More on digital photography — what happens when our attics are no longer full of shoeboxes of old snapshots?

Interesting piece on BBC Online by Paul Rubens. Quote:

“The digital photos will still exist of course, though not as prints which can be dusted off and passed around. They will instead be collections of ones and zeros on various types of electronic storage media.

The problem is there will be no way to look at them. That’s because technology evolves so fast that any storage medium in use today is bound to become obsolete sooner or later. Finding the right equipment to retrieve digital images stored decades previously on obsolete media will become almost impossible.

In fact, it turns out that images stored electronically just 15 years ago are already becoming difficult to access. The Domesday Project, a multimedia archive of British life in 1986 designed as a digital counterpart to the original Domesday Book compiled by monks in 1086, was stored on laser discs.

The equipment needed to view the images on these discs is already very rare, yet the Domesday book, written on paper, is still accessible more than 1,000 years after it was produced. ”