Data that stays "live", that people are interested in, remains accessible - if a torrent stays seeded, it doesn't matter that it's now on SSD rather than magnetic hard disk. And digital media makes copying really cheap. When I meet up with my friends for a LAN party we sync photo libraries - even the most prolific photographers only have a few gigabytes, so it's easy for everyone to act as a backup for everyone else.
If there are some pictures you care about, save your own copy, or several copies of them.
Pictures that no-one cares about? They may die, but that happens to any data that no-one cares about. The same kind of "photos at the bottom of a drawer" phenomenon can happen with digital too - I've read stories of family photos accidentally packaged into software releases, or of people discovering unexpected things in a backup of a backup of a backup that was just copied around for years without anyone looking inside it. But the vast majority of physical photos are lost, just as the vast majority of digital ones will be.
These personal memories already are often not valued by children and grandchildren. A lot of photos, diapositives and super-8 or hi8 films end being disposed every day after someone dies. And there is no museum or collector interested in conserving them either. So, there is no guarantee that physical media endures time.
I'd even argue that todays digital photos and videos capturing a "greater value for society" are more likely to survive because they are often already archived and published on the web.
Todays normal users are taking way too much (bad) photos and selfies nobody will be interested in in 10 months, much less in 10 or 100 years. Some pictures might be worth posting to Flickr or Facebook, but they don't have enough longtime importance to make physical prints from them. And most likely my children after my death won't browse in excitement through the 454 photos I've taken with my phone on my latest trip to New York, nor the tens of thousands of pictures rotting on my hard drive.
>Todays normal users are taking way too much (bad) photos and selfies nobody will be interested in in 10 months, much less in 10 or 100 years. Some pictures might be worth posting to Flickr or Facebook, but they don't have enough longtime importance to make physical prints from them.
Who gets to decide what should be saved? Who gets to decide historical worth? My guess would be archaeologists and historians, and how do you know what will be interesting or useful to them 100s of years in the future?
> Who gets to decide what should be saved? Who gets to decide historical worth?
Even if someone tries to decide what should be saved or what might be worth something, it's really hard to figure out what will be rare/unknown in the future -- if you can figure that out, you can probably make a fortune hoarding something like Beanie Babies to resell down the road.
There's a collection of random snapshots that someone took in a mall in the early 90s [1] that pops up on imgur and reddit every now and then. They were originally taken to compare malls across America, but now they're actually interesting from a cultural/historical perspective.
This is one of the reasons Camlistore exists (http://camlistore.org). Its storage format was designed with digital archaeology in mind. If you can preserve the bits themselves, the format of the data should be self-evident.
The trick, of course, is making sure the bits are preserved. I hope that one day each of my descendants will keep an enneff.tar.gz somewhere in their files—much like the shoebox in the cupboard—so that future generations can see how cute my rabbits were.
The Camlistore storage format is self evident, however, most blobs you put in Camlistore are not. Maybe you can reverse engineer the Matroska container you keep your movies in, but can you reverse engineer h.264?
Even jpeg would be very hard to reverse engineer.
Presumably you can add instructions, or even source code, for decoding pictures, sounds and movies. But then you get into technical problems and there's no guarantee the average grand-grand-children of the future will have the skill or time to use these information.
When you say "the format of the data should be self-evident", do you mean that Camlistore converts images and videos to simpler formats? I mean, JPEG is everywhere now, but fifty years from now, who knows? Maybe we should save them in PPM.
This post really resonated with me. As someone born in the 70's, all of the photos taken of my childhood were shot on film and displayed and preserved as prints. Over the years, my parents selected ("curated") the best of those prints and put them into a photo album that is a physical record of my childhood. Sure some of the older photos are somewhat faded and discoloured, but they're still a good record of the occasion, and, more importantly, as a physical vs. a digital artifact, my album needs no technical expertise to store or view.
By contrast my eldest son was born in 2008 so all of the photos I've taken of him, and his brothers born since, have been digital. Every week my wife and I go through the photos we've taken (on our increasingly cumbersome DSLR and two smartphones) and post the best, with brief comments, to a private family blog. In many ways the blog is superior to my childhood photo album, but I'm also thinking about how to best preserve it in physical form for my own sons so that when they are my age they will have a tangible record of their childhoods even if blogspot.com is dead and gone.
I'm far more confident of the longevity of JPGs than your average inkjet photo print. You need to spend upwards of $1000 for a pigment printer, use acid-free fiber paper, use acid-free mat board, and place it behind UV-filtering glass to give it a good shot at multi-generational longevity. No mean feat.
The problem isn't the JPEG file format, it's the media the JPEG files are stored on. If your child finds an old CD or USB drive of yours 50 years from now, they're not likely to be able to retrieve any data from it (just like you can't read a DECtape today). And the on-line services that you store your photos on today are not likely to be around in 50 years either. For your JPEG file to survive, you'd have to actively keep on transferring it from one medium or service to another.
> For your JPEG file to survive, you'd have to actively keep on transferring it from one medium or service to another.
Or go through all of the steps I outlined above. I'm hoping to do both. Well, actually, I need to upgrade to a pigment printer. I have Canon's prosumer Pro-100 right now, and would love to pick up the -10 or -1 at some point.
But the images I really care about are all shot on medium format black and white film, Fuji Acros 100, which I develop, scan, and print[1] from myself.
[1] i.e. both silver gelatin on fiber in the darkroom, and inkjet on fiber as needed.
>> If the images exist only as a digital image file, the answer is almost certainly, "No".
Hrm I don't quite understand. Right now just about every important element of modern history is being saved in raw formats, as well as jpegs, pngs, psds and the like.
Are we assuming that a hundred years from now we'll have completely lost the ability to view these images and videos?
In a hundred years we'll lose the ability to view all of this and only physical copies will survive? How are we even supposed to store video then? You can't print it out, and if you burn it to a CD it's just as useless.
Not being able to plug your 40 year old USB memory stick into whatever-magic-future-technology exists is one thing, but there's no reason whatever-magic-future-technology wont be able to run a little virtualized system that can display it for you.
I'd say the opposite. In a hundred years 3d printers would have gotten to the point where they could just make some sort of peripheral on the fly to view old CDs, records, and even tape drives. In the future if you're browsing the thrift store and you come across a pristine CD of Silpheed I bet you could walk into your local 'maker' shop and they'll print you out a Sega CD to play it on.
No, what will happen is that sometime in the next 50 years a DMCA request will coming for removal of those films due to images or music on them. One is entitled "Rush Hour" so will probably be caught up in a sweep for copies of the Jackie Chan film of the same name.
Or youtube will go out of business (like the original google video). Or in 5 years the people who posted the videos will pull them down as their business model changes.
If you want to see it already on youtube create a playlist of videos especially music videos. After about a year 10% of them will have been removed.
I have strong opinions about this. I think the skills needed to maintain a "digital archive" are actually fairly advanced. For example, my cousin had many photos of their children growing up on an old computer. The computer crashed and, they lost all the photos. I think this is actually a very common story.
The most important point that often gets lost is to curate your photos. You should have a collection of the best of the best, which can easily be copied everywhere all the time. I have about 500 or so from the last 15 years of digital photography (my kids, mostly) that rise to this status, and about 50-60 on top.
I'm not sure this translates. If it was that important, couldn't they have reversed engineered the format and built a new (even basic) system to read it?
Furthermore, if you have digital copies of the data and old versions of the software, you can virtualize/emulate the software to recover it.
A lot of the "format" for many storage systems is effectively encoded in the hardware (e.g. the speed of a stepper motor, or some thresholding in a signal filter), so short of using, say, an electron microscope there's no way to even read the data in some raw format without the right hardware. At that point it may very well be economically infeasible to recover the data, and the physical storage might degrade before the feasibility reaches a tipping point.
Storing digital copies indefinitely is somewhat of a more modern invention. The digital copy still has to be stored somewhere, and that somewhere used to age out pretty quickly; CDs were seen as archival, but that's becoming less practical. Nowadays you can keep copies in cloud services, and as long as you keep copying them around then it's probably easier to have long-term retention, but you need to keep doing that indefinitely.
Anyway, almost nobody is actually making backups and keeping them around in obsolescing file formats on rotting media.
They are uploading everything to facebook or google or apple, leaving all the details of long-term storage and display to them. Where will those services and that user content be in 20 or 100 years?
We know next to nothing about the historical architecture and culture of tropical countries because they made house out of bricks and straw, and wrote on clay tablets. Historians lament this fact and descendants like us have little to lean on and build upon culturally.
Instead of finding shoe boxes in the attic, in the future we will run data mining scripts that find information in the crazy wide ocean of information out there - like our grandparents Facebook profiles.
If there are some pictures you care about, save your own copy, or several copies of them.
Pictures that no-one cares about? They may die, but that happens to any data that no-one cares about. The same kind of "photos at the bottom of a drawer" phenomenon can happen with digital too - I've read stories of family photos accidentally packaged into software releases, or of people discovering unexpected things in a backup of a backup of a backup that was just copied around for years without anyone looking inside it. But the vast majority of physical photos are lost, just as the vast majority of digital ones will be.