I have amassed over the years some sizable photo collections from other sources, in addition to being an active photographer with all the logistical headaches that come with safely storing and archiving my own work. Mathematically, there is no way I will ever have enough time to scan and digitally archive it. The time I would need to manage my own output is not available.
In contrast, they won’t (hopefully) have too much trouble accessing the information the day I’m no longer here to direct those who might be interested in seeing any of this in the right direction. It has labels and is organized in a way. For 90% of the analog content, including the negatives, prints, and transparencies, this is the case.
The more recent digitally captured material as well as the digital analogue archives do not share this limitation. A variety of recordable media, such as metal oxide and optical, are used to store this.
Anyone with the desire to access the images will have access to them, provided all the hardware required to access the files is regularly upgraded and the files themselves are regularly moved to new recording media.
Duplicating master CDs, Zip and MO discs, and backing up hard drives already take a lot of time—far too much time, in fact—but I don’t see any hardware or media on the horizon that will ease the burden or the annoyance of this task. What happened to Hitachi’s 3D recording technology? What happened to the new holographic technology that Maxell was supposed to launch more than a year ago? What happened to the self-replicating crystal flourite technology that I wrote about in a nearly four-year-old article and that would prevent archivists from dying too young?
When I recently needed an image to illustrate an article, the only digital copy I could find that had been archived was on a Zip disk that was six years old. On three different Macs, the file obstinately refused to open, and not even the synthesised friendly voice of a 1993 Mac Performa could calm my rage.
I’ve written extensively about my tests on exclusive CD-R media in the past. In one article, I recommended paying a little extra for gold layer discs rather than cheap discs for the storage of valuable files. Well, I paid a lot more for German-made gold layer types. For four years, the information on these has been checked once a year. When I last checked a month ago, a number of files refused to open or opened incorrectly, and it was common to have half of an image’s image data missing. Just before Kodak discontinued their gold+silver discs, I bought cartloads of them. Records are carefully examined, but after four years, some files still have issues.
The only media discs that appear to maintain some integrity are MO disks, but because of their high price, I have shifted more in the direction of high capacity stand alone hard drives. When I enter a pin number to pay for something, the industry standard for a hard drive life of 20,000 hours, or roughly 2.28 years, is always in the forefront of my mind because I never purchase anything for which I cannot find comprehensive technical specifications.
2.28 years? – Are they kidding?
Bromide prints that are 40 years old and still look just as good as the day they were created are stored in Agfa Kraft boxes. The silver image is still visible on glass plates from 1858 that are part of the collection. Even older Dufaycolor slides from more than 70 years ago and some early Autochromes are in good condition.
It’s all very well for manufacturers to keep improving the specifications and features of digital capture cameras, but if they cannot grasp what I believe to be their moral obligation to also put in place some way of permanently archiving the images I shoot with their gear, I may stop using it.
Oddly, Leica suggested that if I really needed a higher level of archive security for my digital files, there was really only one medium that could provide it; you guessed it. This was a few years ago, before they had been thoroughly shaken by Epson’s RD1 debut. They claimed that film was the only option.
Despite the advancements made for RAW capture software, I have a feeling that if I asked the same question today, the same answer would be expected.
After some careful editing, I might initially decide that only a small portion of the thousands of digitally captured images I add to the picture library each year are worth recording. There is currently no reasonably priced digital to film recording hardware available, which would allow for the minimally expensive additional costs of film and processing.