in an absolute <B>PANIC</B> about this problem because today so much of what used to be printed or written is recorded digitally that in 50 or 100 years how will historians learn about or study us?

[leonard_richmond7]

Our old neg/slide system imposes very tight constraints on their survival also - there is only one copy of them; once it's gone, it's gone! That's true even for the vast majority of the prints that have been made, since their negs have disappeared long ago & only one print was made.

 

Visiting my parents for my Mom's 75th birthday, she offered me some of the old family photos that I was in. It was obvious that others were getting distributed to other people. Since no picture could go to more than one person, any one of us would only get a small subset of them,and I probably wouldn't ever know where they all went.

 

So I offered to take them all, scan them, put them on cd tied together with HTML to make a "web site on a cd" - just pop the cd in your pc and autorun brings up the home page in your internet browser, with thumbnails to categories of pictures. Click on a thumbnail and get another page of thumbnails for that category. Click on one of those thumbnails and you get a screensize picture. Click on the Fullsize link and you see the fullsize jpeg, enough pixels to print with. A cd will hold 500 pictures this way, probably more than she has.

 

I'm making a bunch of copies to spread around to everyone. Then she can distribute the prints as she wishes, but we'll all have a digital copy (Photoshop corrected).

 

Since I can get great 4x6 reprints for 16 cents and 8x10 for $1.99, we could all afford to get prints made of all of them. Of course, getting reprints from the original negs, if they were even around, would cost us 3 times as much for not very good quality (does your local photofinisher have profiles for his printer for really old neg films?). But then, the negs are long gone.

 

I do the same "web site on a cd" for all my digital images and spread them around the extended family in 3 states - each copy costs me less than a single 4x6 reprint. If only one of them (or any of their descendents) is interested enough to do the transition to the next great storage format, he/she can make copies and spread them around again. If no one likes them enough to do that, they probably weren't worth saving!

[jim_leonard]

The Biggest problem I've read so far in this thread is that people move their data to some form of offline storage (tapes, cds, dvds, and whatever format we may have in the future) and the physical format becomes obsolete. In general the file format is still readable (possibly with significant effort but current image formats are too ubiquitous to be easily lost in the forseeable future, it's the hundreds of formats that were created when digital imaging was in its infancy that will likely be lost).

 

I have had the problem of maintaining my offline storage in the past and the solution I've come up with is that I keep _EVERYTHING_ online (not on the net, just accessable by the computer systems I'm using) in a redundent disk array. Anything less is asking for trouble when a disk fails (expect them to do this, just like you should expect your cd's and floppy disks to go bad). Harddisks are cheap so it's worth my while and as formats become bigger, so does disk space per dollar so when I upgrade disks, all of my old data typically fits in a fraction of the new disk array. The problem is prior to five or ten years ago, a large enough online storage array either didn't exist or was prohibitively expensive which is why companies that generated large amounts of data put everything on tape. Now it isn't so expensive but does take understanding of what you are doing.

 

In my case because I am anal about it I have my disk array in a separate computer system sitting behind a power conditioner and using an optical network connection to protect it from power surges/spikes. To protect against accidental erasure, I currently have enough space on that array to copy all of my photos to a non-accessable section of the disk array. I do try to maintain an offsite backup by making copies of things onto cd or dvd as the data is created but all of those have the problems discussed above and I don't have a good way of copying all of the data at once to removable storage (an expensive tape system would work but I don't have the money for it). So I guess I'm content that short of a fire or some comparable disaster, I'll still have everything and if a disaster does occur I'll still have my (less than perfect) offsite backup.

[jonathan_bundick]

Only through a diligent and ongoing effort to preserve and update your files will they be readable in 50 years. If you want to store it and forget it, then future generations will probably lose those memories.

[barmijo]

It may be true that prints made 50 or 100 years ago are viewable. But even if the negatives still existed, would they be printable? Many film formats used over the generations are now obsolete and you'd have to hire a pro lab to print them. Plus, the substrate on many older negatives is fragile and could be damaged by printing (as you may have heard related to Hollywood's efforts to preserve movies from the first half of the last century).

 

As with all things, film, VCRs, software, CPUs, and digital photos are subject to the laws of supply and demand. APS, Beta, DOS, Z80s etc never reached critical mass; the point at which the majority of consumers will pay extra and make product decisions based upon maintaining compatibility. It's unclear how relating a jpg to a 5 1/4" floppy is relavent, because the number of consumers of that standard was miniscule by comparison to the world population. Likewise for 3 1/2" floppies, DLT tape, 1/4" cartridges and 1/2" tape. All were leading storage media in their time, but all were used by a small fraction of the cosumer population.

 

The more images people store in jpg and tiff formats the longer the formats will be supported. At the same time, it'll be harder for hardware and software makers to introduce improvements because of the incompatibilities.

 

Will you be able to read a jpg in 50 years. I'll be the first on the list to bet yes. There are more digital cameras being sold than film and the majority are point-and-shoot units that default to storing in jpg. Plus, most images on the web are stored in jpg and now cellular phones can take jpg photos. If not displaced within the next few years, jpg will survive. PDF is another likely survivor. TIFF is questionable as it's infrequently used by the mass of consumers. (I know others recommended TIFF earlier, but I think that was a technical decision related to image quality when you change formats and not an archiving assessment.) PSD and all the various RAW formats are likely to have been forgotten.

 

Of course, let's just hope were all around to debate the result in 50 years. I, for one, will be ninety!

[Spearhead]

It's important to understand that the CD and DVD are <i>consumer</i> format storage as opposed to just commercial. You can still buy, brand-new, equipment to play records made 70 years ago. You can even still buy record players that have speeds that haven't used for new content for around forty years. The CD format has now been around for around 25 years. DVD players had to play CDs or they would have quickly disappeared.<p>

 

I'd also agree that digital images can be stored in multiple locations. The next California earthquake or leak in my roof could easily destroy all my negatives, but it takes almost no time for me to put digital images on two different hard drives in different locations and on two CDs, also in different locations.

[www.graemehird.com]

Film: A future-proof, high resolution storage medium.<p>

 

Capture on film and scan to make a digital image. When your CDs and DVDs become obsolete and you've forgotten to upgrade, scan again on the latest and greatest technology. I expect my film to last 50 years, even if my digital storage media/file format goes belly up. (of course, the sensible thing to do is to keep up to date....)<p>

 

Now, will there be film scanners in 50 years? If not, I'll dupe my trannies with the latest 500 MP digi-cam/coffee maker.

[shawn_mertz]

More than enough photos will survive. If only 1% of my photos are recovered 50

years from now that will be over 300 photos from just this year. the amount of

photos being made is so high historians will think we are crazy if they find them all.

 

In 1989 the newspaper I work for burned down over a hundred thousand negatives

were destroyed. It has been a rare occasion that any of them are missed. there are

so many photos being made that not many need to survive for it to make an accurate

historical record.

[oskar_ojala]

I pretty much agree with Emre. Good luck with tucking away your cd's and trying to read them after 50 years.

[kristian_s_oslash_rensen]

Speaking as a software developer with a decades experience, the short answer is "of course you can".

<p>

The slightly longer answer is that you have two issues to deal with. Data representation and physical storage.

<p>

<ol>

<li><b>Data representation</b><br>

In 50 years humans will be able to write software that can interpret your image files written today (if the worlds population has not regressed down to a pre industrial age ability level for some reason, but in that case you have more pressing issues to deal with than retreiving old images) if they have access to a clear, unambigous and complete description of the data representation used to store your images. This means that if you use a data representation that is kept as a trade secret now, then you have a problem 50 years out in the future, but if you one whoes documentation is freely available and widely distributed, then the worst that can happen fifty years out in the future, is that someone has to read that documentation and write a piece of software to interpret your image files on whatever computer hardware they happen to have available at that time.<br>

<br>

Therefore various camera, scanner and software product specific file formats with little or no publicly available documentation is a bad idea for long time storage, while formats such as tiff and png that are specified in freely available and widely distributed documentation is your best bet.<br><br>

</li>

<li><b>physical storage</b><br>

If, fifty years out in the future, there are no easy and adequately priced way to read the physical storage media you used, then you are in trouble. If the data has vanished from the media due to age, then you are obviously out of luck.<br>

<br>

Since you can copy digital files without loosing information, you can get around this problem by copying the files to new types of storage media whenever it gets hard to find hardware+software to read the media you are using or the media you are using is reaching an age where data loss due to age is a concern. <br><br>

</li>

</ol>

[kelly_flanigan1]

Denis ; OT; 5 1/4 high height floppy drives are easy to find used on ebay; thrift stores; and even new old stock; on the web.......Our bookkeeper just went to 3 1/2 inch floppies last year..........5 1/4 new floppy media is still made; and available here at; Office depot, Office Max ;Walgrens; and Walmarts............

[kelly_flanigan1]

At one disk drive company; we had to do a post mortem on a RAID system(redundent disk array) that got zapped by lightning; all the many 14 Gig drives in banks on the 19" rack mount crashed at about once.............One of the lame monitoring PC's; that recorded our Engineering data; didnt crash..we had run it thru alot of isolation; and didnt have it connected with the approved UPS... ..<BR><BR>This RAID system was at a customer site; who wasnt impressed at the the massive data loss.....The strike followed a newly installed communications antenna (IT's status of its UPS and RAID); then jumped to the wazzoo UPS; then wasted alot of MOV's; and headed to the RAIDs trick supply; designed by a guru............Each disk to head had an arc spot on the disks media; the HDA wires were fried on many; the sliders's gaps blown and cracked....There was ALOT of real weird stuff like wires electrically broken; with no visual damage; magnets with reversed polarity; plastic shattered and stuck into the castings....The ball bearings in each spindle motor had pits on the races; and balls; due to the current flow...All the drives outer circuit boards were broken...A wee bit of data was recovered; after the spindle and disk assembly was placed in another drive; and the new heads flown away from the divoted areas..; and a data recovery guru tried alot of things....The grounding for the RAID was by a consultant; that is well respected; and actually teaches seminars on lightning protection..<BR>A RAID system does offer alot of safety; but after seeing the effects of a direct hit; I wonder if anything is all that fool proof.......<BR><BR>

[denisbergeron]

Kelly, OT : I alson have 8 inch floppy, and punch card :-)

[kelly_flanigan1]

One company had a 14" floppy stack; that never went into production...It was a several inch stack of 14" custom made floppies; all stacked on top of each other; ie not in jackets; ie one huge slug of floppies; clamped together...An air knife would separate the pack; like placing a knife in a big phone book.....The knife had read write head; and forced air; to keep the rotating pack apart...the entire pack was about 500+ megs...The rotating big pack of floppies was abit of a sight to see; abit of an oddball affair..