> The data encoded in the steganography, could be any data of course, but for our purposes, it would be the image itself. This was an intriguing idea, but afte

> The data encoded in the steganography, could be any data of course, but for our purposes, it would be the image itself. This was an intriguing idea, but after I did some back of the envelope rough numbers, I tentatively concluded microform might not encode densely enough to accomplish that. It already has poor fidelity characteristics for photographic data. Right off the bat you are losing lots of information during the reducing process, and the film itself does not have the kind of qualities photographers look for. Color microform is also much more expensive than black and white. So the color film works well for newsprint photos, but for archival grade purposes, we're likely better off with the original film negatives. For deep storage archives, I could see a use case for microform, and with the encoding you suggested, but not quite at one picture per frame (page). Steganography relies upon imperceptibly embedding information into the picture, so there is a very low encoding density limit because we're working with analog pictures. Optar at 600 ppi uses an entire page to encode 200 Kb, but microfilm is closer to 300 ppi, so at 100 percent density with no picture, we can expect around 100 Kb per page of Optar-encoded binary data. An average smartphone picture size these days is around 5 MB, closer to 15-50 MB for DSLR pictures. Optar-encoding the smartphone picture, we are around 50 pages before we scatter it into the picture to steganographically encode it. Already we can see the picture has to be blown up across more than 50 pages and stitched back together. At imperceptible levels of encoding density, I'm guessing we're looking at 500+ pages, maybe. A standard microfiche holds about 98 pages, so we're talking about 6'ish fiches per picture at cellphone grade, much more for DSLR grade picture encoding. For high quality archival photograph storage, I think current librarians have it right: lots of duplicates of negatives, geographically separated, then service copy negatives off those masters, digitally scan in the most-used pictures off the service copy, and let patrons use the digital copies. Migrate the digital copies until we establish a universally-accepted digital bootstrap mechanism and process for Long Now-span time scales.