Keeping history alive

[ian Howell]

I recently mislaid the 'memory stick' that holds the majority of my Jowett related pictures (I found it again), but ....

A recent article in The Automobile pointed out that actual photographs are almost unknown these days and the ability to store and retrieve them easily may not be the case for records held on 'older' electronic formats. (Try Video tapes, 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" discs, R/WCDs, etc).

Terabyte hard drives are Ok, for now... Don't mention 'Clouds' or such - one satellite malfunction and .....

Happily it is (fairly) easy to simply convert electronic photos to durable hard copies (not just print outs) using booths often? found in supermarkets.

Am I alone in thinking 'Back in my day my Dad had a camera ....'

Or not?

[Keith Clements]

Are your concerns about your ability to access digital files or your ability to lose the media they are stored on?
The problem wìth all non digital image or sound storage systems is that the media deteriorates. Digital media does not deteriorate although its encoding or physical storage can become obsolete. However, there should still be a way of transposing it into the latest format. Often this transposition can also improve its quality using enhancement technology as I have done with all the Jowett media that is in the Video library. This technology can remove noise and scratches and improve colour and contrast.

Many technologies are used to improve the security of Clouds and other computing systems. Jowett.net is now on a cloud instance but it is also backed up onto completely separate systems. The Cloud is very resilient at all levels such as storage, compute, network and if you pay more can be improved from the basic offering using continental replication. Although an individual might loose access to the resource for many reasons the system and its access can be restored, perhaps with some work.
The biggest threat to all Jowett media is that the owner dies and the material is lost forever. There is also the threat to physical media that it can be lost through fire, flood, burglary or just mislaid forever.

Image recognition software can now even help indexing and searching images. I have not implemented this on Jowett.net as it does take a lot of compute power. The Cloud systems that do this use unused computing cycles from the millions of processors in the cloud and specialised graphic processors to do this.

The other major benefit of digital technology is that it can be copied without loss of quality and thus stored in many places and shared easily.

If you have any Jowett related material then either copy and send to me or send me the original. I have the means to transpose cassette, reel to reel, VHS (no Betamax), 35mm slide, photo, paper (up to A4), but I can do upto A0 using the Rootes Archive.

Note that modern cameras can take good pictures of large objects with careful lighting and camera positioning. Image stitching software can also put together multiple images into one if the large document is scanned on a flatbed scanner in pieces.

I did transpose all the club 8mm film many years ago onto VHS and then this was transposed into mp4 digital files.

jowett.net was set up to store and make accessible to all in the world anything to do with Jowetts.

[ian Howell]

Keith: -

Thank you for the comments but I have in my possession family photographs that are over 70 years old and of course still serving their original purpose. What might be the status of electronic data in 70 years time?

I carry with my car at 'shows', a book of printouts of photos from 1969 Harrogate Rally, the Centenary Rally and other events, all for the edification of those 'unfortunates' who weren't there!

The printouts are already fading and I intend to convert them to 'hard' photographs soon.

I have tried showing them my memory stick, but.....

[Forumadmin]

I accept that many people do find it easier to show a paper copy but I would not like to use a paper original, especially if it was 70 years old, in such a scenario. Sure you can copy the original back onto paper but that is now usually done by converting to digital first. Make sure you save the digital version as well as this will not deteriorate and will be better than what was printed from it, if shown on a decent screen.

I also much prefer digital copies as with failing eyesight I can make them as big as I want and see all the detail.

A photo album is limited to how much you can carry. My phone can store and display all the photos I have ever taken. the phone can access all videos I have taken which are on a server.

If I want a better display I can show on my laptop whose screen if Ultra High Definition and as good as most photos or I can display from my phone on a 65 inch or larger TV screen.

Printing images onto A4 photo paper is not cheap so you would need to be selective on what you copied that way.

I accept that I could loose my phone like you did your memory stick, just like you could your photo album. But I know everything is backed up into more than one place.

What will be around in 70 years? Well if I was on Mars or the Moon and I could not take my photo album I could still show all my photos to others.

[ian Howell]

Keith: -

There is much in what you say. Perhaps photos for the 'boasting book' and electronic for posterity?