Are Your Electronic Photos Safe?

This came across my desk, and I thought I would share.
This past week, I've undertaken a new project: scanning the boxes of old family photos that I inherited from my mom. I started by sorting them and picking out the ones that I cared about most to digitize first, but my goal is to eventually get them all into electronic format and make copies for my kids, aunts and uncles and cousins. The experience got me thinking about how advances in technology have changed the whole family photo experience and the advantages - and disadvantages - of our new methods for preserving visual memories.

Many of the photos in the box are prints from negatives, some are Polaroids, and some are portraits made by professional photographers or commercial studios. The latter range from Olan Mills to the nameless portrait companies that use to set up shop in the local K-Mart and offer an 8x10 for 99 cents (hoping, of course, to talk you into buying many more when you saw the finished pictures). There are even a few ancient ferrotypes of ancestors I never knew that were passed down through the generations.

One characteristic of many of these pictures is that they're one of a kind. Even though most originated on film, most of the original negatives are long gone, lost or thrown away at some point over the years. The exceptions are a bevy of school photos, copies of which are likely residing in similar boxes on dozens of my family members' shelves, and those K-Mart baby pictures; the salespeople almost always succeeded in persuading the proud mom, dad and/or grandma to purchase plenty of "wallets" to distribute to friends and family.

Twenty-five years ago, photography was a fairly expensive proposition. My first Nikon, an F2, cost $1200 back in the 1970s - almost as much as my current semi-pro digital Nikon. If you adjust for inflation, it was much more expensive than the one I use today. Then you had to buy the film. Those of us who grew up shooting film still tend to be stingy and careful with our shots, forgetting that with modern digital cameras we can "spray and pray" without paying extra for the privilege.

The old shoeboxes full of photographs (or for the more industrious among us, the stacks of fat photo albums - I have plenty of both) are probably destined to disappear from our lives as those lives become more and more digitized. Many folks still make prints of the pictures they take with their digital cameras, but to an increasing degree, we share those photos on the web or via email instead of printing them. Even when we want to display them in our homes, we can do it more effectively with digital photo frames. We can even take them with us wherever we go, on tiny keychain displays.

Regardless of whether they originate in our digicams or as faded prints that we scan, for many people, the majority of the photos we own now are in electronic format. Does this make them more or less vulnerable to loss or damage? Well, that depends. The nice thing about electronic files of any kind is that you can make as many copies as you want and store those copies in disparate places. The bad thing about electronic files is that if you don't do that, it's easy to accidentally delete them, have them become corrupted, or get them wiped out by a hard drive crash or the loss of a memory card.

A mistake made by many amateur digital photographers is leaving the pictures on the card in the camera rather than immediately downloading them to the computer. Then you get out there in the field again and need to take more pictures, and your card is full. What do you do? If you don't carry an extra card, or have your laptop with you so you can do an emergency download, you may have to delete some of the pictures on the card before you can take more. That's a situation that's easily avoided with a little foresight, but it happens with surprising frequency.

Another common practice that can put your photos in danger is to download them to your hard drive, and then make a "backup" on that same hard drive. Now, this is better than making no backup at all; at least if one of the files gets corrupted or accidentally deleted, you will probably still have the other copy. But if the disk itself dies, you lose both copies. Ah ha, you say, but I have two separate physical disks in the computer and I put the backup on a different disk. Okay, that's better - but what if a natural disaster destroys the whole computer and both disks?

A better idea is to create an off-site backup. There are various ways to do that. You can copy the photos to removable media - a USB drive, a DVD or CD, a flash card - and then store it somewhere else: at a friend's house, at your office, in the bank safe deposit box. Or you can back up the files up across the Internet: zip them up and email them to a friend to save on his/her computer, email them to your own Gmail or Hotmail account, put them on your ISP's web server if you get free web space with your account, upload them to a "cloud storage" service such as Microsoft's SkyDrive or Mozy or Idrive, or an online backup service such as Carbonite or Backupmyinfo, or publish them on a web-based photo sharing site such as Flickr or Picasa or Shutterfly. The idea is to get as many redundant copies of your photos stored in as many different locations as possible.

Each of these solutions has its benefits and drawbacks. If you store your photos on removable media, you'll need to check on them now and then and maybe transfer them to new media every few years. How many people still have floppy disks full of pictures - and new computers that don't have floppy drives? Even if the technology itself is still current, it's not a bad idea to copy the contents of optical discs over to a new one every few years. It's difficult to know what the lifespan of a particular DVD or CD may be, since it depends on the quality of the disc, storage conditions, and other factors. Don't just assume you can burn your files to a disc and it will still be good five or ten years from now.

Online storage has its own set of drawbacks. You're trusting your precious pictures to a server over which you probably have no control. Free services are great but they tend to come and go. If you visit www.xdrive.com, you'll see a web page announcing "The Xdrive service is closed. Thank you for having been an Xdrive user." Even if you pay for the service, that doesn't guarantee it won't go away. Earlier this year, HP shut down their Upline online backup service:

Something else to consider when you put your photos online is how this affects your copyright. If you publish your pictures on the web, it can be very easy for someone else to copy them without your permission unless you have the expertise (or web publishing software) to disable right click and save/copy options. Of course, even if you do disable that functionality, anyone who can view your photos can still do a screen capture and copy the picture that way. Vista and Windows 7 make this particularly easy with the Snipping Tool. And if you plan on selling any of your photos, remember that posting them on the web may render them "published," so that you can no longer sell first publication rights to them.

Be sure to carefully read the Terms of Service of any web site to which you publish your photos, too. Ensure that by posting your pictures there, you aren't giving up ownership of the copyright or granting the site a license that's overly broad (such as the right to use your pictures for their ads or other commercial purposes).

With all the ways that electronic photos can be lost or destroyed, it might not be such a bad idea to print hard copies of your most important photos, after all. But how do you do that? You can get a pretty decent print now with an inexpensive ink jet printer if you use paper especially made for photos, but you may find that it ends up costing a lot more than you anticipated, given the cost of color ink cartridges. Of course, there are many printers now that are made specifically for printing photos and these may give you better results. You can also take your photo files, on optical disc or memory card, to WalMart or Target or the local camera shop and have prints made. This may be the most cost effective alternative. If you're concerned about how long the prints last without fading, you may want to pay more for archival grade paper.

Have you scanned all those "one of a kind" prints in your albums and boxes to preserve them for posterity? Do you back up your digital photos to several different locations, including at least one "off site" location? Have you automated the backup process or do you do it manually? How do you share photos with your friends and family? Do you email copies, put them on your own web site, publish them on a dedicated photo sharing site, create albums on a social networking site, or some/all of the above? Do you think the digitization of photography has, overall, resulted in better pictures or just more of them? Do you wonder whether your own kids will treasure those family photos as much as you did, now that they're mostly electronic images instead of paper prints?
Walk Good