[ghaff]

As photography was largely switching to digital, I sometimes wondered whether--whatever the preservation possibilities that digital offered--to what degree photos would really be preserved in practice relative to prints and slides.

[bluGill]

Most photos are terrible. Colors can start fading in at little as 10 years if they were hanging on your wall that long. B&W can last longer, but still will fade. Of course there are different process, if you use the best process photos will last longer, but still they are not very stable.

Digital makes it cheap and easy to have multiple in many locations. While any one media may fail, you still have a copy - I have on this computer all the data from whatever computer I was using 15 years ago. (most of it I have not looked at in 20 years and I could safely delete, but it is still here, and on other backup systems I have)

[LiquidPolymer]

Kodachrome is an amazing archival color film that when stored properly will last centuries. b&w negative film is even more stable.

You make a good point about the lack of durability and instability of many types of chemical photo processes (especially color negative and print processing). I do think many digital formats will be lost to time when a color transparency or b&w negative will still be viewable without much aid into the future.

One of my favorite photo books is the re-photographic survey project by Mark Klett. He went around re-capturing the exact locations (and camera position) of notable images of the American West from the early days of the US geological survey when they had a plate photographer on the team. We are talking about a time period just after the US Civil War. So we see a landscape captured in time 10 decades or more after the original.

I've been a pro photographer for over 30 years. All my earliest digital work is archived in RAW so I have the original shooting data. It all triple backed up and I have a friend that allows me store one of my backups at his home. I've been amazed at how many photographers lost track of or throw away their older work. I'm still licensing my work hundreds of times a year and some of this older material is becoming even more valuable simply due to scarcity. The redundancy of digital is great of you take archiving seriously.

Yet, I still have drawers of original film from the late 80's - to early 2000's I'm scanning a few but will probably let many be disposed of . . .

[ghaff]

My point was there's the capability to do all this backup preservation but it doesn't just happen. And it's less visible in many cases than the proverbial shoebox full of photos will be.

[bluGill]

What is the difference between photos on a crashed harddrive, and photos in a shoebox that that just burned in a house fire? Photos are vulnerable to many different attacks just like digital data.

These days your photos are probably backed up by facebook, google, or are such major players. (there are a lot of privacy concerns with the above, but they do tend to have good backups)

[ghaff]

There is a lot of serendipitous backing up with social media. There was also a lot of serendipitous passing on to relatives of physical media. Not sure which better stands the test of time. (And I'm sure it varies.)

[bluGill]

Often passing on to relatives is done with the only copy (well you retain the negative). School pictures come in packages of many, but otherwise you typically only print one copy.