RE: Vs: [Leica] Digital vs Film

["Austin Franklin" <darkroom@ix.netcom.com>]

Aram,

Your point is well taken.  Personally, I store ALL my digital image files in
TIFF format.  It isn't compressed, no special headers/footers etc.  It's as
simple as can be, the file only has the image size and the data.  Really
easy to "decode".  In 100 years, media issues aside (which are a significant
issue, BTW), decoding the image should be a non-issue.

One thing I do is keep old machines around...yes, I know that sounds funny,
but I "archive" the machine, with the old OS, old programs and old data, as
well as the program disks to re-build that machine should I need to.  That
way, I am ASSURED, electronic failure aside, that I can get to my old files.
So far I only have one archived "machine"...pre-Windows (actually, Windows
3.1), and am about to do another, WinNT 4.0.  The reason I do it is because
I do engineering work, and just like your files, engineering files are very
program specific, and the data formats change, companies go out of
business...and I may need to take a look at something I did 10 years ago.
Unfortunately, I didn't do this for a lot of early files I did on a
Mac...and I lost a lot of work, that I can never recover.

Now, I'm not suggesting that for digital images, as it really isn't
necessary...but I would strongly suggest storing digital images in an
uncompressed format, and probably suggest TIFF, because of it's simplicity.
I'm sure that there will always be programs to read JPEG etc, at least for
our lifetime.  I also suggest archiving them to more than one CD...and when
DVD writers become less expensive (and your image library grows), archive
them to DVD...and then to...whatever is the media of the time, at the time
;-)

Regards,

Austin

> William.
>
> I've been saying this for years.  I have a ton of digital files
> of papers my
> students have submitted.  I moved them from floppy to CD about 8
> years ago.
> There are quiet a few that, while the files are in great shape,
> there is no
> way to read them.  The software used 10-15 years ago just doesn't exist
> anymore.  The newer Mac's don't even have floppy drives (yes you can buy
> attachments).  And at the current rate of change, I think your 50
> year time
> frame will be more like 10 years.  I did convert those files that
> were done
> in early versions of Word/Excel Appleworks/MSWorks to a later version of
> Office a few years back and made a new CD, but that took a lot of
> time.  As
> others have posted, they have taken literally hundreds of thousands of
> digital photos.  Are they going to be able to change them as old formats
> fall out of practice and new ones come into practice?  (GIF to JPEG to...)
> Will they have the time to take new photos when all they are doing is
> converting file after file after file....  Do we save everything
> as text or
> raw data?

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