In the past few weeks, I’ve received a lot of requests to share my process for organizing and archiving negatives, and the timing was perfect because a big batch just arrived from my friends at Carmencita Film Lab. Look at this sweet sight of fresh negatives!
I had a death in the family this week, as my brother in law Michael Stroud passed away, after a three-week hospital stint. There are many parts of the grieving process, of course, and one big one is revisiting memories, with photos and video.
Losing priceless digital photographs is something that all too many people experience these days. If you want to make sure you store your digital files properly, read this guide on the best ways to backup your photos for a lifetime.
What do you do when your NAS/RAID/DAS is almost filled up and you need more storage? The answer probably isn’t what you think… Some DAS and NAS, like those from Synology and Drobo, let you replace smaller drives with larger drives to “add capacity.” But doing that doesn’t necessarily give you access to a meaningful amount of additional storage.
Google has been steadily adding features to their Google Photos app since I/O 2017. The new archive feature isn’t the most exciting of them, but it has an interesting trick up its sleeve.
Having hundreds of thousands of images categorized, tagged and sorted on a computer is a wonderful thing. It makes all the non-photo-related chores that used to go along with the art of photography many times simpler and sometimes even automated. Instead of labeling and filing away into plastic sleeves, fighting off dust and taking up space in your closet, we now batch name, drag into a “folder” and easily back up onto an external drive for redundancy (or maybe even that ambiguous cloud we all have heard so much about).
Storing your images digitally is certainly convenient, but it may prove detrimental in the long run.
You know those digital photos you've archived by burning onto DVDs and sticking under your bed? You'll be lucky if the files are still readable by the end of your life. Photographer Trevor Paglen wants to archive photos for a much longer time... and by "much longer", we mean billions of years. He's not just doing this for himself, either, but for all of humanity.
There's a good chance the digital photos you've stored on hard drives and DVDs won't outlive you, but what if there was a disc that could last forever? M-Disc, short for Millenial Disc, is a new type of disc that doesn't suffer from natural decay and degradation like existing disc technologies, allowing you to store data safely for somewhere between "1000 years" and "forever".
It seems like everyone has access to some kind of camera these days, but will the digital images captured survive long enough to become part of the historical record of our time for future generations?
Back in September we wrote an article discussing how difficult it is to keep digital photographs safe for a really, really long time. We mentioned that storing your images with a reliable service like Amazon is probably much safer than trying to archive data yourself, since you're probably not an expert at doing so.