Preserving Your Memories and Your Children's Memories
There are no two ways about it. We all take more photos than we have ever done before. Selfies, snaps with phone cameras, photos for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But, and there is a BIG but! Think about the future. Will those images still be there?
The Box of Old Photos
Most of us adults grew up with boxes of photos that Mum and Dad had taken of us when we were kids. Holidays, days at the seaside, birthday parties, Christmas day opening presents, etc. The old shoe box full of old photos brings back lots of memories and always passes time on a rainy day looking through them. Remembering loved ones who are no longer with us, etc. I have plenty of photos going back to my grandparents time showing them in the 1920's, 30's, 40's, etc. Showing my parents when they were little and growing up, courting, getting married, having my sister and I and us growing up. Will today's children be able to look at photos of them as kids in the future? Probably not!
There May Be Trouble Ahead.....
Today, in the digital age, we do have a major problem looming with preserving today's images. Hardly a week goes by without me having someone in the studio for a portrait session who tells me woes of losing their photos. Whether it is a computer hard drive breaking, a phone being lost, stolen or breaking, a CD or DVD that suddenly cannot be read. I hear them all the time. OK, so we have cloud services that we can store our photos on, such as iCloud, OneDrive, DropBox, etc., but could service providers are companies some of whom have gone bust in the past and people have lost everything stored on them.
Will JPG files be around in 20, 30 or 40 years? Probably not!
There are always changes in technology, often at a rapid rate. The JPG file first came about in 1991 as a way to save photos in a small file format. Previous file formats were huge and the JPG format allwoed compression of the file in order to save space. If it wasn't for the JPG format, you'd get very few photos on a 16GB or even 64GB phone! The format has been updated since, but in technology terms, it is now an ancient file format and is well overdue for being replaced by something new! If you think about 1991, the standard then was to record TV programmes on a VHS or Betamax video recorder. How many of us have a one of these now? Very few. How many couples have their wedding video sitting in a drawer on a video cassette that they can no longer play? Quite a large number! DVD players/recorders didn't come onto the mainstream market until 2000 with the early ones in the late 90's costing £700-1000 just for a player, but now, they are cheap as chips!
Now think about your photos and the future. Will the JPG format still be readable for your children to view in 20 plus years time? I doubt it very much. Something new will come along and I expect that in 20 years time 3D photos will be the norm, with the current two dimensional ones being "old hat". New devices are unlikely to support old formats, so the photos, even if they are still stored on the cloud somewhere, will not be readable. Just the same way as the old VHS and Betamax cassettes are not readable by the vast majority of people in their homes.
So what is the answer?
The best way to preserve images is to print them. Simple as that. Don't just leave those photos on your phone or on your computer. Print them, or get them printed. By printing them, you will preserve those memories in the same way as our parents and grandparents preserved them for us to see. Of course, these days, we take so many photos that you'd need to be filthy rich to be able to afford to print them all, so you'll need to be selective. Think about which ones you would like to look at in the distant future and which ones are there, just because you had a camera phone and wanted to post a selfie on Facebook.
Better still, get some professional photos done of your children when they are newborn, toddlers, growing up, graduating, getting engaged, etc.Professional photos do cost that bit more, but they give you top quality images to keep forever.
Don't leave it until it's too late!
I regularly get people coming into the studio saying that a loved one, mum, dad, sister, brother, husband, wife, or pet has passed away asking me to make a large print of a favourite photo of them. At this point my heart usually sinks when they pass me their mobile phone containing the photo. I know how important it is for them to have a large print of their loved one, but will it be possible? My first question is always "Was the photo taken with a mobile phone?" If the answer is "Yes" then I end up having to explain to them that I am unlikely to be able to print anything larger than a 6"x4" or maybe a 7"x5" print, because enlarging them bigger will simply make them look awfully blurred. But my phone has a 13Mp camera, I hear you say. Yes, it may have plenty of megapixels, but the size of the sensor in a phone is so miniscule, that it's ability to capture real detail in high quality is very compromised. An iPhone 6 camera sensor for example, may have 13Mp, but it is only 4.54mm x 3.42mm compared to the sensor in a professional DSLR being 24mm x 36mm. That is a difference in area of 15.5 square millimetres for the iPhone vs 864 square millimetres for the DSLR. This difference in sensor size makes a dramatic difference to the quality of the image. It is not just about the number of megapixels, so please make sure that you get some good quality photos of loved ones, before it is too late. Photos taken on a mobile phone are fine to view on a mobile phone, tablet, or PC, but are not good for making large prints. Consider again having some professional photos done of your loved ones.
Gordon Hunter, Director, Viva Photography Ltd. http://www.wirralphotography.co.uk
