Is the photo album dead? Have digital cameras, computers and online storage solutions killed the album?

Reader Glenn made a good comment on the Schmap Australia post about digital images.

Digital photos don’t cost anything to take but they sure chew up your PC’s hard drive space. Then you have to burn them to CD ROM or DVD for long term storage. So instead of having a handful of negatives and prints in envelopes because we were all once so careful of the costs generated, everyone now has thousands of images in archives that cost hours to create! Most of them will never be looked at.

It’s a valid argument which can be taken a step further.

For example: Our first two children, born 1994 and 1996, have full photo albums. I used a conventional film camera to take dozens of photos. These remain treasured memories today.

Our twins were born at the end of 2003. By that time I was using a digital camera. I took hundreds of photos, but where are they?

Only a handful were made into prints. The rest are stored on computers or online and many have been lost.

Few people lose printed photos of loved ones, but digital pictures can be lost for a range of reasons.

I disposed of two hard drives recently and have no idea how many irreplaceable pictures were on them.

I burned several hundred pictures to a CD once, but have no idea where the CD is now.

What happens if I get run over by a bus tomorrow? My paid Flickr account will expire in less than a year, my hosted domain will also expire and more than a thousand photos will be wiped from history.

It’s a scary thought when you put it that way. If a bus does strike me tomorrow my photo albums will be preserved and my wife will take care of them.

The solution is to have several copies: hard drive, CD, web site(s) and print. But if you really want to preserve a photo, make a print. Ironic isn’t it.