safetymom said:
There has been growing concern because many people are not printing their images for future generations. A printed picture everyone can view but in the future people may not have ways to view images saved on media that isn't supported.
If you keep updating your images to the latest media that wouldn't be a problem.
They also say you aren't seeing the bad images anymore either. You know the one that was a double exposure but made for a good image for example. People either correct their images or they delete them.
I wish I was as organized in real life as I am with maintaining my images. The digital images are my negatives and I don't want anything to happen to them.
My take on this is, like anything else in life, if you want to keep something for a long time, whether it's a house, a car, a printed photo, or digital data, you have to store it properly and be willing to perform routine periodic maintenance on it.
In the case of digital data, that means copying it to a new, up-to-date file format or storage medium every so often.
Fortunately, the most common image formats in use today (jpg, tif) are outgrowths of established file formats which have been around for as much as 15 years, and although there have been changes to the standards, newer applications can still read files saved in older versions of the tif and jpg formats. Proprietary formats like Photoshop PSD are usually backwards compatible for many years, too.
Storage media, on the other hand, need attention. CD-Rs in the early days were only archivable for 1-3 years before the dyes began to break down, so older CD-Rs should be copied onto newer media that have longer archive characteristics. Most CD-Rs and DVD-Rs today are rated at 5-10 years, and there are some archival-quality discs on the market rated for 25 years.
Personally, I intend to copy my old stuff to new discs of current format every few years to avoid any trouble before it starts. Most of my CD-Rs are less than 4 years old anyway, but when I finally step into the 21st century and buy myself a DVD burner in the next few weeks I will copy all of the old discs, including my photo and MP3 collections, over to a couple of new DVD-Rs.
Digital images are like cars; you can't expect them to last foreer if you don't bother changing the oil every once in a while!