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...and that's why I like to shoot film. It seems improbable that JPG or TIFF will go obsolete any time soon, but—someday—they will. The RAW files from my digita

...and that's why I like to shoot film. It seems improbable that JPG or TIFF will go obsolete any time soon, but—someday—they will. The RAW files from my digital cameras are far less likely to be readable ten years from now. But a negative or a positive image? Not a problem. Never gonna be unreadable. There's a time and place for both formats, just like there is a time and a place for both a Kindle book and a real paper book, and it's important that we make a point of thinking carefully about which the circumstances dictate: convenience or long-term survival.

WalterBright 11y ago
Having a lot of faded old photos, I am not convinced of their longevity.
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago
  My fiber-based prints, properly fixed, washed and toned, are likely to survive for 150+ years.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    Famous last words :-) But seriously, how many photos does anyone bother to preserve on archival quality materials? I've lost family photos due to fading, floods, and simply losing them. I've digitized most of the remainder, in order to preserve them.
    - aaronbrethorst 11y ago
      For me? All of them that matter. I mostly print on gelatin silver paper in a darkroom, and I don't use digital inkjet paper that contains OBAs. I have digital copies, of course, too, and those are stored on my iMac, in a backup hard drive, in Backblaze, and on S3.
arrrg 11y ago
Pragmatism and realism is important. Some weirdo RAW format? Will probably suck to deal with. Already sucks to deal with. Don’t expect it to last long and maybe keep the JPGs around for your grandkids or rather grand-grand-grand-grandkids. JPG? I’m quite willing to bet that, baring the apocalypse, this format will be easy to read in 100, 500 or 1000 years. I’m really that certain about it. I’m even certain that in 100 or 500 years whatever OS on whatever device will come with out of the box support for JPGs. Maybe you will need an afternoon of digging to get JPGs displayed in 1000 years … but that should be about it. Ok, ok, those predictions are quite absurd, but I really would be wary of underestimating the existing and continuing ubiquity of the JPG format. There are probably billions of JPGs created every day, even if you limit it just to JPGs that result from light hitting some sort of image sensor. And that will continue for at least a couple decades. In the end a, what, maybe 80 to 100 year active lifetime of the format (remember, we are already at a quarter century) might seem short in the grand scheme of things, but the cost of just keeping support around will be so low … (again, barring the apocalypse) My OS can open some weird-ass image formats right out of the box. I can None of those formats (no other image format, period) has ever been as popular or as widespread as JPG … by a wide, wide margin. JPG is gonna be ok. If nothing else. So I wouldn’t worry about the format. I would worry about what you use to store those images and how you will hand it down. (Often analog photos are on some attic or similar place somewhere, often long forgotten even by the person who took them. Then someone stumbles across them and that is beautiful. Not so easy to recreate with digital images. How do you stumble across that? How do you just keep it around somewhere safely) You are certainly right that film negatives or positives are more likely to survive the literal apocalypse (where we lose all knowledge about using computers), but I’m not so sure about them being more likely to survive into the deep future … (Though in some ways you do have a point: I think in some ways it’s more likely that your grandkids will stumble across and know how to deal with your box of negatives in the attic than, I don’t know, your old hard drive? Your old PC? How do you even keep such stuff around?) But my point is this: JPGs are easy. Move beyond that and it gets hard. Any kind of interactive content is a nightmare.
kragen 11y ago
Maybe you should use PPM P6 format instead of JPEG, TIFF, RAW, or analog. Here's the implementation I used in My Very First Ray Tracer: /* PPM P6 file format; see <http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ppm.html> */ static void output_header(int ww, int hh) { printf("P6\n%d %d\n255\n", ww, hh); } static unsigned char byte(double dd) { return dd > 1 ? 255 : dd < 0 ? 0 : dd * 255 + 0.5; } static void encode_color(color co) { putchar(byte(co.x)); putchar(byte(co.y)); putchar(byte(co.z)); } (I was using x, y, and z to hold the r, g, and b components of the color, respectively.)
thaumasiotes 11y ago
> But a negative or a positive image? Not a problem. Never gonna be unreadable. This is pretty dishonest. Images fade; that's not a different problem from formats being lost, except to the extent that an image in a hard-to-read format might still be recoverable. For example, tiff is uncompressed pixel color values; you could recover that easily without having a tiff reader or even knowing what tiff was.
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago
  A properly developed, stopped, fixed, washed black and white negative stored in a box in reasonable temperature conditions isn't going to fade for a very long time.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    And a digital image with a text file accompanying it describing the image format is similarly resilient. Heck, you could provide text describing the format within the image file. Also, I'll note that the comment I responded to specifically claimed that positive images last forever.
    - davorb 11y ago
      The problem isn't that it's digital. The problem is where do you store it? Hardrives, CDs, floppy disks? All of that stuff has a very limited lifetime, after which it simply stops working. And even if it continues to work, what are your chances of being able to buy a CD reader in five to ten years? The big difference between analog and digital is that with analog, you can simply stuff it in a box and it will stay there. With digital, you have to take the time every now and then to make sure that you don't lose that stuff. And do you really think that you (or someone else, when you are gone) will be doing that properly? I mean, you will most likely have forgotten why that stuff was even "important" in a few years. There's so much great stuff our generation is going to lose, simply because we'll forget to migrate our backups.

WalterBright 11y ago

Having a lot of faded old photos, I am not convinced of their longevity.

aaronbrethorst 11y ago
My fiber-based prints, properly fixed, washed and toned, are likely to survive for 150+ years.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  Famous last words :-) But seriously, how many photos does anyone bother to preserve on archival quality materials? I've lost family photos due to fading, floods, and simply losing them. I've digitized most of the remainder, in order to preserve them.
  - aaronbrethorst 11y ago
    For me? All of them that matter. I mostly print on gelatin silver paper in a darkroom, and I don't use digital inkjet paper that contains OBAs. I have digital copies, of course, too, and those are stored on my iMac, in a backup hard drive, in Backblaze, and on S3.

arrrg 11y ago

Pragmatism and realism is important. Some weirdo RAW format? Will probably suck to deal with. Already sucks to deal with. Don’t expect it to last long and maybe keep the JPGs around for your grandkids or rather grand-grand-grand-grandkids. JPG? I’m quite willing to bet that, baring the apocalypse, this format will be easy to read in 100, 500 or 1000 years. I’m really that certain about it. I’m even certain that in 100 or 500 years whatever OS on whatever device will come with out of the box support for JPGs. Maybe you will need an afternoon of digging to get JPGs displayed in 1000 years … but that should be about it. Ok, ok, those predictions are quite absurd, but I really would be wary of underestimating the existing and continuing ubiquity of the JPG format. There are probably billions of JPGs created every day, even if you limit it just to JPGs that result from light hitting some sort of image sensor. And that will continue for at least a couple decades. In the end a, what, maybe 80 to 100 year active lifetime of the format (remember, we are already at a quarter century) might seem short in the grand scheme of things, but the cost of just keeping support around will be so low … (again, barring the apocalypse) My OS can open some weird-ass image formats right out of the box. I can None of those formats (no other image format, period) has ever been as popular or as widespread as JPG … by a wide, wide margin. JPG is gonna be ok. If nothing else. So I wouldn’t worry about the format. I would worry about what you use to store those images and how you will hand it down. (Often analog photos are on some attic or similar place somewhere, often long forgotten even by the person who took them. Then someone stumbles across them and that is beautiful. Not so easy to recreate with digital images. How do you stumble across that? How do you just keep it around somewhere safely) You are certainly right that film negatives or positives are more likely to survive the literal apocalypse (where we lose all knowledge about using computers), but I’m not so sure about them being more likely to survive into the deep future … (Though in some ways you do have a point: I think in some ways it’s more likely that your grandkids will stumble across and know how to deal with your box of negatives in the attic than, I don’t know, your old hard drive? Your old PC? How do you even keep such stuff around?) But my point is this: JPGs are easy. Move beyond that and it gets hard. Any kind of interactive content is a nightmare.

kragen 11y ago

Maybe you should use PPM P6 format instead of JPEG, TIFF, RAW, or analog. Here's the implementation I used in My Very First Ray Tracer: /* PPM P6 file format; see <http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ppm.html> */ static void output_header(int ww, int hh) { printf("P6\n%d %d\n255\n", ww, hh); } static unsigned char byte(double dd) { return dd > 1 ? 255 : dd < 0 ? 0 : dd * 255 + 0.5; } static void encode_color(color co) { putchar(byte(co.x)); putchar(byte(co.y)); putchar(byte(co.z)); } (I was using x, y, and z to hold the r, g, and b components of the color, respectively.)

thaumasiotes 11y ago

> But a negative or a positive image? Not a problem. Never gonna be unreadable. This is pretty dishonest. Images fade; that's not a different problem from formats being lost, except to the extent that an image in a hard-to-read format might still be recoverable. For example, tiff is uncompressed pixel color values; you could recover that easily without having a tiff reader or even knowing what tiff was.

aaronbrethorst 11y ago
A properly developed, stopped, fixed, washed black and white negative stored in a box in reasonable temperature conditions isn't going to fade for a very long time.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  And a digital image with a text file accompanying it describing the image format is similarly resilient. Heck, you could provide text describing the format within the image file. Also, I'll note that the comment I responded to specifically claimed that positive images last forever.
  - davorb 11y ago
    The problem isn't that it's digital. The problem is where do you store it? Hardrives, CDs, floppy disks? All of that stuff has a very limited lifetime, after which it simply stops working. And even if it continues to work, what are your chances of being able to buy a CD reader in five to ten years? The big difference between analog and digital is that with analog, you can simply stuff it in a box and it will stay there. With digital, you have to take the time every now and then to make sure that you don't lose that stuff. And do you really think that you (or someone else, when you are gone) will be doing that properly? I mean, you will most likely have forgotten why that stuff was even "important" in a few years. There's so much great stuff our generation is going to lose, simply because we'll forget to migrate our backups.