It's 2027. Do you know where your baby pictures are?
My brother, one of the new parents I mentioned in the recent post about digital photography, isn't buying my pessimism about how long today's digital photos will be around. He writes:
I think you need a more detailed analysis on your blog about exactly what you think is going to happen with the digital photos. Currently JPEG is probably the most common format in the world. One can assume that 100s of millions are taken daily. You don't think that format will be supported in 20 years? I think you're crazy. At the bare minimum, there will be common and free programs to convert
your existing JPEGs to whatever format is prevalent at that time. But I've been doing computer graphics stuff since 1993 . . . (14 years ago!! Close to 20!) and all the formats that existed then exist now—PSD, TIFF, PICT, EPS, etc. Even the unusual formats can be converted with specialized software like Debabelizer. Program files (WP, Quark) may get harder and harder to open if you don't keep them updated. But standard file formats, I don't see an issue.
50 years—maybe.
And of course, if the files are lost, destroyed, deleted, etc. But of course that can happen with anything in life, including prints and negatives, which can go bad as well and usually only exist as one copy.
The following is a version of my response to him.What I see happening is that the average person's photos will become unavailable for all practical purposes through a combination of creeping technological obsolescence and human nature. You can't just look at the strongest link in a chain (the file formats, maybe) and conclude that the chain is sound.
I don't dispute the basic premise that these digital files are eternal, in theory. A row of ones and zeros is eternal. And the main file formats probably will continue to exist indefinitely, although I'm not positive about that and it seems possible that there are already issues on the horizon with JPEGs, such as perhaps they will not contain the amount of color-space information expected in the future.
It is definitely possible for a diligent person or organization to make sure all of their digital files are preserved and accessible on an ongoing basis. This is mostly the province of users who rely on their files professionally. My guess is that even the most diligent of these users carry less than all of their files forward, relying on their contemporaneous expectations about what they will need in the future. The accuracy of those expectations is open to question, naturally, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.
What I'm predicting is that the average person's photos taken today are not likely to exist in a practically accessible form in 20 years, give or take. By "average person", I mean the 99% of the population that relies on digital photography to record memories but to whom everything my brother wrote above past JPEG would be unfamiliar gibberish. I mean the layperson who thinks that recordable CDs are robust like commercially-recorded CDs and will last forever, who thinks once something is on CD in a drawer somewhere, it's safe. I mean the person who, when he gets a new computer, transfers the main data files and puts the old machine in a closet since "some of my old files are still on there." I think I am describing most people.
When it comes to preserving their data, most of these people will end up proving the old adage "failing to plan is planning to fail." They find out that JPEGS etc. are likely to exist for the foreseeable future, and they move on to more pressing matters.
Today, a person with a bunch of digital files looks forward, if he does at all, and sees a nice gradual progression of technology receding into the future. But I think there are many, many ways that over 20 years the files can disappear or become unavailable absent great effort. As an example, I think of my own college and law-school papers, which I wrote on the old Leading Edge Model D (640K of RAM!) using WordPerfect 4.0 and MS-DOS. These are stored on 5-1/4" floppy disks. For a while after I wrote these minor works of genius, I continued to own my Leading Edge. One day, I gave it to my girlfriend's mother because it was obsolete and she needed a computer. (I didn't replace it at the time with another home machine, which means that there was a time in the pre-WWW era when I figured I had a computer at work so didn't need one at home—how bizarre that seems to me now.) I stopped having a computer that supported the 5-1/4" floppy storage medium (I can't recall if there were machines that had both 5-1/4" and 3-1/2" drives—probably, but I think most people leapfrogged directly to 3-1/2"-only setups), which ended whatever "in-house" capacity I may have had to port the files to another system. Eventually Windows replaced MS-DOS, the "DOS shell" function vanished, WordPerfect almost disappeared, Word stopped supporting that legacy file format, etc. At no point in the 20 years since I wrote the first of my college papers was there one event where they disappeared or became unreadable, yet for practical purposes they unavailable to me. And still they have not vanished. I have the floppies in a box in the basement somewhere. But even though I think from time to time that I should find a company to get them off the floppies and into a readable format before it's completely too late, that is not a priority and, realistically, probably won't become a priority at any time in the future. So my papers are on their way to really being gone. In much less than 100 years there will be no trace of them.
What happened (is happening, really) with my college papers is completely unique in its particulars and, I think, very typical on the level of practical experience.
It seems to me that some version of the foregoing will happen to most of today's digital photos. The average person is giving roughly no thought to systematically preserving images. They sit on hard drives, maybe backed up on CDRs or DVDs, all media with significant failure rates and that depend on various bits of today's technology to make them work. It's hard to predict what transition among all those of creeping obsolescence will have the single greatest impact. Perhaps when USB cables disappear. Or CDs. Today you might hear "then I upgraded to a PC that didn't have a floppy drive." What will you be hearing in twenty years?
Ultimately, I think the combination of constant technological change and human nature is what will doom (most of) most people's photos. The absolute impermanence of various recording media is a secondary concern. The stability of encoding conventions like JPEG hardly enters into it. Realistically, favorite images may be saved and a lot of others will not be. Perhaps companies like Google end up assuming (more or less by default) a quasi-archival function for the photos of average people.
It's true that "one-copy" physical media don't always last, and are vulnerable to various (individually very improbable) catastrophes. You could come up with an annualized rate at which this could be expected to happen. It is a rate that is not too much affected by lack of specific human attention. In 20 years, most of the film sitting in the backs of closets will still be fine. Any digital files stored that way will be unavailable (someone could "back out" an imputed annualized rate of decay for digital files left sitting unattended, which would interesting to see). In terms of other stuff you have around the house, film is more like a book and digital is more like a houseplant. You can keep the houseplant alive for a long time, and if you propagate it right maybe it will live forever. But the book just sits there and is fine for a long time with no attention. And how many of our grandparents' houseplants do we have? This is not a perfect comparison, to be sure, but interesting to think about.There is an interesting online discussion post by a professional photographer who does lots of work for major clients and has been fully digital in his studio for 7+ years—a serious guy. I don't think the comparison he makes with old videotape is entirely apt, but it makes you think. His point about digital RAW files is one I had not considered. He points out that RAW (what you shoot in digitally if you are "serious") is not a standardized format at all. His basic point: "Digital is disposable in my book."
As a long-term archiving solution, recording digital images on film is accepted as one of the most reliable and stable storage methods. Here are some interesting observations from a somewhat biased source, a company selling film recorders or film recorder archiving:
Digital Data Archiving Gets Neglected
In business as in private life the long-term storage is neglected. Documents of considerable historical and sociological importance will be lost. Even in professional archiving institutions the digital archives all have a astonishingly short 'shelf-life'.
It becomes necessary after 10-15 years to transfer the entire digital archive from one storage system to another with increasing costs.
Digital Media with an Expiry Date
Digital storage media age and at a much faster rate than analog ones. CD-ROMs have been and still are one of the most popular storage media, yet they are among the least durable media we have. Egyptian papyrus or documents of medieval Europe survived for centuries.
Missing Storage Systems and Computers
Storage media develops as fast as processors. The replacement of computer generations is significant in a number of ways:
- when a system vanishes, data formats are lost
- when a system vanishes, connections and system buses are lost
- whenever a new system comes onto the market, this increases the pressure for change and the elimination of older systems.
Digital File Formats That Everyone Has Forgotten
Not only the physical durability of the media themselves and the usability of the storage media is limited, but also the file formats used for the information also change roughly every ten years.
Practically speaking, this means that every ten years when the inevitable transfer of data takes place, a certain proportion of the data won't be converted and in time will become unusable. This is of course the very opposite of what archives, museums and libraries were established for in the first place.
Here's something interesting from Stewart Brand that echoes my college paper situation:
The loss is already considerable. You may have noticed that any files you carefully recorded on 5l/4" floppy disks a few years ago are now unreadable. Not only have those disk drives disappeared, but so have the programs, operating systems, and machines that wrote the files (WordStar in CP/M on a Kaypro?). Your files may be intact, but they are as unrecoverable as if they never existed. The same is true of Landsat satellite data from the 1960s and early 1970s on countless reels of now-unreadable magnetic tape. All of the early pioneer computer work at labs such as MIT Artificial Intelligence is similarly lost, no matter how carefully it was recorded at the time. The pioneer work of today is just as doomed, because the rate of digital obsolescence keeps accelerating, and the serious search for a long-term strategy for storage has yet to begin.
I would love to get some comments on this entry. What do you think about these points? Do you think the average person will have access to today's photos in 20 years?
Labels: film cameras, if only they would listen to MWR, parenting, photography, scenes from my outbox
posted at 1:58 PM
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