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Does a digital image really exist if it’s never printed?

OK, this post may be a little strange, but the thought has been bugging me for a while now. Please indulge me for a moment. Let’s revisit the days of analog photography. You know, when we all used to shoot on film. When you shot a photo, the emulsion of the film was burned by the light. Using a little chemistry, the burned areas were processed and made stable, thus producing a negative. The negative was then used to produce as many prints as you wanted and in whatever size you wanted.

Now in the era of digital photography, we don’t have negatives. We don’t have anything physical from which to produce prints. Images can viewed on a monitor or mobile device, but the viewing is transient and without some type of device, cannot be seen at all. The digital image you just captured, doesn’t exist in the way that a negative does. It only exists in the form of electromagnetic energy. You can’t see them, you can’t touch them, they are merely data.

The argument can be made that a digital image doesn’t really exist until it is actually printed and brought into the physical world. I guess you can use an analogy that a book doesn’t really exist if all the words are just in the author’s head. It’s not until they are printed that they become a book. (I know this leads to the whole debate about electronic books, but I’m not going down that road). I think you get my point.

I’m afraid we are all going to be lose a lot of cherished photos because we mistakenly believe that digital images are permanent. Hard drives will fail. With the best intentions, backups will be planned, but never executed. DVDs and CDs will degrade and become unusable. Data will be lost. File formats will change.

I was fortunate. My father was an amateur photographer and took tons of photos. My mom was good about creating photo albums and thereby preserved family moments. These are images I truly cherish.

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I cannot imagine not having this snapshot.  This is a photo of my mother at age 19, taken by my father in Germany during June of 1946. In the photo my mom is on a merry-go-round at a  carnival. I’m sure my dad was doing something goofy behind the camera to make her laugh.

They had met while he was in the Army and stationed there after World War II. She was German and met him when she ducked into a doorway to get out of the rain. The doorway happened to be the entrance to a police station where my dad was stationed as an MP.

If this photo had been stored on a hard drive rather than in an album, would it still be around 68 years later?

Is there any data on your computer that you plan on preserving for 68 years?

 

 

 

My suggestion is that you:

1) Backup all your photos to more than one external drive (this means camera phone images too). Camera phones sometimes contain some really valuable images. Especially after time passes and people leave our lives.

2) Print the photos you want to preserve. Print using archival inks or let a pro lab print them for you. Most images printed on regular paper with cheap inks will degrade pretty quickly. Spend the money and get them printed so that they will last.

3) If you take lots of photos, organize them on your computer. Make sure all your photos are stored so that they can be easily found and backed up. Often it makes sense to have one main folder, then use subfolders to further organize them.

30 years from now, your grandkids/family members would much rather have an old dusty photo album to look at than an unreadable DVD. It’s conceivable that a generation that is now growing up carrying a camera with them at all times may be a generation that leaves fewer photos for their children/grandchildren.

I think regular family portraits are priceless and are usually appreciated more as time goes by. But don’t forget the candid photos and snapshots. Sometimes capturing those unposed, unplanned moments are worth their weight in gold.

Just some food for thought. Thanks for reading!

-Ken.