Image by Lynette Millett via Flickr
Technology Thursday
For every complication that technology eases, it seems to bring another one to replace it. I've had a digital camera since around 2000 and love, love, love the flexibility digital photography provides. I no longer have to drop film off at a photo processing place and hope they don't lose it. I don't have to spend time sorting pictures into albums that will then sit on shelves to gather dust and never be seen again. I don't have to label and keep track of negatives. I can crop and tweak and fix red eye easily. I can quickly remove zits and, these days, spots of drool from my son's chin. I can take as many pictures as I want without worrying about the cost of developing. And for those that I really like I can upload them to a local photo store and get prints made in almost any size I want.
But for all those nice features, digital photography has definitely added some work to my life.
First there's the problem of organizing, cataloguing, and labeling photos for easy viewing and retrieval. I am woefully inadequate at this task. Oh, I have big dreams (find all photos of Spouse + cat #1 and not cat #2; find all photos of my son and his aunt; and so on), but am many, many, many hours of work away from achieving them. Right now almost 10 years of my digital photos are stored across at least three different computers. Someday I'll get them all integrated into one database with useful metadata and tagging. Some day. really.
An even bigger concern than organization is preservation and archiving. Digital's advantage over print of course is that you can make multiple copies. But where do you keep these copies? What happens if your hard drive fails? Or you dump coffee into it? Or there's a larger tragedy and your house burns down? Many people I talk to say apart from kids and pets, their photos are the thing they'd most want to try to save in a fire. So how do you keep backups of your digital photos?
There are many options.
One basic suggestion I've seen is to back up all of your photos regularly to two separate hard drives and to keep one of those hard drives somewhere other than your house - setting up a backup schedule such that you rotate which hard drive is away from the house regularly and that each drive always has close to a current version of your library. That's a bit of logistical work there. Another is to pay for some storage space somewhere out on the Internet - maybe at a webhosting service, an online photo service such as Flickr or Picasa, or an explicit cloud computing infrastructure such as Amazon's S3. I'm investigating JungleDisk (which uses S3) as an option at the moment. It's not clear it's going to work for me, but if it doesn't I'll look into other options.
Some of my favorite photos are also posted to Flickr and I upload the originals there so that Flickr can serve as a rudimentary backup for some of them. When my son was 6 months old I created a large photobook using Apple's iPhoto application of some of the best pictures from his first 6 months and gave copies to his grandparents and aunt and kept a copy for ourselves. So there are some hardcopies of some of the pictures in case all of my digital solutions fail.
Archiving digital data is not easy yet. The blogger who writes Archivist Alison has suggestions for photo archiving, and archiving of other sorts. This is definitely a challenge I'm keeping on my radar as more and more important "stuff" in my life is digital.
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