April 3, 2005
Mark Weaver knows more about computers than most people. But his high-tech expertise wasn't enough to prevent a mistake that nearly cost him a series of prized digital images.
After filling his camera's memory card at the annual St. Patrick's Day parade in Rochester, Weaver dashed home to transfer pictures to a computer. Weaver, who works as a programmer, then reformatted his memory card — a routine housekeeping step aimed at clearing space for more picture-taking.
One problem: The download had essentially failed, and in reformatting the card, Weaver cast his pictures into a sort of computer purgatory. "I went to print them later," Weaver recalled, "only to find out they weren't where they were supposed to be."
As digital photography moves more deeply into the mainstream, users like Weaver are discovering that the technology has some serious potential downsides.
Unlike film photography and its negatives, digital cameras don't create back-up copies of images they create. That transforms digital pictures into fragile treasures, susceptible to catastrophic losses from computer crashes, memory card failures, format changes and other technical issues.
And even the most logical solution — printing all your pictures — isn't necessarily a foolproof step. Despite dramatic technological advances, prints made at home using certain combinations of ink and inkjet paper can age rapidly when exposed to the open air.
Longevity issues involving digital images are attracting increasing attention from the photographic industry. Last fall, Eastman Kodak Co., Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd. and Konica Minolta Photo Imaging Inc. agreed to collaborate on technical standards for retrieving digital images. The goal is to make sure that images saved today will be able to be played back in the future. The companies released the first version of the standards in February.
At the same time, the Society for Imaging Science & Technology, a nonprofit trade group for imaging scientists, has launched an expanded focus on the preservation of digital images. Later this month, the society will hold its second annual archiving conference in Washington, D.C., with attendees from academia, industry, museums, libraries, government institutions and nonprofit organizations. The conference is co-chaired by Franziska Frey, a professor at Rochester Institute of Technology and a well-known expert on the subject.
The industry's longevity efforts are driven by a growing concern that many of today's priceless Kodak Moments may be lost to the forces of technological change, experts say.
"I'm afraid there is going to be a big hole in our historical record," said Jim Reilly, director of the Image Permanence Institute at RIT, a nonprofit testing laboratory that studies issues of image longevity.
Software programmer Weaver and his pictures nearly fell into that hole on St. Patrick's Day. He got himself out with the help of ImageRecall, software developed by a British company and sold in the United States by its FlashFixers subsidiary. The software works to recover images that were accidentally deleted or overwritten by the formatting function.
The episode has made Weaver much more careful when moving pictures to his computer. He now essentially manually transfers the images and double- and triple-checks himself before wiping his memory card clean. Currently he's working out a system for long-term storage for his digital pictures, perhaps on DVD.
Creating an effective personal archive requires household photographers to be more vigilant than they were in the age of film, according to the owner of a Rochester-based event photography service.
Kevin Leysath, owner of Creative Eye Photo, devotes a fair amount of time to labeling picture CD-ROMs and naming computer folders created while shooting at corporate picnics, banquets and other themed events. He admits that the task was challenging when he first started the business.
Today, he likens the cataloging of images to a housekeeping chore. "Just like anything," he says, "if you put your toys away as you're using them, you don't have a problem."
Leysath has learned a few lessons. He now routinely saves customer images onto two CD-ROMs — so if one fails, he hasn't lost everything. Thankfully, he's rarely had problems. "Once in a while, I'll have trouble reading a CD," he says, "but it's rare."
Kodak, Fuji and Konica Minolta are doing what they can to make sure it stays rare. Their efforts to create the Picture Archive and Sharing Standard are aimed at making it easier for consumers to view and interact with their images, no matter the playback device — camera, PC, DVD player, video camera, cell phone or something else. The industry is fragmented with a range of different formats, making playback a choppy, inconsistent experience.
The standard is roughly akin to the creation of a common process years ago for turning rolls of film into printed pictures — known in the trade as the "C-41" photofinishing standard.
The partner companies see the standard as a way of resolving potential problems with changing computer technologies. For instance, new computers generally do not have 3½-inch floppy disk drives, rendering images saved in that not-long-ago popular format all but obsolete.
Hardware and software could be designed with the picture archiving standard in mind, ensuring that images today can be played back tomorrow, said Frank Ranaletti, who is spearheading the initiative for Kodak. The companies are exploring creating a certification program, in which products designed using the standard would carry a recognizable "seal of approval," he said.
"We're trying as best we can to make this as simple as possible, so we can pass it onto the future," Ranaletti says. Some of those images undoubtedly represent priceless treasures that in the past would have been archived either in the proverbial shoebox or photo album, Lasher said.
The idea of PicturesMatter is to help educate consumers about the best methods for archiving their digital images. And in Lasher's mind, there's only one answer: Make a print.
Many people argue that the beauty of digital is the ability to transmit an image across the world in an instant, Lasher notes. |