Hope
everyone had wonderful holidays and stayed warm. Did you
make lots of archival memories? Now
is the time to organize and preserve them. With the advent of digital photography, especially with it now
available on phones, people are taking more and more photographs. Digital photographs are great in a lot
of ways, but to preserve them for the future can be a headache. The problem, of course, is the rapid
changing technology that impacts accessibility. In the digital archival program
in which I am involved we save our photographs in TIFF (Tagged Image File
Format) format. That’s pretty much
the industry standard because it is supported by most graphic related
applications. Also importantly TIFF
has less loss in terms of image quality compared to JPEG (named for the Joint
Photographic Expert Group). The
downside is the large size of files.
For my personal use, I save my photographs as JPEGs just because of file
size. If I were a professional
photographer I would save my files as TIFFs. Current thought is that TIFF files will be supported the
longest by software applications. We’ll
see.
One
thing I would suggest is specific labeling. In my digital archives, we have extensive metadata templates for our collections because some will be downloaded and used for research. For the individual, simple labeling to provide easy identification of the
photograph is probably adequate.
Since you don’t have the back of a photograph to label, you will need to
incorporate that information into the picture title. The software dates the photograph or at least when the
photograph was downloaded so that takes care of that. Most programs let you add a specific date if you want. Location where the image was taken, people, or a title for the
photograph is really necessary. How
else are you going to identify the one picture you want from the 10,000 you
took of family this holiday season? Most software programs let you organize
your photographs by groups and so forth.
Do it! Otherwise you are
going to end up with the equivalent of box of unidentified photographs. Pretty worthless for memories and for
preservation. Oh yes, and delete
those photographs that are out of focus, cut people’s heads off, or are
duplicates. Believe me deleting
bad photographs is ok, really it is.
Your descendents and any archivist will thank you.
Oh
yes, make back-ups of your favorites- on the cloud, external hard drives - and keep your photos updated so they can be
read by whatever is current in software applications. Most important! That means watching for software updates. Estimates are that updates to saved images may need to be made every 3-5 years.
Next
time - comments on the preservation and labeling of prints both digital and otherwise
and negatives and slides.
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