With many of my friends now getting way up in years, I have unfortunately been getting a lot more calls lately from relatives of the folks I worked with, asking for help in sorting and evaluating their estates after they have passed away. Recently this has brought to light an increasingly disturbing trend.

I am noticing that digital photo collections frequently die with the photographer.

Slides and print film are often recognized by relatives as something of value. Occasionally they get passed along to an intended recipient, or sometimes get sold on eBay, and in a few cases they get thrown away. In contrast, digital photo collections are seldom recognized by relatives as having historic value or any other value. They are simply file names on a computer hard drive. Most photographers downloaded them onto home computers to free up the memory chips, and they end up going to whoever grabs the computer first (or worse yet, sends it to the recycling center if nobody wants it).

This has happened a number of times now with the collections of industry "insiders" who were excellent photographers and had access to things that are now largely inaccessible to outsiders. It is particularly sad because just as the capability of digital projectors have totally eclipsed the old Kodak Carousel, the capabilities of modern digital cameras have outdistanced both slide and print film considerably. Indoor photos in particular are now easy and practical where any film camera would have been far short on light. Consequently the people who are in a position to document history as it passes are able to do a better job with the images than ever before, provided those images survive.

I don't have an answer to this. But if it continues going this way, I can see that there is likely to be an enormous hole in the historical documentation of this current time period "inside" the railroad industry.

PC

I put all my photos into separate files no more than one CD in size and then periodically copy the computer files onto CD's labeled "My Pictures Part _). I am slowly putting all my film photos on the computer and then onto CD's.

In addition, they have all been uploaded to Picasa files on Google. So, hopefully they will outlast me.

Maybe it's exactly what should happen.

After all, the photographer did not make arrangements for his work to be transferred. Maybe that was intentional. (after all, how else would he express such intent?) The only thing we have to go on is his intentions as expressed while living. Since these photos would be lost otherwise, it goes without saying that he did not share them while living and did not will them to anyone. Given that, what makes you think his intention was to share them once deceased?

And if it wasn't his intent, is it right to take them?

This is indeed most unforntunate. I think photos are like any other property. Many times the owner is the only one in the family that has interest in them and the heirs don't have a clue about them. I think the only way to insure survival is for the owner to let the hiers know what to do with them as they would with any other property. Unfortunately, It's just something that isn't given much thought by some.

My grandfather worked for the PRR for 42 years. He had all sorts of pictures, memerobilia, etc. he accumulated. When he died my mother & grandmother didn't ask me if I would like to have them. I was in the service overseas at the time. They gave all his things to the Harrisburg, Dauphin County Historical society. At least they didn't get trashed, but I sure would have liked to have had them.

Robert MacDowell, I am just pointing out a trend. This illustrates the need for people to have backup copies of digital image collections outside their personal computer if they do want these things to be preserved. I try to help out the families of friends at their request. In most cases the legal heirs recognize the value of slides and film. But often the family members are not as computer literate as the photographer was, and they are unaware of where the digital collections are stored, or that they threw them away or gave them away with the computer.

PC

Hi

Due to the fact I am interest mainly in the C&NW I send a CD to the Chicago North Western Historical Society whenever I have chance.

This has a side benefit. When I am in need of information they are more than happy to help me.

Tim

This has been a real concern of mine for quite some time...the outward "invisiblity" of digital.

The arbitrary deletion of images during shooting to save or create more card space while convenient, is a whole 'nother issue. Back in the olden days you lived with the "out-takes" surrounding your keeper frames, sometimes for years...and sometimes you're glad you did. There was no messing around with the latent image.

Stephen

Stephen, I also got caught on the same issue early in using digital cameras. I didn't carry enough memory cards and ended up deleting things that I regretted having erased later on. Now I carry extra cards, and when I get home I download the pictures to two drives, an internal drive on the personal computer and a portable external drive that gets stored in another location. I also changed my directory naming system on the computers and now use longer and more descriptive names for the folders that tell their contents in language that the less computer capable members of the family can more easily understand.

PC

For what it is worth, prints, prints, prints...

Anything I am remotely interested in I have prints made even if only 4X6 size. They are incredibly cheap and of decent quality from York Photo and many other outfits. The stuff I really care about I usually print myself just because I enjoy the process.

No matter how many archival CDs or hard drives I have with photos on, nothing beats a print tucked away in an album - preferably of archival quality.

Time passes quickly and what doesn't seem like history soon becomes history. My dad took lots of Colorado narrow gage pictures from 1980 on, in addition to his early stuff. I sometimes think of the 1980 stuff as "new" and pay less attention to it. But think of this - in 1980 computer technology as we know it today was non-existant. That was 28 years ago and I can still look at his negatives and prints with my eyes. Had they been stored electronically, what would I be using to look at them? Will CDs, DVDs, thumb drives, etc. be around 28 years from now? Will anything be available to read them? Will we have to continuously update the file types and storage media as new technology replaces the old? I don't have the answers to those questions, but if history is any lesson, I would rather have hard copies stashed away because unless evolution takes a quantum leap, human beings will still have eyeballs in 28 years.

Yes, in order to preserve our access to these things we're going to have to. But wouldn't it be nice if when you bring your memory card or CD into Walgreens to get prints made that they'd strike a negative for you at the same time? All these Pixar computer animated features start out rendered by computer, and are then transferred to negative so that prints may made for distribution to theaters...the technology does exist...

On digital cameras, I don't fool around with multiple cards, I just get the biggest memory card I can get. I dump everytime I dock with my PC, so I only need enough capacity to get home.

Also, modern cameras are 8-12 megapixel or more. That's way too much for most common shots, so turn your resolution down and your card will last a lot longer.

On age, I still can view scans I created over 20 years ago on an $8000 Howtek scanner. They're in .TGA and .GIF, which are still totally supported today.

With negatives, you're soon going to have the exact same problem as 16mm and 8mm movie films, reel-to-reel tapes, and LP's: Far fewer people are going to own an appropriate translator (a tape player, a movie projector, a photo enlarger, etc.) than a computer capable of reading an old file. Hell, I would have a FAR easier time right now finding and running a 5 3/4" floppy drive than I would finding the right cartridge and needle for my three record turntables! And don't even talk to me about bulbs for the movie projectors! So once the drugstore/etc. burns you a negative: then what? Why? Do you still have a basement darkroom? Did you buy a $500+ film scanner? Or couldn't you just as well scan that print on your $80 flatbed scanner?

And in about ten years, where are you going to buy photo paper and processing chemicals, other than maybe the art-college supply store? (Even the Maryland Institute College of Art has discontinued film and processing, largely on environmental grounds, I'm told.)

I concede that image stability, file formats, etc. are considerations to worry about--but no more than cheap drugstore processing, uncaptioned photos (ever play a game of "identify the RR" in the photo library?), and sloppy negative storage. And there will be FAR more folks willing to assist us with a corrupted thumb drive or scratched CD-R than there will be photo processors in the future.

So how many of you HAVE worked with glass plate negatives? <:-)

Unless I misread, that was an $8000 scanner....which few of us would be willing to afford.

Yes, I have had many hours of experience with glass plate negatives. Big Dick Hillman, Martin O'Toole and I spent many pleasant evenings in Dick's basement generating PRINTS from the glass plate archives from Glover's, some of which were used in his excellent book. Quality of image and replicability were very impressive. Those glass plates had been stored in an un-climate controlled building for several decades, but still allowed us to reproduce their images with common technology of today, without noticeable loss of image quality.

Let's put a floppy disk or a CD in similar surroundings, for 70 years, and have our grandkids see if they can print them with the technology available in their time.

dave

I don't know if a local drugstore could be trusted to do a truly archival negative or print unless they really understood what they were doing and paid close attention to their chemistry and washing. And then what about storage - how many of us keep negatives and prints under proper climate control?

There have been lots of digital storage media changes in the past 20-30 years (IBM cards, magnetic tapes, the various sizes of floppy disks, Zip disks, ...). (I had the last IBM card reader at Berkeley and met some interesting people because of it..)

Maybe the safest idea for keeping digital files for the ages is endowed care like a cemetery plot. You pay a company a one-time fee to keep your files in perpetuity, which would include backup and transfer to new media as needed to keep up with technology. With the unit cost of digital storage dropping consistently, the business model might work.

To get back to earlier posts in the thread, an endowed storage agreement would have to include up-front a binding agreement about what to do with the files upon the owner's death.

When it comes to still photographs, I completely agree with Linn just said. This is why my wife loves to scrapbook, and why I think it's important she does it. Otherwise, our digital pictures will never be printed, and I'll only enjoy the few that I select to pop up on my desktop wallpaper or my screen saver.

To illustrate Linn's point further, one of the very first digital cameras I ever used was a Sony Mavica. These early-generation 1.0 megapixel beauties stored the pictures on a 1.44 Megabyte 3.5 inch floppy disk... Which was great back in the mid-to-late-1990's when most computers still had floppy disk drives. (I can almost hear NathanSixChime saying, "What's a floppy disk drive?" <grin>) But if that's all people used to store images (meaning they did NOT download them to a computer), how unfortunate, because I haven't seen very many computers with a built-in 3.5 inch floppy drive for 9, almost 10 years!

(However, I did invest $40 in a USB external 3.5 inch drive because I know there are times when somebody using an older computer will give me one of these disks and say, "the files are on here." And you know what? It's the fastest floppy drive I've ever owned!)

The CD-ROM standard (holds about 660 MB) is still around, but is on its way out with so many new DVD-ROM-equipped computers (4.7 GB, or 8 to 8.5 GB with Dual Layer). I'm sure more people are going that route, especially now that consumers have so many options for VIDEO and making MOVIES on their computer. Before they had to have expensive video equipment, now they just need a good camera with Firewire or USB capability.

So now it's not just the pictures, it's also the movies too, and what's the equivalent to "print, print, print" for those? Hmmm.. that's one to think about. I think for movies we are just stuck with converting and upgrading. Film movies were put to VHS (my Dad has a film camera, and a bunch of home movies that still need to be converted before too long), now VHS is put to DVD, DVD will soon be completely replaced by BlueRay... and in 10 years there will be something better.