"Some time ago," these libraries and archives probably already had staff familiar with film preservation, and processes in place to do so. While preserving digi

"Some time ago," these libraries and archives probably already had staff familiar with film preservation, and processes in place to do so. While preserving digital photos is an inherently easier task than preserving negatives and prints — neither of which can be stored, duplicated, or even viewed without at least some amount of degradation — the skills and processes required are very different. Professional archivists aren't simply going to stick digital media in a climate-controlled vault and assume it'll be accessible in 80 years, and, if you care about your photos, neither should you! Putting (perfectly tractable) media preservation issues aside, most common lossy and lossless image formats have open, published specs for both image data and metadata, so I wouldn't anticipate problems reading these in the future — can you honestly imagine a non-apocalyptic future where JPEG, TIFF, or PNG files won't be viewable in 80 years? Unprocessed, proprietary camera raw files pose more interesting problems, of course.