Preservation of Photographic Images for Future Generations: New Opportunities for Prints and Photo Books

Abstract

Upon discovering the 120 year old object in their grandparents' attic, most people today would be hard-pressed to play back a recording made on a wax cylinder of the late 1800s. What will people do just 50 years from now with an optical disk or magnetic hard drive? Over time, we have recorded our memories in many ways: letters, post cards, photographs, movies, audio and video recordings are a few examples. In earlier days, interpreting those recordings was independent of the technology used to create them -you could hold and view a hard copy document in your hand. How will future generations deal with those post cards, letters to the family, and photographs that have now been replaced by "Word documents", email, and digital images on the computer? While professional and mass-portrait labs recognize the importance of hard copy images, the word needs to spread from there. The end consumer in particular needs to become aware of long-term storage issues that relate to the preservation of the data behind digital documents including photographic images. Longerterm issues beyond routine backup and migration of data need to be considered, and preservation via human-readable hardcopy images is a key option. This paper provides an update on preservation strategies for the consumer and suggestions for the professional imaging laboratories to communicate these strategies to the consumer. While the familiar advice to "make a hard copy" provides a solid foundation, we go beyond this recommendation, with the intent to raise consumer awareness of the need to create a long-term preservation plan for their most treasured images and the data behind them.

Hard Copy Printing for Long-term Preservation as a Growth Engine for Prints and Photo Books

“…The storage risk is actually fourfold: 1) format obsolescence of the storage media; 2) interface obsolescence to a modern computer; 3) file format obsolescence; 4) data integrity. Detailed discussions of the risk of formats were presented in recent papers by this author [3,4]. Briefly, formats in the past have changed.…”

“…While the photographic printing industry is certainly aware of this concern, the general public is not. Earlier papers by this author on the subject of long-term preservation [1,2] have dealt with digital photographic images and the use of film as a technology-independent storage medium while a more recent paper [3] focused on documents of all kinds, including digital files of letters, emails, as well as photographs. The focus of this paper is long-term preservation of the "best of the best" of consumers' photo images through hard copy output products from the photo fulfillment industry.…”