Photographs and the best way to save them.
Last month, I returned to my hometown and met
up with some old friends. One of them
brought along some old photos of times we had spent together 20 years ago. We had such fun reminiscing and catching up
on news. One photo in particular was
particularly poignant. It was a family
snap, with my friend and my family all together. I hadn’t seen it before. I have now borrowed it, and taken a copy. My scanner was broken, so I went to Clifton
Colour in Clifton Down Shopping Centre, and they did it for me on the
spot.
When I went to pay, there was a photocopy on
the desk, printed out from The Daily Telegraph.
Google’s vice president has warned internet users to
print out treasured photographs or risk losing them.
“Vint Cerf, the internet pioneer, said it was
time to start preserving the vast quantities of digital data which are produced
before they are lost forever.
Warning that the 21st century could
become a second "Dark Ages" because so much data is now kept in digital
format, he said that future generations would struggle to understand our
society because technology is advancing so quickly that old files will be
inaccessible.
Speaking at a conference in San
Jose, California, Mr Cerf likened the problem to the Dark Ages, the period in
Britain between the 5th and 8th centuries where little is known, following the
collapse of the Roman Empire.
“If we don’t find a solution our 21st Century
will be an information black hole.”
“Future generations will wonder
about us but they will have very great difficulty knowing about us.”
“We think about digitising things
because we think we will preserve them, but what we don't understand is that
unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and
may even be worse than, the artefacts that we digitised.”
“We stand to lose a lot of our
history. If you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives
which is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, people's
tweets, all of the world wide web, then if you wanted to see what was on the
web in 1994 you'd have trouble doing that. A lot of the stuff disappears.
“We don't want our digital lives to
fade away. If we want to preserve them the same way we preserve books and so on
we need to make sure that the digital objects we create will be rendered far
into the future.”
Mr Cerf said there was a huge
problem with the ability to preserve and run software over long periods of
time. He said he felt a ‘great burden’ to find a way to create digital formats
which can still be accessed in thousands of years.
He is recommending the creation of a
system, which will not only store a digital format but preserve details of the
software and operating system needed to access it, so it can be recreated in
the future.
In the meantime, he recommended printing out important documents such as
treasured family pictures to avoid losing them through outdated operating
systems.
“We have various formats for digital
photographs and movies and those formats need software to correctly render
those objects.
“Sometimes the standards we use to
produce those objects fade away and are replaced by other alternatives and then
software that is supposed to render images can't render older formats, so the
images are no longer visible.
I thought that the article was worthy of sharing with you. Do make sure that your most precious photos
are printed or at least saved. Don’t
just leave them on your camera or phone, transfer the photos onto your computer
and then back them up elsewhere too.
So many photos are taken on phones- such as this “Selfie”. It is likely that many will remain in digital
format and often be lost with the phone if that goes astray.
Treasure your digital memories, and take care of them!
