Processing photos 10, 20, 30 years from now?

I'm not sure what others typically do, but when I come back from a trip or outing with 50, 100 or even 500 RAW photos, I typically only edit about 15-20% of my favorites and save them as jpg in a separate folder. I'm not saying the remainder are trash, they're just not photos I want to spend time with at the moment.

But I started wondering, will I be able to properly edit these RAW files in the future? It's hard to imagine Camera Raw or at least some type of software not being around, but 30 years is a long time. And will the proper lens profiles still be there after all the new ones introduced over 30 years time?

Just sort of thinking out loud here, wondering what could happen.

If you don't care about a photo now you probably won't care about it in 20 years. Cull harder, delete the photos you don't care about. I delete 75% of my photos, personal and professional.

I have RAW, dng, and jpeg versions of my keeper photos. I have them stored in multiple locations - on my computer, on two hard drives in two locations, and stored in Amazon Glacier long term storage. DNS and jpeg are much more likely to be readable in 20 years than camera specific raw files.

http://www.dpbestflow.​org …rmat/archive-file-formats

kirk

Good read. Thank you.

Interesting! I guess there's the archival side, then the "going back to edit" side. For instance, you had a photo edited and saved to jpg but you want to do the same for a slightly different composition (a few photos before or after chronologically) for whatever reason. It would be a big letdown if this was no longer possible.

I know it may seem unlikely now, but who knows.

I would consider not worrying about it too much. Take pictures, have fun, print the ones you like and give them as gifts or hang them on the wall.

kirk

tim wrote in post #18428549
If you don't care about a photo now you probably won't care about it in 20 years. Cull harder, delete the photos you don't care about. I delete 75% of my photos, personal and professional.

I have RAW, dng, and jpeg versions of my keeper photos. I have them stored in multiple locations - on my computer, on two hard drives in two locations, and stored in Amazon Glacier long term storage. DNS and jpeg are much more likely to be readable in 20 years than camera specific raw files.

75% probably isn't nearly enough ... but it's a really good effort and a bit better than I manage (and I don't shoot professionally).

Only a tiny proportion of what I shoot is really worth keeping, I think, and I really need to learn how to throw away more. In years to come, I'm just going to have too much junk if I don't.

Better photographers than me may well shoot many better images ... but they probably also have (or should have) higher standards. I'd say even the very best photographer should be aiming to bin by far the larger part of what they shoot.

DaviSto wrote in post #18428674
75% probably isn't nearly enough ... but it's a really good effort and a bit better than I manage (and I don't shoot professionally).

Only a tiny proportion of what I shoot is really worth keeping, I think, and I really need to learn how to throw away more. In years to come, I'm just going to have too much junk if I don't.

Better photographers than me may well shoot many better images ... but they probably also have (or should have) higher standards. I'd say even the very best photographer should be aiming to bin by far the larger part of what they shoot.

Me too. I have excellent backup at several levels but that is no protection against the problem of excess volume. Even with a robust system separating out wow/good/meh takes time and hard mental labor.

My current solution is to delete most everything and make the long-term keep decisions more on the basis of subject and event rather than quality. That seems to really help in creating archives worth looking at.

DaviSto wrote in post #18428674
75% probably isn't nearly enough ... but it's a really good effort and a bit better than I manage (and I don't shoot professionally).

Only a tiny proportion of what I shoot is really worth keeping, I think, and I really need to learn how to throw away more. In years to come, I'm just going to have too much junk if I don't.

Better photographers than me may well shoot many better images ... but they probably also have (or should have) higher standards. I'd say even the very best photographer should be aiming to bin by far the larger part of what they shoot.

I don't think you can comment on what my keeper ratio should be. Perhaps I shoot less than you.

At a wedding I shoot around 2000 photos and keep around 500. That works well for me.

At home I mostly photograph my little boy. Because he moves so fast I take more than I need. I deliberately keep a lot of photos, but only say 1/3 of those go into my gallery.

My data volumes are just fine, as are my backups.

AZGeorge wrote in post #18428722
Me too. I have excellent backup at several levels but that is no protection against the problem of excess volume. Even with a robust system separating out wow/good/meh takes time and hard mental labor.

My current solution is to delete most everything and make the long-term keep decisions more on the basis of subject and event rather than quality. That seems to really help in creating archives worth looking at.

And when it gets right down to it, the tiny proportion that you keep really should be tiny. If the average keen photographer throws away 99.5% of what they shoot, and they shoot maybe five or six thousand images a year, that is 25 or 30 images a year held as keepers ... say 1,500 over 50 years of being engrossed in this thing.

That is a huge heap of pictures! And it is enough to represent the best of what anyone can produce.

And the above only applies to 'single shooters' ... anyone shooting action/nature/sports at a typically high average frame rate should obviously throwing away far, far more.

tim wrote in post #18428725
I don't think you can comment on what my keeper ratio should be. Perhaps I shoot less than you.

At a wedding I shoot around 2000 photos and keep around 500. That works well for me.

At home I mostly photograph my little boy. Because he moves so fast I take more than I need. I deliberately keep a lot of photos, but only say 1/3 of those go into my gallery.

My data volumes are just fine, as are my backups.

Mostly, I photograph my little boy too. The reason why I have overspent on gear is entirely because I know that I will not get any second chances doing that. And every picture that I get that genuinely 'hits the spot' is very precious to me.

Nevertheless, I only need so many (not very many at all) shots of Joe at 18 months looking amazingly cute or vexed or perplexed or active or inactive (or whatever) to be sure I have captured everything I possibly can of him by means of photography. The very best is all I need and everything else is junk. The faster and more decisively I throw away the junk the better things will be in future. If ... when I am older ... I have just ten great shots of Joseph when he was two years old, that will be plenty.

I think we need to think ahead. Most of us are going to be drowning in the swamp of images we have failed to cull if we don't soon get ruthless with our pictures.

I just use my little RX100 most of the time. The big SLR is too slow to get to, and too heavy.

The reason I probably have more photos than others is that I like to "document" the vacation, backpacking trip, etc. So this will include a subject from various angles (even though 3 out of the 4 angles are not great photos), photos of signs, and all kinds of random things. I like to go back and "revisit" the trip years down the road.

tim wrote in post #18428773
I just use my little RX100 most of the time. The big SLR is too slow to get to, and too heavy.

It sure is! I took my 5D4 and 24-70 II on vacation last week and that's a lot of weight to carry all day. My iPhone would have been ok, but I'm glad I took the effort. I got some really great shots on a vacation I won't be doing again anytime soon.

A lot of the replies so far are of the nature "if you did not care about the photo now, you won't care about it in 40 years", and "only a tiny proportion of what I shoot is really worth keeping". Let me articulate the OTHER side of the picture (pun intended) as someone who voiced questions about long term longevity of digital images (vs. negative and prints 'in shoeboxes') over 10 years ago...

1. first issue is the accessibility of digital files (both JPG and RAW) 30-40 years from now due to the kind of media it is stored on...already I have documents stored 30 years ago on PC written to MFM ST-506 harddrives, which I cannot retrieve (admittedly I have not even tried because I have not needed these old documents!)...try to find an ST-506 controller that fits into a PCI bus in a PC today! So the data on the ST-506 harddrive is unavailable unless you put together an old PC with an ISA bus, to accommodate the ST-506 controller cards that you can still buy today. But then you have the issue of what media type you can transfer that data to, from ST-506 via what media, to store on media compatible with your current PC?!
   
2. the next issue, as you have already brought up is the software that CAN handle the RAW files from 30-40 years earlier. We have seen this already happening!
   • In June 2011, "For example, on the ASMP site at: http://www.dpbestflow.​org/node/386
     stated: "Images from some of the very expensive digital camera from the late 1990's are now only accessible
     with very old computers." Later, on the same page, they list three formats that "are in at least some danger of
     obsolescence in the foreseeable future": Kodak PhotoCD, Kodak RAW, and PICT.
     "Two of these may be consider raw formats, Kodak PhotoCD and Kodak RAW. (PhotoCD because it was used to represent
     scanned images, and no other intermediate digital format was used.)".
     
   • In May 2012, someone writes, "Using a Mac OS X 10.5.8 with versions of Adobe Photoshop CS5, Adobe Bridge CS5 and Camera Raw Plug-in. Shot .CR2 raw format photos on my Canon EOS 450D (Same as Rebel XSi) Have always been able to open them successfully in Camera Raw and Photoshop. Now says that the files and/or my camera model/make is not supported by the Camera Raw Plug-in nor by my Photoshop."
   
   

• You die 50 years from now, and your surviving grandchildren and great grandchildren want to put together a photo montage of your life, to honor you at your funeral gathering. They want to access your lifetime of photography, so as to commemorate family events in your lifetime, but they are inaccessible due to reasons #1 and #2.
  
• (fictional) You ended up being one of the papparazzi who followed Taylor Swift, and she being a legendary singer later became a philanthropist who started a movement which ended racial bigotry in the world, so the historians wanted photos documenting Taylor's early life as a country/pop singer, but no one can get at your photos as they are inaccessible due to reasons #1 and #2.
  
• (fictional) You lived in a great coastal city NYC which fell victim to the rising waters of the oceans, and you photographed the city as it fought to save itself from flooding before it became 'Venice of the New World', and the photos were sought by historians and anthropologists who, in the 22nd Century, studied and documented society in the times of 'the Great Flooding of the 21st Century'. but no one can get at your photos as they are inaccessible due to reasons #1 and #2.
  

So far the end of the world RAW scenarios have not panned out.

I can still edit my 2003 RAW files with no problem on several platforms with many choices of converter/application.

as for Data, any data I wanted to keep dating back to 3.5" floppy disks and 128MB hard drives I have transferred as new media arrives. Larger hard drives, Zip disks, CD-R, DVD-R etc.

I now use only hard drives, as all removable media is too small and slow to bother with IMHO.