Phones vs. dedicated devices for photography and audio

[Lucan]

with digital versions, a box of optical discs or a hard drive or whatever doesn't give clues of what it contains so is much more likely to be left in storage (I'd also say especially with cloud storage, the ownership of accounts especially when people pass away etc is going to be a bit issue in coming years).

Indeed. That is if you will even be able to read those optical disks - how many peope can even still read a CD or DVD? How many billions of family photos there must be on floppy disks (various sizes), Jazz disks, Iomega Zip disks etc, that can never be (and will never be) accessed again except with the services of a specialised and expensive forensic IT company. As for the hard drive in my PC, when I snuff it I expect the whole PC will be tossed in a skip as "old-fashioned"; the drive will probably fail before then anyway. I don't use cloud services, but some of them have shown no qualms about deleting the records of dormant (possibly deceased) users, and even if they do not the relatives need to jump through hoops to release them.

FWIW, I can still read 3.5" floppies on an old PC and I recently went through them to take off anything worth keeping. I lost the ability to read my 3" floppies (yes they existed) when I scrapped an old Amstrad PCW. I can read CDs and DVDs on the PC I am using now, and I have a project to print on paper any text worth passing on (eg family history) and photos, although neither inkjet nor laser prints last as well as old-style chemical photos, and even the colours of those fade over time. The best archival colour prints were by the Cibachrome process, but that is now banned because 'Elf and Safety. Present day historians express concern that there will be something of a hole in the long-term archival records corresponding to the digital era.

 

[Ediswan]

The best archival colour prints were by the Cibachrome process, but that is now banned because 'Elf and Safety.

That prompted some research. There is no doubt that Cibachrome/Ilfochrome chemicals were noxious, but I can't find any suggestion that the process was banned. Rather, the products were discontinued due to falling popularity.

 

[dgl]

That prompted some research. There is no doubt that Cibachrome/Ilfochrome chemicals were noxious, but I can't find any suggestion that the process was banned. Rather, the products were discontinued due to falling popularity.

Yes, Tim Hunkin had some old Cibachrome stock and it's no longer that great. I understand that the demand for it was not their so the last manufacturer stopped making them.

 

[jon0844]

Some very good points raised here about archiving, the lack of prints and photo albums, or access to photos and data when someone dies (some companies do offer a means to pass an account to someone else after death, but given tech companies can come and go, or change policies, is anyone that confident?).

All are things that people should be thinking about, beyond just backing up photos to a few different sources. It isn't perhaps talked about enough.

I'd say that if you archived a portable hard drive in a safe, dry, protected environment like a fire proof safe, it's quite probable you'd be able to access it quite easily even in a good few decades from now. This could be a good option to complement a cloud based solution.

But you have to keep that up to date, which is already the big problem with people not doing backups often enough. I suppose you could just do it every few years so at least the bulk of your content is safe, like childhood and family photos.

Finally, people absolutely should print more photos out.

 

[AM9]

Some very good points raised here about archiving, the lack of prints and photo albums, or access to photos and data when someone dies (some companies do offer a means to pass an account to someone else after death, but given tech companies can come and go, or change policies, is anyone that confident?).

All are things that people should be thinking about, beyond just backing up photos to a few different sources. It isn't perhaps talked about enough.

I'd say that if you archived a portable hard drive in a safe, dry, protected environment like a fire proof safe, it's quite probable you'd be able to access it quite easily even in a good few decades from now. This could be a good option to complement a cloud based solution.

But you have to keep that up to date, which is already the big problem with people not doing backups often enough. I suppose you could just do it every few years so at least the bulk of your content is safe, like childhood and family photos.

Finally, people absolutely should print more photos out.

The question of cloud stored data being available when it's owner passes on can quite easily be dealt with their agreement to storing the current password sealed but available to a trustep relative/friend via a will. The password can the be revealed on the owner's death. The cloud service doesn't care who is logging in, - their liability only extends to ensuring that the correct password is used.

 

[JohnMcL7]

I did previously make the effort to have a look through my photos each year and print a selection out to make an annual album but I stopped when I lost motivation as I never looked at them nor did anyone else. It has been something I've been thinking about though when looking through photos of my grandparents which must be around 80 years old, they've faded and the quality isn't great but you can still make them out. Even putting aside technology not failing who knows will there be anything compatible with it, watching retro channels working with storage and similar from the 80s it can be quite a challenge at times reading the data.

 

[StKeverne1497]

I did previously make the effort to have a look through my photos each year and print a selection out to make an annual album but I stopped when I lost motivation as I never looked at them nor did anyone else. It has been something I've been thinking about though when looking through photos of my grandparents which must be around 80 years old, they've faded and the quality isn't great but you can still make them out. Even putting aside technology not failing who knows will there be anything compatible with it, watching retro channels working with storage and similar from the 80s it can be quite a challenge at times reading the data.

(Wading in late, sorry)

My dad has an iPad and my sibling has a habit of loading it up with photographs of the grandchildren, days out etc. I take the pictures and print them out for my dad, who much prefers sliding them into a polypocket ringbinder which he can just lift off the table and leaf through whenever he feels like, showing it off to visitors without having to dig up the iPad and remember how to turn it on.

The thing with digital data though (as opposed to digitised data - something that was originally in an analogue format) is that if you are reasonably careful, it's incorruptible. You can only make so many prints from a negative before you end up bleaching the negative but you can churn out copy after copy after copy of a digital "original" and all the copies (can be) identical to the original down to the last binary digit - and might as well be originals themselves.

So the "medium" in which a digital image is stored becomes less and less important. Got some old photos on a Smart Media card?

Quick, while your camera or card reader still works, copy it on to whatever you now use for storage, and you don't need to worry about the "original" being lost.

Does it matter if the storage unit I use for photos runs on SATA spinning-rust hard drives? No, of course not. In the medium term, as the drives die I will replace them with more SATA spinning discs, maybe even SATA SSDs (solid state discs). The data stays the same.

At some point, the unit itself might die, but that's ok because I have backups and the backups are identical in every respect to the originals.

At some later point, it might not be possible to get SATA discs, but when that day approaches I will obtain a new unit which might run on (say) NVMe storage and after a little bit of copying, the data is safe and accessible. In the distant future, a grandchild might have a couple of petabytes of storage surgically implanted in a thumb. If they choose to copy my digital archive, it will be identical to the original - and they can "touch thumbs" with their siblings and cousins and each one of them can have a complete set of "originals".

As for the original thread title though; I have a low-end DSLR which is now nearly 14 years old and 10 megapixels. I have a new-to-me phone which is two years old, and is supposed to have some of the better cameras available, including a "main" camera which produces 12 megapixel images downsampled from a 108 megapixel sensor (9 sensor pixels are combined into one image pixel). At a guess, and adjusting slightly for inflation, the MSRP of the phone was about the same as the MSRP for the DSLR. There is absolutely no comparison. Even with the "kit" lens and JPEG rather than RAW, and even just when viewing on the living room telly, the DSLR produces images which easily beat the phone camera in just about every respect... but as I'm sure someone has already pointed out, the best camera for the job is the one you have with you, and I'm not in the habit of carrying my DSLR everywhere I go.

 

[JohnMcL7]

If you've got some old photos on a smartmedia card it's probably way too late to get them off now, I used Fuji originally and found Smartmedia to be an incredibly unreliable format in its day and was glad to move onto CF.