The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
IÕve been at three different relativesÕ houses this summer where the comment, ÒYou really need to see the pictures of our trip to.....Ó involved a trip to the computer. We sat down, watched slideshows and even had offers of burnt CDs for the really interesting pictures. While I keep all of the pictures IÕve taken in probably the last five years on the laptop that lives with me basically wherever I go, I still found this to be a strange experience. When my mother died a few years ago, one of the biggest jobs we had as kids was sorting through shoeboxes and albums trying to figure out who was going to get which pictures. We separated piles, squinted at old black and whites trying to figure out who each person was, and considered running some of them down to photo shops to get them copied so that we could each have some of the more important ones. In some ways weÕve got it much easier now, but in others, I wonder about the photographs that weÕre taking. ItÕs simple. Research shows that when a person switches from a standard film camera to a digital camera (which almost everyone has already done), they take approximately six times as many pictures as they did before. The photo-sharing site Flickr gets just over two million pictures uploaded to it every single day. There is no doubt that we are producing far more pictures than people in the past ever did. Getting your picture taken as a family used to be a massive affair that might be done several times in a lifetime and involved great expense. Now, we take and throw away more pictures than ever before. But what happens to them? If you upload them to a site like flickr, you possibly have a pro level account that holds many more pictures than a free one. Costing only about $25 a year, many people (including me) have gone this route. Some people routinely upload dozens of pictures to the web and promptly delete them from their computers, not wanting to take up the hard drive space. This really is a great idea Ð until we also begin deciding that we donÕt want to pay our money anymore and our pictures disappear from the Internet. Your other option is to save all of your pictures just to your computer. Eventually these pictures begin taking too much space, so you burn them onto CDs or DVDs. ThatÕs another great idea, but the problem is that these forms of storage can begin to deteriorate in as little as five years. What happens when you faithfully burn these pictures, store them for years, and then they canÕt be opened at some later date because the discs have begun to break down? Everything is lost. This is a real problem. The same thing is already being found with plain text computer files of people from the Ô60s and Ô70s. The computers needed to open them simply donÕt exist anymore. This means some of the research notes from top scientists from these times, who were the early users of computers, cannot be read. What happens when billions of photographs, the life stories of millions of families, suffer the same fate? ItÕs sad to say in our digital age, but your best bet for saving your family photos is still to print them off. Buy good quality photo paper of archival quality and print out the pictures that you really want to keep. If you have some pictures that are not all that important, burn them onto good quality CDs or DVDs and then re-burn them every few years onto new discs. The problem is not with the types of files, itÕs with the discs themselves, so as long as you are making arrangements and looking after them, the pictures will be there. Now take this problem and expand out to all of our different types of data: movies, written text files, e-mails, etc. I know my in-laws still have letters they sent to each other more than 40 years ago, before they were married; I probably donÕt have things I sent to my wife last week, as theyÕve all been deleted from my machines. There is no doubt that we are producing a lot more stuff, and this really is great. I love to see people being creative, but I still wonder about whatÕs going to happen to all of it. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
