What we can do to preserve our digital memories
Why even think about this?
It feels like it is getting harder and harder to keep up with digital technology today. New products come on the market so quickly the next thing we know our digital products are obsolete or no longer work with the latest technologies. This makes our digital materials on our computers very fragile.
Before digital cameras hit the consumer market our family memories and histories were either stored on slides or printed on photographic paper. The photographs were usually kept in photo albums or boxes for future generations to cherish and look at many years later.
Today, many of us capture these memories on digital cameras and store on our computers. But digital photographs require specific hardware and software to view them. How will we access these memories 15 or 30 years from now when our cameras, current media cards, rewritable discs and memory sticks will very likely be obsolete? Even the software and hardware we are using today to open our image files will probably not be around in a few decades. How can we ensure that our photographs will not be locked into unsupported storage media or made unusable?
Steps we can take:
1. Print copies of favourite photos or those very special moments you never want to lose. Use archive-quality ink and high-quality paper for best preservation.
2. If you store all of your digital photographs on your computer's hard drive it is very important to establish a regular backup system so your computer files, including the digital photographs and other media, are copied to CDs, DVDs or to an external hard drive. Make more than one copy of your digital files and store the copies in different physical locations.
3. Save your digital photograhic files on the latest storage media products available. It is suggested that you never use rewritable discs for long-term storage. Make several copies of these files and store them in different places.
Be aware that the compact disks and DVDs you make today may become damaged or obsolete in the future so it is important to convert old disks to new formats as they become available. This extra work every few years ensures that you are not stuck with unsupported, obsolete media storage with no way to access your photographs.
4. Once you are finished editing your digital photograph and ready to save it for the long term, save one copy of it in a non-proprietary image file format such as TIFF or JPEG. At this time most digital cameras and photo devices recognize a JPEG file which means you can open and manipulate the photograph in just about any digital imaging software program. One of the drawbacks of saving as a JPEG before you edit the image is that JPEG files lose pixels when they are saved due the way files are compressed to reduce their size. When you save the image as a TIFF file you do not lose pixels but not every software program recognizes the TIFF file format.
By saving the picture in a readily available file format today, when this file format falls out of favour and is replaced by something else you should still be able to transfer the old JPEG or TIFF photograph to the newer, freely available format.
Organizing our digital photographs
Digital cameras make it very easy for us to create large quantities of digital photographs. Finding a specific picture to look at can become an onerous task if we have not taken the time to properly label or tag our photographs. Labelling photographs with descriptive keywords and dates can help speed up this retrieval. The more information we record about the photograph the greater the chances will be of finding it later.
Document reviewed 2011 January 9